DataON Storage, the leading provider of OS-Agnostic Storage Enclosures, today unveils the DNS-9000 Series of Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) appliances, a groundbreaking suite of products intended to redefine the storage industry. DataON’s flagship product, the DNS-9470, achieves high availability (HA) dual-node clustering with a 280TB storage capacity in a single 70-bay 4U enclosure. The DNS-9220 can provide the same HA clustering benefits but is available as a 12-bay 2U enclosure.

Launching in New Orleans at Microsoft’s annual TechEd technology conference (Booth #2103), the innovative dual-node storage appliances introduce simplified clustering technology designed to provide a redundant, failover environment condensed into one single HA storage solution. The new CiB appliances can leverage the high availability feature provided by Microsoft? Windows Server? 2012 to introduce clustering, while the built-in ‘Storage Spaces’ functionality provides a less capital-intensive shared storage approach. For example, a DNS-9470 Cluster-in-a-Box fully populated with 280TB and amply configured server nodes with Windows Server 2012 will fetch a street price of $59,950, that’s about $0.21/GB of HA clustered storage. Since the DNS-9470 is a scalable solution the CiB can be backed with additional JBOD boxes to provide up to 3PB (petabytes) of capacity in a standard rackmount cabinet.

“With the proliferation of various Software-defined Storage applications, there is a strong push to leverage cluster server platforms,” says Trenton R. Baker VP of Business Development, DataON Storage. “The DataON Storage DNS-9470 is a Datacenter-in-a-Box failover cluster solution that, when bundled with any scale-out HA ready file system, delivers high availability technology to prevent unplanned IT downtime, without the legacy SAN purveyors high cost and complexity.”

Traditional legacy SAN storage design has been unable to provide sophisticated failover technology and remain within datacenter footprint and cost of ownership constraints. DataON is challenging this paradigm with the introduction of the DNS-9470 and DNS-9220. The CiB is purpose-built to simplify and tame Cloud and Big Data sprawl by maximizing storage density with a 150% denser design than traditional dual server and external storage deployments.

While the 70-drive bay DNS-9470 offers unparalleled storage density, it also includes modular dual-node failover cluster servers, with dual Intel Xeon processors to provide high performance and built-in system failover. Capable of housing 70 HDD and/or SSD 3.5” SAS / SATA devices in only 4U of rack space, this exclusive offering from DataON Storage reduces data center sprawl by more than 15% as compared to even the highest density storage JBOD array offerings and requires 60% less rack space than the competing high availability clustered scale-out file storage offerings.

A CiB dual-node cluster server storage platform is made up of two individual server nodes located side-by-side within a single enclosure along with a shared storage pool of hybrid storage drives which are available for auto-tiering or flash-based auto-caching. Should one of the two cluster nodes fail, the system will failover automatically to the other node thus minimizing unplanned downtime and service disruption. The CiB also includes internal shared storage space—12 drives for the DNS-9220 and 70 drives for the DNS-9470—which can be expanded upon with additional external storage JBODs.

Ready to run out-of-the-box, the DataON CiB groundbreaking ability to condense the HA cluster server footprint while delivering massive shared scalable storage provides a huge advantage for IT administrators seeking to scale more intelligently and efficiently, while driving down the total cost of ownership. DataON Storage DNS-9220 and DNS-9470 will ship early third quarter of 2013 and are available for pre-order immediately.