SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - Huawei Symantec Technologies today unveiled its first line of midrange disk-based storage area networks (SANs) designed for small and midsize firms through enterprises.
Huawei Symantec, a joint venture company established in 2008 by telecommunications technology provider Huawei and software vendor Symantec, anounced the new line at Storage Networking World here.
The Oceanspace T-Series includes four models for block-level storage area network traffic, and are positioned against similar offerings from recently acquired array vendors EqualLogic, 3Par, and Compellent.
The entire Huawei Symantec array line can be managed through a single user interface that allows for monitoring, one-step firmware upgrades and inter-array data replication for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.
The new Oceanspace T-Series includes: the Oceanspace S5500T; Oceanspace S5600T; Oceanspace S5800T; and Oceanspace S6800T.
The vendor said the modular T-series scales by adding disk array expansion units. The arrays come with 8Gbit/sec Fibre Channel and 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based iSCSI ports to fit into any existing SAN infrastructure. The arrays are capable of producing up to 100,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), the company said.
An administrator-defined energy saving policy control allows disk drives to be placed into an automated sleep mode when not in use. The same application can also control fan speed tuning and CPU-speed tuning.
In addition, a suite of software lets data center administrators deploy a variety of storage applications, such as remote replication for disaster recovery, under a single license.
"High-availability, high-performance and a broad suite of software, which a few years ago were found only in high-end disk arrays, are expected today in mid-range systems," said Jane Li, general manager of Huawei Symantec, North America, in a statement. "Storage partners will find the feature-rich T-Series is well-suited for data center environments."
Li said the arrays offer policy-driven unified management that controls data protection, disaster recovery, and system management.
The T Series comes with a data tiering feature called SmartCache, which offers the ability to place the most active data on solid state drives while migrating less frequently accessed data to lower tiers of hard disk drive (HDD) storage, including serial SCSI (SAS) to serial ATA (SATA) drives. The arrays also offer synchronous mirroring through a policy-based snapshot and remote mirroring application called Hypermirror.
Each T-series array starts with controller and a 24-HDD bay that, with the exception of the S5500T, can use SSDs, Fibre Channel, SAS or SATA drives. The S5500T can use all of the latter expect Fibre Channel drives.
Using 2TB drives, the largest array -- the S6800T -- can scale up to 2.88PB of capacity. The smallest array, the S5500T, is a 2U (3.5-in high) array that with external expansion units can scale to 288 drives. The S5600T is a 4U-high array that can scale to 576 drives using expansion units. The S5800T and S6800T are also 4U-high arrays that can scale to 1,152 and 1,440 drives, respectively.
The T-Series array family is currently available, but Huawei Symantec declined to provide pricing information.
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.