These new scale-out offerings follow up last year’s file sync and sharing solution, as PROMISE moves beyond its traditional product lines with different types of products.

Storage vendor PROMISE Technology is making a major push into the enterprise space with the launch of the VSky A-Series, its first scale-out storage solution.

Taiwanese-based PROMISE has been in the market for years, making RAID controllers and subsystems, with a sweet spot in the media and entertainment industry. Within the last year, however, they have made a major push into new markets, looking to expand beyond the commodity hardware market. Last August, they launched their first cloud and first software application with the FileCruiser Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing solution, designed to allow both enterprises and SMBs to build a private cloud storage service. Now, with the VSky A-Series scale-out offering, PROMISE introduces a product which will serve it well in its traditional verticals. However, its massive scalability, which will allow scaling, accessing and archiving at petabyte volumes, will meet the needs of customers with more demanding requirements as well.

“We definitely want to expand deeper into the enterprise, and the VSky A-Series is designed to play there,” said Victor Pacheco, PROMISE’s director for field applications and support in the enterprise.

“The low hanging fruit for this is our existing customer base, with 80 per cent of our business being in media and entertainment,” Pacheco said, “Our VTrak storage is also used in other areas however. Customers also buy it for unstructured data, which is actually where we started before we got into media and entertainment with the help of Apple. VSky will help us there, as well as in other areas like video surveillance and virtual environments where we also have a presence now.” He identified backup archiving, broadcasting with compressed content, and private and public clouds as other likely use cases.

The VSky A-Series allows organizations to overcome the challenges caused by explosive growth in storage demand, allowing them to scale to petabyte volumes on a pay-as-you-go basis with no downtime and with a single flat name space. It also has the advantages of having PROMISE make and supply all the components, to remove installation and support issues that can arise when integrating scale-out storage and commodity hardware from different vendors.

“This is an all-in-one, with a single web-based management interface for software, hardware, services and the back end,” Pacheco said. The VSky A-Series also provides full multi-protocol support, with a single infrastructure with scale-out capability for object, file, and block level storage.

The VSky A-Series is available in two separate form factors. The A1100 is a 1U gateway server appliance with no storage, to which additional nodes can be added. These nodes will also connect with PROMISE Vess and VTrak storage, providing a unified storage pool.

The second offering is the VSky A1970, a high-density 4U 70 bay, top loaded storage server solution with two independent server nodes. Its high-density design reduces the data center footprint which helps lower IT, power and cooling costs.

PROMISE’s VSky A1100 (Vess compatible) and A1970 will be available in Q2. VSky A1100 will be compatible with PROMISE’s VTrak storage in Q3.