Symantec Corp. unveiled a new application that that the company promises can help companies build internal highly scalable, high-performance file-based cloud storage systems using commodity server hardware and the arrays of most storage vendors. Derrington provided few details of the new cloud service, but did note that it will to scale to tens of petabytes for corporate users. At the same time, Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability services at Symantec, disclosed that the company also plans to launch an online object-based file storage service, code-named S4, over the next year.
The S4 service is similar in name to to of Amazon.com's S3 cloud-storage service , which enables its resellers to set up SaaS offerings of their own using Amazon's grid-based backend storage architecture. Meanwhile, Symantec said that the new FileStore software product is being pitched as a tool to help enterprise-class companies economically build onsite cloud infrastructures using commodity x86 server hardware as well as any configuration of backend storage systems, including JBOD. For the past several months, Symantec has been using FileStore as the file-based storage architecture in the cloud services it offers to consumers. Similarly, Symantec's S4 is will enable companies to provide public cloud services to their customers. The service currently has some 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users. The software also integrates natively with Symantec's Endpoint Protection security software and Symantec's Enterprise Vault e-mail, file and instant messaging archive application, he added. "We've designed this to support diverse workloads - applications that have requirements for hundreds of millions of really tiny files like ringtones or tens of millions of larger files, like online auction sites," Derrington said. "It can scale from the low-end to the high end with near linear scalability. Derrington said that FileStore lets users add or remove storage logical unit numbers (LUNs) dynamically without taking systems offline and without disruption to applications.
The server nodes on the front end of FileStore are all actively participating and sharing the load." A single FileStore system can support up to 16 storage nodes, and two petabytes of storage capacity, Derrington said. "On the backend you can use anybody's storage that you want to. FileStore is available immediately and is priced per CPU, regardless of how many cores exist in each processor. All the major storage vendors we support with Veritas Storage Foundation are supported with FileStore," he added. For example, a server with two CPUs, will cost the same whether they're duo- or quad-core processors. A two node configuration of FileStore will start at $6,995.