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Broomfield, CO “ February 13, 2012 ” Starboard Storage Systems, an innovator in Application-Crafted Storage for mixed workloads, today announced the Starboard AC72 Storage System. The AC72 Storage System is designed to dramatically simplify managing mixed workload environments that include unstructured, virtualized, and structured data while delivering twice the performance at half the cost of legacy SAN and NAS systems.
Traditional storage systems are not designed to support mixed workloads efficiently within a single scalable storage system, forcing SME customers to maintain separate silos of DAS, NAS and SAN storage and make costly forklift upgrades from one storage array to another. By providing optimized consolidation of unstructured, virtualized, and structured data onto a single scalable storage system, Starboard Storage has delivered a modern storage system that dramatically simplifies managing mixed application workloads while changing the price/performance equation for mid-tier IT environments.
Starboard Storage already has more than 30 customers managing more than 750 terabytes of capacity with the Starboard AC72 Storage System. We were able to consolidate all workloads under the Starboard Storage solution to improve storage utilization and management, said Shane Brown, CEO of DigeTekS. As a result, we saw exceptional I/O performance, 20 times faster than the previous iSCSI solution we were using. Even during volume production and peak load periods we were able to maintain high performance and throughput across our virtual environment.
In a comparative test run by Evaluator Group, the Starboard Storage AC72 System was benchmarked against a leading mid-range unified storage system. The January 2012 study revealed that the Starboard AC72 Storage System achieved 100 percent better performance in the Iometer test and 42 percent more transactions per second in the JetStress performance test. Both systems were comparably configured with SDDs and HDDs. The Starboard AC72 Storage System is less than half the cost of the competing system.
“Starboard Storage Systems has addressed pressing storage needs for the mid-tier market by introducing an advanced systems architecture while reducing the complexity of storage management, said Randy Kerns, senior strategist of the Evaluator Group. In a mixed workload environment, Starboard Storage has been shown to deliver twice the performance at half the cost of existing SAN and NAS systems.”
The Starboard AC72 Storage System Advantage
The AC72 provides simple, efficient consolidation onto a single storage system, optimizing the configuration for each application by creating a Dynamic Storage Pool with virtual volumes tuned for each workload.
The Starboard Storage AC72 also introduces the SSD Accelerator Tier, a second-generation tiering architecture that lowers operational overhead and provides predictable performance when and where its needed. The SSD Accelerator Tier boosts performance for both reads and writes, providing optimally tuned storage that maintains consistently high performance for mixed workloads.
Combining dynamic storage pooling and automated SSD acceleration for each application workload offers small and medium enterprises a new level of simplicity in managing mixed workload environments.
In addition, Starboard Storage Apps simplify provisioning of volumes across multiple storage protocols including CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel. Since the AC72 was specially designed to manage mixed workloads, IT administrators can dramatically reduce their time and costs in managing storage.
With the AC72 Storage System, you save as you grow with an all-inclusive software license that includes thin provisioning, mirroring, asynchronous replication and snapshots. The AC72 scales up to 474TBs with a completely redundant architecture.
Distribution and Availability
Starboard Storage Systems distributes its products through a network of high impact value-added reseller partners that share the goal of bringing Application-Crafted Storage solutions to market and into small and medium enterprises.
The Starboard Storage AC72 System is available now. The Starboard AC72 Storage System is priced at $59,995 MSRP for an all-inclusive storage system including 24TB storage, an SSD Accelerator Tier with three SSD drives, thin provisioning, asynchronous replication and snapshots. Customers can simply and affordably expand the system by adding Starboard AC72 Storage System Expansion Shelves. For more information contact sales@starboardstorage.com.
Does this utilize caching or auto-tiering with its SSD layer, or did they specify?
They call it an “SSD Accelerator Tier”, but their description makes it sound like caching. Seems more like a hybrid solution, as the overview implies it’s a novel design.