ag�mi Brings Enterprise Storage Below $20K

When you’re a small storage systems provider trying to make a go of it
versus incumbents like EMC, IBM and HP, you can typically try to win on
price or performance.

agámi Systems wants to do both.

The company today rolled out the agámi Information Server AIS1006, a new
storage array designed to help cost-conscious small- and medium-sized
businesses (SMB) employ business continuity and on-site data protection
without sacrificing too much performance.

The machine retails for $17,970, which if you’ve shopped for storage arrays
before makes you inclined to think you’re getting just a bunch of disks (JBOD).

But there is actually a fair degree of functionality for that price range, which agámi was able to achieve by using SATA  disk drives as an alternative to the typical $20,000 per terabyte industry incumbents charge for their Fibre Channel-based drives, said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management for agámi.

An SMB storage array. Source: agami

The AIS1006 is also an alternative to Linux or Windows-based white boxes
with SATA drives that are short on performance and scalability.

For example, Speciale said that while Dell is perceived as a low-cost
provider, its PowerVault NX1950 unified storage box stores up to 4.5
terabytes  but costs $30,000.

The machine offers 300 megabytes per second (MBps) of throughput and 6
terabytes of capacity to go along with RAID5 with parallel rebuild,
snapshots and call-home features.

Another perk is pre-integrated live replication with agámiFSR, which copies
file systems between a primary and a secondary AIS server synchronously or
asynchronously over a LAN or WAN. Speciale said agámiFSR provides more
granular, bit-by-bit replication than the block-based approach of EMC’s SRDF
replication tool.

Replication functionality is considered table stakes for storage vendors
these days. Customers demand such features to help them meet stringent
corporate compliance regulations that demand data be preserved, unaltered,
for specific time periods.

Moreover, like its more powerful AIS3000 and AIS6000 predecessors, the
AIS1006 uses a blend of 64-bit Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP)
technology, SATA drives and HyperTransport I/O technology to enable a
unified storage architecture.

This special architecture enables agámi systems to simultaneously connect iSCSI
, NFS , CIFS , NDMP
 and SNMP , which means customers don’t have to buy several different machines to manage storage created in different
protocols.

The AIS1006 is also 100 percent compatible with agámi’s higher density and
higher performance AIS3000 and AIS6000 products, which the company began
selling in March.

agámi is selling the AIS1006 beginning today exclusively online; the
e-commerce approach is a departure from agámi’s previous reseller and direct
sales methods.