SharqStor NS 3160

Overview

The SharqStor NS 3160 is a powerful mid-range to high-end Network Attached Storage appliance solution. It supports up to 8TB of RAID protected storage and can scale in processing power to four CPU cores making it ideal for use in high performance and high throughput clustering deployments. Its large storage capacity also makes it the perfect solution for nearline storage, disk-to-disk backup and multimedia serving applications.

Processing Titan

Powered by up to two dual-core 64-bit AMD Opteron processors, the SharqStor NS 3160 can take pretty much anything you throw at it. It is the perfectly balanced NAS solution - with raw processing power matching its huge 8TB capacity. With eight (8) DIMM slots, the SharqStor NS 3160 can scale to 32GB of high performance DDR-400 ECC protected SDRAM. And with the AMD Hypertransport technology, each processor gets up to 24 GB/s peak bandwidth, virtually eliminating I/O bottlenecks.

Capacity and Scalability

In just 3U of rack space, the SharqStor NS 3160 will deliver 8TB of raw storage capacity or 7TB of RAID 5 protected storage capacity. And as 750GB disk drives go mainstream, this will scale to 12TB of raw storage capacity - an incredibly dense storage configuration. The SharqStor NS 3160 also supports external storage expansion via direct attached storage arrays to take total storage capacity to a whopping 16TB in just 6U of rack space. So you can start small today and grow with the (data) flow. Standalone, the SharqStor NS 3160 supports up to 16 hot-swappable SATA-II disk drives and with the external storage expansion unit, can be configured with a total of 32 disk drives.

Always-on Reliability

Your data is useless if you cannot get to it. That is why the SharqStor NS 3160 is big on availability and reliability features. At every level, subsystems are designed to maximize system uptime and guarantee data availablity even under the most adverse conditions. You could lose a disk or two, a system fan and a power supply module and still have continuous transparent access to your data. The powerful point-to-point high performance RAID controller connected to the disk backplane allows disk modules to be hot-swapped - meaning failed disks can be replaced when the system is in full operational use.

Likewise, the main system cooling subsystem supports hot-plugging of fans without having to schedule a power-down. Finally, the redundant hot-swap power supply unit, with three power modules, will allow up to two simultaneous power module failures without skipping a beat - no need for scheduled maintenance downtime. Simply replace the failed power module at your earliest convenience.

Powered by Openfiler

Openfiler is a powerful, intuitive, browser-based network storage software operating system. Openfiler delivers file-based Network Attached Storage and block-based Storage Area Networking protocols in a single framework. Openfiler is based on an Enterprise Linux distribution. File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, and FTP.

Authentication support encompasses most directory based authentication systems including NIS, LDAP, Active Directory and Hesiod with Kerberos. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI, scheduled snapshots, resource quota and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.