Infortrend goes upmarket with new storage architecture

Infortrend is moving into the mid-tier and enterprise spaces with its new storage arrays

Infortrend has unveiled new storage kit designed to help the firm break into the enterprise market by including embedded support for features such as thin provisioning and snapshots at a competitive price point.

Announced in Europe today and due to start shipping from 1 July, the Enterprise Scalable Virtualised Architecture (ESVA) line consists initially of three Fibre Channel F series and two iSCSI E series arrays, with embedded data services managed via the firm's SANWatch software.

The announcement is part of Infortend's plans to move into the mid-tier and enterprise spaces from its roots in the small to medium sized enterprise and entry-level storage markets, according to director of marketing Jon Ashley.

"Our proposition is still about value and quality, and we believe we are equipped with world-class capabilities and can meet the storage requirements of the enterprise," he said.

The ESVA line-up differs from products from more established vendors such as EMC by including data services embedded in the controller, rather than hosted on servers.

"There is no need to install anything on your servers apart from a small agent. We can provide storage virtualisation, thin provisioning, snapshots and load balancing, all built-in," said Ashley.

Replication and mirroring support can also be added, but are licensed separately, he added.

Alex Young, director of technology at Infortrend, explained that embedding the services in the array offloads the handling of these tasks from the servers, and frees up network bandwidth.

"In our implementation, if you perform a snapshot, the data goes from one volume direct to another without bothering the server," he said.

With the Fibre Channel models, the entry-level F20 starts with 16 bays for Serial ATA II drives, each up to 1TB in capacity, while 2TB models are currently in qualification. The F40 and F60 models are designed for up to 48 and up to 112 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives respectively.

The E series iSCSI models can both hold up to 64 drives. The E20 is designed for Sata, while the E60 takes SAS drives.

All the products will include three years of 24/7 support, plus licences for the software for three years. Infortrend will even supply ready-tested hard drives, according to Ashley.

Prices for the new hardware have yet to be announced, but will be " competitive against comparable capacities and features" from other vendors, the firm said.