storageFOUNDRY
Forging a solution for the Storage of Everything

A nationwide internet and cable provider was fed up with deploying storage appliances that invariably created silos of trapped capacity and isolated performance. While they knew it was possible to move beyond traditional SAN and NAS architectures, they found it difficult to locate an Enterprise-capable, scale-out system that could address both their legacy SAN access requirements as well as their near-term OpenStack initiatives. After a long search for a simple-to-deploy solution that could become a scalable, unified core for many of their needs, the company discovered their solution in the NautilusE6000, a hyper-scale open-storage platform from storageFOUNDRY.

Born from the need to deliver storage without limits for data without boundaries, the Nautilus products jettison the restrictions of appliance-centric solutions in favor of a distributed object-store, and are capable of providing storage via SAN, NAS, Object and Direct-API protocols. In the initial phase of the project, the NautilusE6000 was deployed as scaleoutblock storage for OpenStack using native RBD block devices, while simultaneously meshing with the legacy VMware racks using iSCSI LUNs over 10GE/40GE. The next phase is queued to leverage the native active-clustered file access. Nautilus also supports the presentation of storage via S3 and SWIFT interfaces, and a fast direct-API.

“Nautilus provides an open-core backend with flexible front-end protocol layers to provide the agility and size required for to¬day’s big-data and cloud-driven workloads, “says Craig Forbes, Solution Consultant at storageFoundry. “This open-platform approach supports the rapid integration of new technologies, which allows a system designer to precisely address the needs of a project at the initial roll-out, and then easily adapt to new demands as they emerge.”

The industry veterans at storageFOUNDRY are known for their ability to integrate scale-out components into a reliable, high performance solution; and the Nautilus platform’s software-defined foundation is the real-world result of a decade of development. “There are a wide range of use cases in the market, and we use an application-centric understanding of a client’s environment to make sense of the practical requirements. While we know the needs will change, we’re not overly concerned. We know that a platform as flexible and scalable as Nautilus is going to integrate soundly no matter if it is day 1 or day 1,500 of the systems lifecycle.” adds Tyson Webster, Lead Design Engineer on the Nautilus product line.

The firm understands that the future of storage belongs to grid-based architectures, not point-solutions, and that the transition from legacy storage systems to dynamic infrastructure built on innovative scale-out software is well under way. “We’ve crossed the Rubicon regarding how storage is built,” adds Webster. “Appliance-based designs don’t scale; they’re on the way out. Distributed Storage is the new model, and Nautilus embraces this, by building on a better design philosophy that enables Nautilus to be the Storage for Everything.

storageFOUNDRY’s design philoso¬phy of using reliable, scale-out software with OEM-grade Hard¬ware enables firms to create their own infrastructure, exactly as they need it, while leveraging the expe¬rience of a trusted partner to deal with the low-level minutia