Enterprise Computing: Symantec FileStore

Today Symantec are announcing their scalable NAS product called FileStore.  This simple appliance claims to offer linear scaling for up to 2PB of storage per cluster, leveraging all the benefits of the Veritas storage products we’ve come to know and love over the years.  But what chance has this competitor in a crowded market?

Have a look a the graphic on the right.  This pretty much sums up what FileStore is about – it’s an appliance serving standard file system protocols (NFS/CIFS/FTP/HTTP) using whatever storage you choose to place at the back end.  Up to 16 ‘nodes’ can be clustered together, working as a single load-balanced entity.  Each node uses commodity x86 hardware.

OK, so these features offer nothing special so far.  However, Symantec are using their Veritas heritage to provide some useful functionality into the product.  Firstly, nodes can be added and removed transparently, including the addition of nodes at higher specifications and O/S levels.  This means the technology can easily be refreshed over time; a painful scenario that most storage admins don’t like to have to go through.  Replacing storage is also simple as FileStore uses the Veritas File System under the covers.  Think of how a ‘plex’ can be replaced on a VFS today – add a new plex from the new storage, mirror these up and remove the old plex – voila!, transparent migration.

There’s also the option of tiering storage at the file level, another benefit of using VFS.  Individual files can be mapped to tiers of storage based on customer-defined policies, which provides the exact level of granularity needed.

What about scale?  Well, Symantec claim linear scalability and a SPEC SFS rating that will exceed the ones posted by Netapp.  These figures aren’t available yet but when they are will make interesting reading.  Finally there’s the thorny subject of the existing customer base.  Symantec claim to have been using FileStore to support their SaaS online backup service for the last 3 years.  This stores around 40PB of data for 9 million users.  In addition, there are large customers around the world already using FileStore, including TaoBao in China.

OK, it can’t all be good news.  What marketing slides tend not to show are the little details that matter, such as management interfaces and feature sets.  I’ve not seen details on what other functionality is available with FileStore - snapshots, replication, de-duplication, compression, encryption all come to mind.  However with a starting price of $6995 for a 2-node 2-socket system, do many of those features matter?

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