Woohoo! We’ve completed test and development of CloudArray 1.1, which we’ve dubbed the “Extended” release. No, it’s not “Extended” because of the development schedule; it’s taking the core features of CloudArray 1.0 and making them better.
- We’ve increased the maximum volume size: in version 1.0, we had a two terabyte limit on the maximum size of the volume. Now, we can create and present single volumes of up to 384TB. That boggles my mind. Think about it: you can make a five volume RAID-5 device that is 1.5 petabytes. I’m tempted to do that on my own machine, just to be able to say that I have 1.5 petabytes attached to it. Of course, with thin provisioning, I wouldn’t actually have to pay for all of that…
- We run in the cloud: we’ve extended CloudArray so that it can actually run in the cloud compute space. The same feature set that you use in your local data center is available, so that you can replicate, thin provision, snapshot, share, and encrypt storage to disk images in the cloud, too. With the launch of our ComputeAnywhere™ initiative, you can even share entire data volumes between local data center servers and cloud compute servers. Presently, we’ve got an EC2 AMI available, and more on the way,
- We’ve extended our provider policy support: you can use policies like RRS on Amazon S3 to substantially reduce storage costs, or Synaptic’s increased redundancy policies to get even higher availability,
- A host of smaller changes: we’ve tossed in lots of usability improvements, like easier cache creation and capacity management, snapshot checkpoint integration, more precise error reporting, and increased integration with our web portal services.
All-in-all, a nice set of changes, and I’m thrilled to be able to release it.
