QuantaStor v3 the Software Defined Storage Platform Now Available!

Software Defined Storage is all about elevating storage above the hardware and going beyond traditional  protocols to produce a protocol agnostic platform that delivers SAN, NAS, BigData, and Object Storage in a pure software platform.   A great Software Defined Storage platforms is also one that's built for the future so you can deploy it just as easily on physical hardware or as a virtual storage appliance (VSA).

This is what QuantaStor is all about and with v3 we've added some key pieces to our Software Defined Storage strategy with integrated Gluster support, CIFS support with advanced Avid media-editing capabilities, and new advanced new hardware support for STEC PCIe SSD, LSI Nytro MegaRAID and Adaptec 7xxx series controllers.

We've also expanded the capabilities of QuantaGrid so you can now manage up to 16 QuantaStor appliances in a grid, virtual and/or physical as a single unit.

For more information on the full feature list and performance of QuantaStor v3 have a look at our new software product brochure here.

QuantaStor v2.7 Delivers New XenServer 6.x StorageLink Support

With Citrix's latest release of XenServer 6.1 we're happy to announce the release of QuantaStor v2.7 with StorageLink support for both XenServer 6.0 and 6.1. Our new QuantaStor StorageLink adapter also comes with a utility 'qstorutil.py' to simplify the configuration process. For those using older versions of QuantaStor, note that you'll need to upgrade to v2.7 using the Upgrade Manager to take advantage before creating new StorageLink Repositories.

One of the big advantages of using StorageLink is that you can map iSCSI LUNs directly to XenServer virtual machines which makes cloud environments much more agile. Now you can move volumes (LUNs) between XenServer Resource Pools and leverage hardware cloning and remote-replication features to move your data around with much greater ease. For more information on how to setup and configure QuantaStor v2.7 with StorageLink please see our online documentation here.

QuantaStor v2.6 adds cloud service integration with Librato Metrics, PagerDuty.com, and Softlayer Cloud Storage

Simplified IT support integration with PagerDuty

Storage system monitoring should be simple and should fit in with how you monitor all servers. That's why we're big fans of PagerDuty and we've integrated it into QuantaStor v2.6 so you can get alerts sent directly to your IT support team by setting a simple token in the QuantaStor Alert Manager. For more information on PagerDuty please see our new Wiki article here.

Simplified system monitoring with Librato Metrics

Also in our latest v2.6 release is integrated support for Librato Metrics. With Metrics you can now monitor all kinds of stats about your QuantaStor systems including performance IO stats and CPU load from the cloud. For those using QuantaGrid to combine systems the data from all the systems in your grid is automatically aggregated into a common Dashboard so you can see the status of all the systems at a glance. For more information about Metrics please see the Librato site here and our Wiki article here.

Enhanced cloud backup features with SoftLayer Cloud Storage

Finally, we've expanded our support for Cloud Backup to include SoftLayer's OpenStack SWIFT based Object Storage service which works both inside and outside the SoftLayer cloud. Using QuantaStor's cloud containers you can create an NFS share of unlimited capacity for use to do offsite backups in the datacenter of your choice.

For more details on the exact changes made in v2.6 please see the change log on our Wiki here.

QuantaStor v2.5 introduces scale-out management

Our latest release of QuantaStor introduces support for scale-out grid management capabilities which allows one to link together up to sixteen QuantaStor systems so that they can be managed as a single unit. This makes scaling easy as it near eliminates the additional management cost of adding more systems to your environment.
Also of note for v2.5 is an innovative new HA capability which integrates with the LSI SAS switch to failover storage pools automatically should the current pool owner go offline. By utilizing the SAS switch to control access to the storage the overall solution is much more efficient than software mirroring based approaches.
Finally, this release also introduces build-in management of LSI CacheCade so that hybrid SSD QuantaStor storage appliances can be built to greatly increase IOPS performance for IO intensive applications like virtualization and databases.

QuantaStor v2.1 enables dynamic pool expansion and virtual network support

QuantaStor version 2.1 brings a few new features and some minor fixes to 2.0 which are outlined in our official Change Log. Support for three features in particular stand out from the rest:

• Support for growing the size of a hardware RAID unit for LSI MegaRAID and Adaptec controllers.
  • With hardware RAID unit expansion you can add additional disks to an existing hardware RAID unit. In version 2 we had support for this at the software RAID level but 2.1 brings this support to the hardware level as well. Once the underlying RAID unit has grown you can do a Storage Pool Expand operation via QuantaStor Manager to complete the process.
• Support for dynamically growing and expanding QuantaStor storage pools through concatenation
  • Along with hardware RAID unit expansion you can now concatenate/append hardware RAID units to grow existing pools of storage. For example, if you have a storage pool utilizing a 10TB RAID5 hardware unit you can add to it a 8TB RAID5 hardware unit to grow your storage pool from 10TB usable to 18TB usable. The Storage Pool grow operation takes just a few seconds.
• Virtual network interfaces allowing for failover between physical interfaces.
  • Virtual network ports/interfaces can float between physical interfaces and is a key tool for being able to map your QuantaStor system into VPNs.

If you have any questions regarding v2.1 please contact us at support@osnexus.com or post to our Forum. The new download is available here.
Thanks,
The OS NEXUS Team