Fujitsu today unveiled two soon-to-ship arrays, the Eternus AF250 and AF650, which the company claims can tip the economic scales in favor of flash storage for many businesses.
Both models feature integrated data compression and inline deduplication, reducing the capacity requirements of the arrays’ solid-state drives (SSDs) by up to a factor of five, claims the company. In short, enterprises will be able squeeze more data for their high-performance business applications into less space.
In addition, the storage systems’ automated quality of service (QoS) capabilities help administrators reclaim time lost to repetitive and mundane manual tasks. AF arrays are also compatible with the company’s existing Eternus DX line of storage systems, allowing customers to add flash capacity to their current setups while capitalizing on their existing disk storage.
For business analytics, large databases and heavy application workloads, Fujitsu offers the range-topping Fujitsu Eternus AF650. The system features 368 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity, or up to 1,843TB with compression and deduplication active, and up to 256GB of RAM in a 6U form factor. It carries an input/output operations per second (IOPs) rating of up to 2.56 million.
For more modest deployments, the AF250 packs 92TB (up to 460TB effective storage capacity) and 64GB of system memory into a 2U enclosure. The system boasts a random access performance rating of up to 760,000 IOPS and latency of less than 0.1 millisecond. According to the company, this system is at home serving as general-purpose storage for critical applications run by small and midsized businesses or workloads that require brisk access to data, like those in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
Fujitsu is currently accepting orders and expects to ship the new arrays in late October.
Regional factors and configuration options will have an effect on pricing, but Alex Lam, vice president of Enterprise Business Strategy in North America at Fujitsu Technology, asserts that enterprises will find his company’s new all-flash arrays and economical alternative to even disk-based storage. “With the Eternus AF, we are showing the market how ultra-fast, all-flash storage can be made available to the mass market, not only at extremely affordable price points in relation to traditional HDD [hard disk drive] storage, but also with a proven suite of enterprise-grade storage services that customers expect from premium storage platforms,” said Lam in a statement.
“As the economics of all-flash storage continue to be more attractive over time due to Moore’s Law, we’re enabling customers to create faster, more responsive IT environments to support the next wave of digital business and IT services, and doing so on a proven, enterprise-grade storage platform,” he continued.
