Formation’s Enhances Flagship Software-Defined Storage Platform Recovers Unused VM “Stranded” Storage to Deliver Massive Economic Savings and Efficiency

FREMONT, CA – Jun 8, 2016 — /BackupReview.info/ — Formation Data Systems (Formation), a company revolutionizing enterprise storage, today announced new features for the FormationOne™ Dynamic Storage Platform (FormationOne) that allows enterprises to recapture unused storage in their virtualized server environments. This exciting new feature, which is an industry first called Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR), allows Formation customers to extend their FormationOne deployments beyond standard software-defined storage implementations to be able to utilize storage capacity that is “stranded” within most virtual servers and hypervisor clusters.

Using FormationOne VSR, customers can now provision unused capacity across any VM environment including Hyperconverged environments. FormationOne VSR delivers this reclaimed storage as flexible shared-storage pool which can be used for a variety of applications including backup, archive, file and object storage. This solution can unlock terabytes to petabytes of capacity with no incremental hardware purchase.

The FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform eliminates the complexities created by traditional storage architectures by delivering differentiated capabilities such as Quality of Service, dynamic tiering, data duplication and continuous data protection to deliver high performance storage with industry-leading control and protection. FormationOne uses a fully distributed software-defined architecture that runs on industry standard x86 compute nodes and consolidates workloads across block, file and object data types, lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 10 times or more.

Today, organizations cannot cost-effectively support the deployment of both traditional and next generation workloads because hardware-centric architectures are very rigid and do not easily support modern, distributed architectures in combination with traditional workloads.

Formation addresses this challenge by providing customers with a modern, storage solution that is:

  • Software-defined and dynamic
  • Hyper-scale and fault tolerant
  • Cost effective and scalable

FormationOne VSR
The Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR) feature within FormationOne allows customers that have deployed large virtual server farms to take advantage of the fact that FormationOne can discover and leverage the disk and connected storage array resources in all of the physical hosts across the data center. The distributed architecture of FormationOne allows customers to create completely new pools of virtualized storage resources from capacity that would have been otherwise unused. These new storage resources can now be managed as part of a FormationOne system, providing administrators access to storage within the standard compute nodes in a Formation domain in addition to the capacity within the VM hosts, arrays or appliances. These new resources are managed in a single interface and can be presented as any data type (iSCSI, NFS, Object) with automated data management including QoS, tiering, journaling so that regardless of the storage source, the result is Enterprise class storage.

“Customers with large VM deployments end up with potentially petabytes of capacity that essentially goes to waste, this new FormationOne VSR capability allows customers to maximize their hardware investments and fully utilize this stranded investment,” said CEO of Formation Data Systems, Mark Lewis. “Formation is here to provide every enterprise with a platform that delivers cloud storage capabilities that are an order of magnitude less costly than today’s traditional architectures, but don’t require sacrificing performance, availability or security.”

The Formation Advantage
The FormationOne Dynamic Storage platform provides these differentiated capabilities:

  • Integrated de-duplication and data reduction, minimizing the storage footprint
  • Workload consolidation across block, file, object and big data use cases
  • PriorityOne QoS, which delivers prioritized I/O and throughput across all data types
  • TimeLine journaled data protection, with real-time recovery and integrated snaps and clones
  • FireBreak analytics, which delivers real time anomaly detection and reporting
  • Dynamic tiering and all flash access, which leverage SSD performance at much lower cost points

“Storage Operations and Business Managers seek a unified pool of elastic storage with predictable performance, secure boundaries, and invisible management, but existing technologies can’t deliver at real-world scale,” said Paul Evans, Principal Architect at Daystrom Technology Group “This is why the Formation SDS architecture is so compelling: QoS, dynamic provisioning and inline analytics offer value to both sets of stakeholders. This, in addition to the economic benefits give Formation a solution that can transform the storage landscape for the next decade.”

“Software-defined storage is a great example of a rare-but-real paradigm market shift, and Formation Data Systems is one vendor helping to spearhead the shift. Traditional storage architectures are too costly, complex and siloed, and they can prevent organizations from unlocking — and optimizing — the value in their data,” said Practice Director & Senior Analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, Mark Peters. “The new era of ‘software-defined everything’ is upon us, and enterprises are beginning to understand its impact and opportunity. FormationOne is a modern, data-focused platform that can address all of the cost and data management pains most enterprises experience today.”

RELATED LINKS

  • Visit press room — http://www.formationds.com/media
  • Follow Formation’s blog — http://www.formationds.com/blog
  • Follow Formation on Twitter — https://twitter.com/formationds
  • Follow Formation on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/3106026
  • CEO Mark Lewis’ Twitter — https://twitter.com/ml62

About Formation Data Systems
Formation Data Systems’ mission is to help IT organizations realize the transformative benefits of modern storage technology. Formation has developed the revolutionary FormationOne™ Dynamic Storage Platform that combines the agility, flexibility and simplicity of public cloud web-scale approaches with the control, security and customization capabilities of private datacenter storage. FormationOne has been built for Enterprise IT, SaaS application providers, and service providers, seeking ways to transform the agility and economics of their storage and data management environment. The platform is generally available. Go to formationds.com for more information.

Media Contact:
John Vu, Eastwick Communications
Email: FDS@eastwick.com
Phone: 408-823-9318

Source: Formation Data Systems

 

 

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