News

Maxta's Promise of Enterprise Storage Sans Storage Arrays

Maxta unveils its converged compute and storage platform.

• By Christa Ayer
• 11/20/2013

With the announcement of its Maxta Storage Platform, Maxta is hoping to make storage arrays in enterprise environments a thing of the past, or at least an endangered species. Leveraging server-side flash and disk drives to optimize performance and capacity, MxSP delivers a converged compute and storage solution on standard servers. Think of it as a server-based storage app.

Maxta claims enterprises will be able to forego storage arrays, along with their associated power, cooling, and floor space expenses, as well as eliminate legacy storage protocols such as SAN and NAS, and legacy storage constructs such as LUNs/volumes. It fully integrates with server virtualization at all levels, from user interface to data management, while supporting all possible deployments of virtual data centers, including private, public, and hybrid clouds.

The platform promises to simplify IT by automating storage management and integrating it into the virtualization UI. Thus, there's no need to set up and provision storage; create volumes, file systems, and RAID groups; or decide how to map VMs to volumes. MxSP can scale compute and storage independently, one standard server at a time, without having to over-provision resources.

VM-centric data services such as snapshot, clone, and replication support high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. Capacity optimization capabilities such as thin provisioning, inline compression, and de-duplication promise to increase storage efficiency and cost effectively manage data growth.