31 July 2010
Saturday
IBM launches SONAS
By Beth Pariseau | Feb 17, 2010
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PrintIBM Corp. became the latest major storage vendor to add a clustered NAS product to its enterprise data storage portfolio, as scale-out quickly becomes a checklist feature for unstructured data storage systems.
The new product, Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), is based on IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) and a cousin of the Scale-Out File Services (SOFS) IBM has offered through IBM Global Technology Services. IBM also launched standalone bundles based on SOFS for information archiving and cloud computing in October, but SONAS project executive Todd Neville said SONAS is a different animal.
While GPFS is the foundation of both types of scale-out systems, "those [Smart Business bundles] offered a variation in back-end storage between the XIV and DS series, and between blade and rackmount servers," Neville said.
SONAS has a fixed underlying hardware infrastructure that consists of between two and 30 IBM System x3650 server nodes, between two and 30 Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) ports, and a 20 Gbps InfiniBand network connecting the compute nodes to what IBM calls Storage Pods (SP). Storage Pods are subunits consisting of redundant x3650 servers attached to a 4u storage device that holds 60 SAS or SATA disk drives. The storage side of SONAS can scale from one to 30 Storage Pods.
GPFS allows up to 256 snapshots per file system, and up to 256 file systems are allowed per SONAS system. Neville said SONAS is also IBM's first product with a clustered Samba implementation on the front end, which allows the underlying object-based storage system to be accessed over the CIFS and NFS standard file network protocols. SONAS can also be accessed with FTP or HTTP protocols.
IBM "made a conscious effort to design this system without anything proprietary or unique," Neville said. Though pricing for SONAS isn't being specifically disclosed by IBM, Neville indicated IBM is using SONAS to target the largest of large shops in the enterprise and cloud data storage markets, at petabyte scale.
SONAS will ship on its general availability date in March with a Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) client already loaded on each server node. Because GPFS already separates metadata from back-end data, the metadata database can be queried through SONAS to return a list of files sorted by certain parameters, like "files that are 90 days old." That list can then be passed to TSM for backup.
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
