SharqStor NS 5240

Overview

The SharqStor NS 5240 is a high-performance high-end Network Attached Storage appliance solution. It supports up to 12TB 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, general data archiving, OS virtualization and multimedia serving applications.

64-bit Processing Power

Unlike many NAS solutions on the market, the SharqStor NS 5240 does not compromise when it comes to processing performance and scalability. With up to two dual-core 64-bit AMD Opteron processors, the SharqStor NS 5240 will hold its own against pretty much anything you can throw at it. AMD Hypertransport technology ensures the best possible I/O bandwidth and throughput for processor-to-processor and processor-to-memory operations.

Oodles of Storage

The SharqStor NS 5240 is not your run-of-the-mill NAS storage appliance. This unique high-capacity solution can scale to 12TB+ of storage with industry-standard 500GB SATA-II disk technology. It will also soon be shipping with 750GB capacity drives - which would mean a total raw capacity of 18TB in just 5U of rackmount real-estate. 24 drive bays and the dual disk RAID controller configuration provides unprecedented levels of flexibility in storage layout. Two RAID controllers means two separate RAID volumes can be utilised either separately or combined with the powerful Logical Volume Manager, configured via the Openfiler web-based management interface.

Always Available

With a storage capacity of 12TB, a lot of effort has to be put into ensuring  that access to data is not compromised in any event. The SharqStor NS 5240 meets this challenge with a redundant-everything approach. Redundant power, cooling and disks to be precise. The 930W power subsystem incorporates four independent power modules. A single or even two power modules could fail simultaneously without causing down-time. A maintenance operator can then hot-swap the failed power module(s). To guarantee data availability, the storage subsystem - comprising of 6 independent cooling-optimized SATA-II backplanes, multilane cables (for maximal airflow) and two high-performance RAID controllers - allows for RAID protected storage configurations and hot-swap disk support.

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.