Overview

SGI NAS - Modular Open Storage

SGI NAS is a powerful, enterprise-class NAS solution that provides the maximum of flexibility in a complete open storage offering. SGI NAS enables organizations to maximize their datacenter real estate with a scalable system that can start small and grow to multiple petabytes of unified storage.

SGI NAS includes full VM integration, even in mixed vendor environments, and can be expanded to extremely large global deployments with multi node clusters. With support for multiple NAS and SAN protocols, standard features such as inline deduplication and native compression, unlimited snapshots and cloning, unlimited file size, and high-availability support, SGI NAS is a powerful addition to the SGI InfiniteStorage ecosystem.

Hybrid Storage Pools

Hybrid Storage Pools (HSP) are the heart of the system and dictate overall performance. Primarily, initial capacity and the expected capacity growth, as well as IOPS and the read/write ratio between them, are the most dominant factors.

Block allocation algorithms of the Hybrid Storage Pool transform small random writes into a single, more efficient sequential write operation. Virtual machines invoke a large number of random read / writes, and the HSP provides intelligent methods of handling these unpredictable workloads.

With SGI NAS, these fundamental features dramatically accelerate performance. The Hybrid Storage Pool uses RAM, Solid State Devices (SSDs), and rotational drives all at once. As such, instead of just adding spindles, the design of the pool provides more degrees of freedom. Within the HSP, three different device types can be created: one virtual device type for cache (read operations); a log device (write operations); and a regular virtual device (capacity).

Built-in Space Savers

Deduplication: SGI NAS is the only software storage solution that supports inline data deduplication for primary storage, which saves storage capacity and decreases the number of required I/Os when data is highly redundant.

With the SGI NAS Web interface, administrators can optionally configure data volumes for deduplication that, in virtualization environments, provide capacity savings and IO reduction where there are many systems with replicate sets of data. Data duplication only stores unique data blocks in the pool and can save up to 90% of storage capacity depending on the use case.

Unlimited Snapshots and Cloning: Snapshots provide an efficient point-in-time copy of the data set. Only changes to the data set are written to the pool. Cloning snapshots also enables read / write actions, only keeping track of the new written blocks to the newly created clones.

SGI NAS is built on an Open Storage architecture, and as such provides significant advantages over legacy storage solutions.

SGI NAS Benefits

  • Lower Capital Expenses: Open Storage architecture offers dramatic savings in hardware costs and support contracts, allowing them to offer customers more competitive per-TB rates.
  • Lower Operational Expenses: SGI NAS is certified as VMware- and Citrix-ready, which means a far lower risk of interoperability glitches with the leading virtualization vendors.
  • Simplified Management: Storage management from one console.
  • Simplified Integration: Reliance on published REST APIs lets cloud providers integrate SGI NAS into their storage architecture back-end quickly and easily.
  • Greater Flexibility and Scalability: Scalable software-only approach removes the barriers to rapid scaling, allowing providers to adjust service offerings quickly and easily to respond to competition and market demands.

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