Starboard unveils unified storage model

data with a single platform, CRN says.

“Storage in the past has been managed in silos, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI and virtualised systems,” says Karl Chen, chief marketing officer at the Broomfield, Colorado-based vendor.

“They were all designed to support a single workload. But customers want simplified environments. So we provide storage applications that allow IT generalists to quickly provision storage, optimise storage volumes and provide predictable performance.”

The AC72 storage system is named after the America's Cup AC72 high-performance catamaran, Information Week notes.

The storage system ships completely through the channel and is targeted at the small and mid-size enterprise, where data is growing at as much as 40% a year, according to analysts.

Starboard is targeting the system at companies looking to replace 10- to 20-year-old storage area networks and network-attached storage systems with a unified storage system such as the AC72, which ships with data reduction, thin provisioning, space reclamation, snapshots and capacity expansion capabilities.

The Starboard AC72 head unit comes in four 3U dual-controller models, two geared for performance and the other two for capacity, Search Storage writes.

The performance systems begin at 7.2TB with 15 000rpm SAS drives, while the capacity units begin at 24TB with 7 200rpm near-line SAS drives.

Besides the drives, the other differences are in the processors and memory. The base performance and capacity systems include an Intel Xeon 5600 processor with 24GB of memory per node.