sTec today took the wraps off a new, all-flash unified storage system for Windows Storage Server 2012 during Microsoft’s TechEd conference in New Orleans.
The Santa Ana, Calif.-based enterprise flash storage specialist announced the s3000, SSD-packed hardware built to speed up Windows Server-based workloads. sTec’s s3000 is capable of delivering up to 1.2 million IOs per second (IOPS), according to the company.
The s3000 can be configured with either one or two drive shelves, each capable of housing 24 sTec 2.5-inch SAS SSDs. In total, the system can scale to 768 TB of storage. s3000 controllers are powered by two, 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2680 server processors and 128 GB of RAM.
Network connectivity is provided by four GbE (gigabit Ethernet) ports and a choice of two, four or six 10 GbE connections per head unit. The system features hot-swappable drives and power supplies.
Included storage management perks include deduplication and thin provisioning to maximize capacity and promote efficiency. The s3000 also supports Branch Cache, Microsoft’s WAN optimization technology, to reduce the system’s toll on network bandwidth between remote locations.
Tailored to the Microsoft software ecosystem, the s3000 can be integrated with existing storage and give an SSD-fueled boost to an organization’s file serving needs. Enterprises can also leverage sTec’s flash-based hardware to speed up SQL Server, SharePoint and Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualization technology. The company also touts the s3000’s boot storm elimination features for organizations eyeing a storage foundation for their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.
sTech’s s3000 arrived just in time to reshape the data center, according to Storage Strategies NOW senior analyst Jim Bagley. “The enterprise-storage market is ripe for leveraging advances in SSDs and operating systems that provide powerful solutions to IT professionals’ greatest challenges: storage management, clustering and virtualization – all within a reasonable budget,” he said in prepared remarks.
“sTec has aligned its solid-state storage expertise with this trend, as the s3000 was developed around Windows Storage Server 2012 for a tight coupling of enterprise-class storage and a standardized software platform,” added Bagley.
Microsoft’s director of Server and Tools Marketing notes that the system is a good match for the innovations his company has included in the latest edition of its storage software platform. “Windows Storage Server 2012 introduced industry-leading innovations in storage, and sTec is building on these advances. sTec’s s3000 solid-state storage appliance takes advantage of Windows Storage Server 2012’s range of features to give enterprises worldwide an advanced storage platform,” he said in a statement.