Fujitsu brings petabyte-scale storage to the data centre

Fujitsuhas launched  the ETERNUS DX8900 S4 storage solution, bringing flash-optimised petabyte-scale storage to the data centre. This new generation system reduces complexity by eliminating the need for varying storage tiers for different workloads and consolidates separate storage silos into a single system to streamline the soft migration to an all-flash data centre – even for petabyte-scale workloads.

 

As data capacities grow, enterprises need to store previously unimagined amounts of information. This data growth is driven by technologies such as the Internet of Things, network edge computing, virtual reality, advanced analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, all generating very large amounts of structured and unstructured data. The petabyte era is arriving as a result of this exponential growth, with one petabyte equaling 1,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000 gigabytes of data.

 

The ongoing trend towards data centre consolidation and virtualisation, driven by a need to cut down on both capital expenditure and operating expenses, is also driving data growth. To consolidate data with enterprise applications such as OLTP, databases and ERP requires flexible storage that is highly dense, scalable and reliable, supports multiple different service levels, and provides a high level of automation.

 

Fujitsu is addressing all these needs with its latest-generation ETERNUS DX8900 S4. Able to store all data, the new arrival helps enterprises prepare for petabyte-scale storage requirements – where only all flash-based systems can provide the access and response times needed. The move to all flash will also reduce data centre energy consumption, by eliminating spinning disks and therefore also reducing heat output and cooling requirements.

 

Olivier Delachapelle, Head of Data Centre Category Management at Fujitsu EMEIA says: “With fifty percent of data centre storage expected to be flash-based within the next three years, the technology is going mainstream fast. The new ETERNUS DX8900 S4 is flash-optimised and supports the latest 30TB solid state drives to combine best in class performance¹ with massive scalable capacity. This makes ETERNUS ideal to help today’s digital enterprises consolidate storage infrastructures and tame their ever-growing amount of data.”

 

Based on a multi-redundant, scale-out architecture, the ETERNUS DX8900 S4 is designed for modular scalability – from a two-controller configuration up to 24 controllers – and to provide leading performance and business continuity. It allows the combination of disk and flash drives to easily balance capacity, data access speed and cost requirements. A big step towards the full flash data centre, a single ETERNUS reaches peak performance of up to 10,000,000 IOPS and hosts up to 140PB of flash capacity, double the capacity of its predecessor.

 

ETERNUS DX facilitates transition to the full flash data centre

ETERNUS DX8900 S4 can be configured for SSD, HDD or a combination of disk and flash, and is fully compatible with ETERNUS AF all-flash arrays. It also leverages Extreme Cache (up to 307.2TB) powered by Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) for accelerated read access to turbocharge performance.

 

Quality of Service and hardware-accelerated data reduction

The ETERNUS DX8900 S4 offers enhanced efficiency, with all compression managed by hardware, improving performance up to a factor of six. In scale-out configurations, performance improves with each additional controller module.

 

Fujitsu’s new system also ensures that application performance remains unaffected and minimises administration overheads when consolidating diverse workloads and storage tiers. Built-in Quality of Service (QoS) functionality handles automatic CPU prioritization, bandwidth allocation and tiering, managed by specifying required response times. These fully automated QoS functions, coupled with data reduction technologies, make the ETERNUS DX8900 S4 ideally suited for dynamic enterprise applications such as OLTP, databases, ERP, data analytics, and high-performance computing.

 

Flexible failover and disaster recovery

Built-in multi-redundancy provides complete, enterprise-class protection against the failure of disks, controllers, interconnects or even the complete system. Additionally, features such as zero downtime migration, snapshots, remote replication and transparent failover help ensure business continuity. Built on Fujitsu’s seamless ETERNUS family architecture, smaller ETERNUS DX or ETERNUS AF systems can easily replicate data to an ETERNUS DX8900 S4, providing cost-efficient system failover and flexible disaster recovery for branch offices and geographically distributed subsidiaries.