By harnessing commodity storage hardware into a virtual single unit, ExaStore-ICM (Intelligent Cluster Management) offers interoperability by providing support for NFS, CIFS and AFP protocols and by enabling file sharing among Apple, UNIX, Linux and Microsoft clients.

With ExaStore-ICM, Exanet claims to be the only company to provide unlimited, on-the-fly bandwidth and capacity scalability in a clustered, multi-platform NAS environment, a company spokesperson said.

By orchestrating standard, off-the-shelf hardware, ExaStore-ICM can help provide best-of-breed solutions for any application or budget, the spokesperson said.

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"It is abundantly clear that Exanet is in the clustered storage game," said Brad O'Neill, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

"Their benchmarks are record-setting, and their price/performance metrics are equally compelling by virtue of their software-based deployment. This is the exact direction that we believe the entire industry needs to head, but Exanet is doing it today."

Click here to read more about Exanet's clustered NAS software.

With the groundbreaking ExaStore-ICM, Herzliya, Israel-based Exanet has achieved a series of industry firsts, including the first CDP (Continuous Data Protection) solution to fully integrate with a clustered NAS platform, the spokesperson said.

Key features of ExaStore-ICM, as listed by the company, include:

• Advanced Point-in-Time functionality, which enables users to capture an infinite set of snapshots, enabling a return to any given recovery point.
• Automated storage management that simplifies system operation and maintenance and drives down the total cost of ownership of enterprise NAS.
• New virtual volume capability allows dynamic expansion or reallocation of storage capacity according to changing business needs and provides an additional level of control and flexibility for capacity management and provisioning.
• A home-grown single file system and single storage pool ensure maximum utilization of disk space.

"If you add [ExaStore-ICM] to a system's high performance and unlimited scalability ... it opens up new business opportunities for blue-chip customers in telecommunications, broadcasting, active archiving and other areas where data is growing exponentially and needs to be constantly available," said Exanet CEO Rami Schwartz.

Pricing and availability

ExaStore-ICM, available now, is sold only through channel partners at $10,000 per terabyte (SATA) and $20,000 per terabyte (Fibre Channel) price points, the spokesperson said.

Back in October, Exanet and Toronto-based remote backup/recovery software specialist Asigra announced that a joint system package featuring the companies' ExaStore and Televaulting systems successfully stored more than 1 billion files on a single distributed file system—what the two companies called "an industry first."

Featuring an ExaStore two-node High Performance Cluster and an Asigra N+1 DS-System architecture, 1.13 billion data files were distributed to remote site servers during the test.

ExaStore provided a single IP address for which Televaulting could write, while automatically balancing the load and the data to the least busy node and least occupied disk drives, thus maximizing total storage performance and capacity.

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