Sepaton releases upgrades to high-end storage appliance

Computerworld - Sepaton today announced major upgrades to its enterprise-class backup appliance -- almost doubling the backup speed -- added encryption for data at rest, and increased connectivity from 4Gbps to 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10Gbps Ethernet.

Sepaton's new S2100-ES3 Series 2925 appliance can back up or restore up to 80TB per hour, according to Amy Lipton, senior vice president of marketing.

The array has been upgraded with HP DL380p Gen 8 based server nodes and Intel Xeon E5-2690 8-core dual-CPUs running at 2.9GHz. The array also features increased DDR3 memory -- from 96GB to 128GB -- and adds new Exar 1845 data compression cards, which offload data deduplication overhead.

The array comes with version 7.0 management software, which includes an easier to use set of graphical user interfaces, Lipton said.

"There's also no performance penalty for encryption," said Florin Dejeu, director of product management for Sepaton.

For the first time, Sepaton's backup appliance can come with AES 256-bit encryption, which ensures that if drives are removed the data cannot be read without the encryption keys, which are kept separately, Lipton said.

Sepaton's new S2100-ES3 Series 2925 backup appliance

Sepaton's new backup appliance integrates with encryption key managers that are compliant with industry-standard Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP). That enables interoperability across encryption and key management systems. The S2100-ES3 series 2925 is currently fully qualified with the RSA DPM and Thales e-Security keyAuthority 4.0 appliances.

Because of its clustered architecture, users can use a "pay as you grow" strategy to scaling capacity on the new array. The array can scale from two to eight nodes and up to two petabytes of raw capacity, Dejeu said.

The backup appliance comes in a pre-wired data center cabinet for ease of installation and expansion when demand requires.

A basic S2011-ES3 backup appliance retails for $350,000. For that, a user gets 24TB of raw capacity and the complete software stack along with switches. Encryption cards are sold separately for $15,000 per node.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at  @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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