Promise Technology is making a big push into big-data applications with its new VSky A-Series of scale-out storage hardware designed to expand easily into the multiple-PB range.

The VSky launch line-up consists of just two products. The A1100 is a 1U gateway server for a large number of clients that can be connected to a unified storage pool made up of Promise Vess or VTrak storage. For customers who are building a data center that requires high-density storage appliances, the A1970 is a 4U top-loaded storage server with 70 drive bays and two independent server nodes (each node manages 35 HDDs). The A1100 scales up to three systems per node (one RAID head storage and two JBODs), and each A1970 can be scaled up with up to two JBODs per node. For scale-out, the A-series can extend to up to 16 nodes. Both products support object, file and block-level storage.

Source: Promise Technologies [PDF]; click image to see chart at full size

Promise says VSky is aimed at users who face rapidly growing archives of high-resolution media or need to deliver content across distributed production facilities. But the company also hopes the new products can help it expand beyond its core customer base in media and entertainment and into markets including surveillance archives and cloud storage and virtualization. To that end, VSky supports a broad range of protocols, including NFS/CIFS, iSCSI, Amazon S3, Swift, and WebDAV RESTful APIs.

"Scale-out storage is increasingly the answer for enterprises that are buried under massive volumes of data stored on a variety of hardware and software," said Promise Technology CEO James Lee in a prepared statement. "With VSky A-Series, we are offering an all-in-one storage solution that enables users to manage huge amounts of data with greater cost savings, scalability, flexibility and simplicity."

The devices support data protection via RAID, data replication, and erasure coding. The VSky A-Series is expected to ship in the second quarter, but some features, notably compatibility with VTrak storage (Vess compatibility will be enabled at launch), won't be enabled until a service release scheduled for the third quarter of 2015.