Exablox unveils the OneBlox 5210, a scale-out low-cost flash product with object storage under the hood, that lists for $29,000 diskless, with 4 TB SSDs a further $2,000 each.
The Exablox OneBlox 5210
Sunnyvale-based storage vendor Exablox has announced the expansion of its roster with the OneBlox 5210, an all-flash, scale-out offering that positions Exablox better in the enterprise for more robust primary storage use cases.
“This is the third generation Exablox,” said Sean Derrington, Director of Products at Exablox, which brought its first product to market in 2013, and sells entirely through channel partners. “The second generation was the OneBlox 4312, from last year. The 4312 is now targeted at the SME and at smaller enterprises. The 5210 is higher performance, and is directed more at mid- and larger enterprises. They both have the same software. The differences are the speed at which they run, and the price, with the 5210 coming in at $USD 29k diskless, compared to $12k for the 4312.”
Derrington said that while the OneBlox 4312 was sold into the enterprise before, its limitations in the larger environments limited it to project-type work, such as departmental deployments, VDI and archiving.
“The OneBlox 5210 greatly expands our addressable market,” he said. “It now gives our partners the opportunity to go into primary storage in the enterprise. They now have more products in their portfolio to solve customer problems.” Exablox’s expectation is that 35 per cent of these units will find their way into primary storage, 35 per cent into secondary storage, and 30 per cent hybrid.
The OneBlox 5210 is a 1U appliance with 10 2.5” drive slots, which achieves 50,000 IOPS.
“It is very high density, but also high performance and low cost,” Derrington said. “It is a scale-out architecture, with all its benefits, and because we are object-based under the covers, we can mix and match capacities over time without the user having to reconfigure. We eliminate all the RAID and LUNs and volumes. This also makes it easy for partners to deploy.”
The cost, $USD 29,000, comes in at less than $0.50/GB. Derrington said the cost advantage is broader than that however, because while some competitors have a low diskless cost, then charge a lot for the flash disks, Exablox’s disk are also inexpensive.
“You can buy 4 TB SSDs for $2000 each,” he said. “No one else does that.”
OneBlox seamlessly scales in virtual environments, non-disruptively scaling out when capacity is added to the cluster.
“There are no capacity restrictions,” Derrington stated. While VMware NFS datastores have limitations from volume sizing constraints, each datastore here can support hundreds of VMs. There are no boundaries on how large a data store can be, and they don’t have to be reconfigured like RAID and LUNs.”
Derrington also noted that the OneSystem cloud management system in all the Exablox models allows users to globally manage any OneBlox from anywhere.
“The management system allows it to be managed from any browser,” he said. “Along with 24×7 Exablox proactive monitoring, this makes it ideal for partners running backups as a service.”
The OneBlox 5210 is available now for early access, at a list price of $USD 28,995. General availability is scheduled for Q4.
Exablox will be demoing the product at VMworld next week. They are at Booth 2708.
