Joys of TechEd! sTec announces the s3000, an SSD-based Windows Storage Server Solution

Even though I wasn’t born on the Bayou, I know good gumbo when I taste it. Today in New Orleans, Microsoft kicks off one of the biggest geek fests in the industry and those hungry conference-goers get something tasty in the form of a solid state storage solution from sTec built using Windows Storage Server 2012!

Checkout the press release here: https://www.stec-inc.com/company/news-events/press-releases/press-release/?pr=169#.UazXFYfrz8U

I love SSDs for my desktops and laptops, and I won’t run without them anymore. They improve performance immensely and make Windows super snappy. Now I am drooling all over these new SSD based storage solutions!  I can’t wait to get one of these in my lab to really crank out some performance numbers. Eventually the reliability, size and cost of SSD is going to push rust-filled spinning hard disks into extinction and it looks like sTec is leading the charge!  Great job done by the sTec team, I can’t wait to see these s3000 series boxes breaking records and appearing on glossy magazine covers this year.

NEW ORLEANS, La. – TechEd 2013 – June 3, 2013 – sTec, Inc. (NASDAQ: STEC), a leading global provider of solid-state storage solutions, today announced the sTec™ s3000 storage appliance. The s3000 combines the performance, reliability and endurance of sTec’s industry-leading solid-state drive (SSD) technology with Microsoft Windows® Storage Server 2012’s storage clustering, virtualization and management features -- all within a cost-effective hardware configuration.

Storage Capacity/Scalability
Up to 48 of the highest performing sTec enterprise SSDs reaching up to 96TB per node. Build continuously-available clustered storage services that leverage SMB-Direct, SMB Multi-channel, NIC Teaming, Large I/O and RDMA for low latency and high throughput.

Use Cases
Transactional Databases :  Improved performance, reduced query latency; virtualization/consolidation enabler
Server Virtualization / Cloud:   Increased consolidation factors and per-server performance
VDI:   Reduced infrastructure cost ($/VDI); boot storm elimination
BI / DW / Analytics:   Decreased query response time; increased concurrency and throughput Media Real-time access to high demand shared assets
High-Performance Computing: Accelerating a wide range of I/O-intensive HPC applications

Performance
Actual measurements from the disk subsystems with 48 SSDs!

SMB3.0 4k Random Read: 1.2 Million IOPS 603,000 IOPS 1M Sequential Read: 8,342 MBytes PS 1M Sequential Write: 5,544 MBytes PS

iSCSI Target 4k Random Write: 341,000 IOPS 292,000 IOPS 1M Sequential Read: 8,154 MBytes PS 1M Sequential Write: 3,429 MBytes PS

Continuous Availability
Fully redundant
No single-point of failure
Dual active-active HA cluster
Hot swap RAID protected drives
Redundant interfaces
Redundant hot-swap power supplies, fans

Interfaces
4x1Gbit Ethernet per head unit
2x, or 4x, or 6x 10Gbit Ethernet per head unit
Block Level Interface: iSCSI
File Level Interface: SMB-2, 2.1, 3.0, NFS-v2, v3, 4.1

Head Unit Specs
One or two head units- each head unit with:
Two 8-core Xeon E5-2680
128 GB memory
Dual-mirrored boot drives
Multiple high speed ports

Storage
One or two drive shelves with 8 to 24 solid-state drives per drive shelf – 48 SSDs total
6.4TB up to 96TB total raw capacity
Redundant IO controllers with total 144Gbps bandwidth to each drive shelf
Hot swap 2.5” drives- Replace a bad drive while running
RAID-0, Mirror (RAID-1), Parity (RAID-5)
800G or 2TB Gen4 sTec enterprise SSDs with dual 6G SAS interface

Advanced Storage features
Deduplication reduces data size
Thin provisioning eliminates over allocation
Snapshot with VSS support
Branch cache reduces WAN traffic
On-the-fly volume or storage expansion

I highly recommend stopping by the sTec booth and checking out the new hardware! 

https://www.stec-inc.com/products/s3000-series-solid-state-storage/

Cheers,
Scott M. Johnson
Program Manager
Windows Storage Server

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2013
  Have you done a cost analysis in terms per price per TB compared with standard NAS?