Posted by David Greenfield on September 8, 2010 for Network Computing
There’s been plenty of talk about scale-out storage, which is a storage architecture built from low cost computing devices and commodity storage systems to form a vast, inexpensive storage pool. Scale-out storage means designating volumes for structured or unstructured data, but not both individually. That can be confining to many users, which is one reason why Scale Computing introduced its N05 Starter Cluster at VMworld last week.
The new unified storage is aimed at small and medium businesses and supports both structured and unstructured data for as little as $2,500 per hardware node. Scale’s N05 Starter Cluster (3 nodes) offers 1.5TB of storage capacity and is stocked with the usual storage features: thin provisioning, snap-shotting, replication, scale-out capabilities, unified SAN and NAS. There is no support for primary deduplication, however.