Seagate announced enhancements to its AssuredSAN RealStor line of hybrid and all-flash arrays this week, kicking off a renewed push into the midrange storage market for the company and the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) it supplies.
First, Seagate updated its flash storage options. By offering new “value-endurance SSDs,” the company claims it can reduce the per-IOPs and per-VM cost of the arrays by 40 percent and deliver near-all-flash performance.
For organizations seeking to float their own clouds, the new RealStor arrays support the OpenStack Cinder driver. Cinder is the block storage component of the increasingly popular OpenStack cloud computing platform.
Also new is RealSpan asynchronous replication. Seagate claims that RealSpan enables storage administrators to set up data replication services to another array in less than 15 minutes. Snapshots incur no zero performance penalty, according to the company.
On the high-end RealStor 6004 hybrid storage array, Seagate upgraded its RealStor operating system software to deliver improved automatic data tiering, among other storage services. A pair of new interfaces, Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI host support, expand on the hardware’s connectivity options.
“From enterprise data centers to the cloud, new software-defined and hyper-converged platforms are driving up storage demands, particularly as organizations look to harness advances in mobile, social, big data analytics and the Internet of Things,” commented Bill Wuertz, vice president of engineering at Seagate in remarks to the press.
“Seagate RealStor hybrid and all-flash storage arrays are a tremendous complement to our portfolio and these enhancements only add to the great value they are known to deliver. For OEMs, the diverse options we offer ensure their customers find a solution that strongly meets their needs, budget and can accommodate future growth,” Wuertz continued.
Altogether, the improvements add up to a compelling package, particularly for Seagate’s cost-conscious OEM customers, said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).
“The enhanced Seagate hybrid array portfolio offers more choice for OEMs and their customers,” said Peters in a statement. “Not only are OEM sales efforts now bolstered by a more comprehensive selection of field-proven storage solutions, but also these new RealStor enhancements address critical enterprise needs while maintaining the products’ hallmark competitive pricing.”
Seagate’s revamped RealStor line of storage arrays (3000-, 4000- and 6000-series) is available now to OEMs.