Exablox came out of stealth startup yesterday at Storage Field Day and detailed their storage solution. From my understanding of the company and their product, they wish to bring an enterprise-grade storage appliance to market that is usable for all businesses, not just those with storage engineers. They want to provide a solution that is not too costly, too complex, nor too time consuming.
Exablox‘s first product offering is the marriage of OneBlox and OneSystem. OneBlox’s object-based storage and OneSystem’s management simplifies storage to allow scaling, dynamic growth, with zero configuration. The big enterprise features include inline deduplication, continuous data protection, and zero-configuration expansion while supporting SMB and CIFS protocols. By default, all data is protected with AES-256 encryption.
Without the shackles of a legacy storage architecture, Exablox’s clean sheet approach combines the CIFS/SMB accessible OneBlox appliance with OneSystem, an elegant multi-tenant cloud-based management service.
From the Exablox NAS press release, OneBlox with OneSystem provides a solution:
- Powerful: The scale-out object-based file system enables non-disruptive capacity and performance expansion with zero configuration. Additionally, its inline deduplication for primary storage and disk-based backup maximizes storage utilization;
- Simple: The secure multi-tenant cloud-based management service enables organizations and managed service providers (MSPs) to manage Exablox storage deployments with minimal effort from anywhere with an Internet connection, and eliminates on-premises software requirements; and
- Protected: The always-on continuous data protection (CDP) capability enables fine-grained data recovery. Its real-time replication enables disaster recovery, and its inline encryption prevents data theft from any removed disk drive.
No RAID. No LUNS. No Volumes. No Hassle.
OneBlox can provide fully protected CIFS/SMB shares to users in less than five minutes with zero configuration. With no impact to business operations, additional OneBlox appliances can be added automatically, enabling resource constrained organizations to scale file system capacity without downtime. Organizations can forego forklift upgrades and multiple disk-based targets as their business grows with OneBlox’s dynamic scalability.
A single appliance can hold 32TB of data with 8 disks of 4TB capacity. The system can also grow as a ring to nearly 200TBs of storage.
You can learn more about the technical specifications of the OneBlox appliance from the Exablox products page.