Computerworld — Sepaton today announced the next-generation operating system for its grid-based deduplication, backup appliance, the S2100-ES2.

The new 64-bit operating system, combined with Intel's (INTC) new Westmere processor, runs the updated appliance at twice the speeds of its predecessor, the company said.

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The updated S2100-ES2 appliance has a maximum throughput of 1,500MB/sec throughput per node or as much as 43.2TB/hr. The system initially will scale to 8-nodes; the company has qualified up to 16 nodes in its labs, said Linda Mentzer, vice president of product and program management at Sepaton.

The S2100-ES2 series consists of its version 6.0 OS running on Intel 2U (3.5-in high) commodity servers with Hitachi Data Systems AMS 2100 storage arrays. Like all grid-based architectures, as more nodes are added, both processing power and storage capacity increase.

There S2100-ES2 appliance is available in two models -- the 1910, which has 1TB serial ATA (SATA) drives, and the 2910, which has comes with 2TB capacity SATA drives.

The OS upgrade allows the S2100-ES2 platform, for the first time, to support Symantec (SYMC) NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) on 10 Gbit/sec Ethernet concurrently with 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel tape emulation, which makes it a virtual tape library (VTL).

The company plans to add the Network File System (NFS) protocol interface to future iterations of the deduplication and backup appliance.

Sepaton also announced that it has enhanced its ContentAware application, which deduplicates both progressive incremental Tivoli Storage Manager backups and multi-streamed database backups.

Sepaton added a secure erasure feature to the 6.0 version of its OS, which is compliant with the National Institute of Technology and Standards (NIST) protocols that ensure data is overwritten so it cannot be recovered.

The new OS also offers an updated graphical user interface with new reporting tools that allow administrators to see the types of applications being backed up and the data policies associated with them. It also allows administrators to track system trends that can be used for chargeback purposes.

"Sepaton's laser sharp focus on delivering data protection platforms with enterprise-class capabilities such as massive grid scalability, storage pooling that enables phased migration to new technologies, and cloud enabling multi-tenancy, will be a key platform for enterprises to control the rising costs of managing massive data volumes and exponential data growth," said Laura Dubois, program vice president at market research firm IDC.

The base price for the S2100-ES2 is $257,500. For that, a user gets a single-node appliance with 12TB of usable storage capacity, Mentzer said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .

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