Today SGI announced the InfiniteStorage Gateway, an appliance that delivers virtualized data management to lower the cost of high volume storage. Why an appliance? SGI’s Floyd Christofferson described it as a way to “install DMF within minutes and enable greatly simplified storage management for Big Data.”
The SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway reduces the dependency on high-cost primary storage by creating a virtualized storage fabric that can include any mixture of disk, tape, Zero-Watt Disk or MAID, and object storage. While appearing to users and applications simply as online data, SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway offers IT administrators the ability to keep data protected and online at a fraction of the cost of primary storage systems.
As data growth has continued to sky-rocket, IT organizations increasingly face the problem of infrastructure fragmentation, and the fact that their most expensive primary storage arrays are often used to house mostly inactive data,” said Laura DuBois, program vice president, IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions. “Data management is not only about the performance of active data today. It also must provide a seamless long-term strategy for all data that keeps costs at a minimum and reduces IT administrative burden without impacting users.”
With up to 276TB of onboard capacity in a single 4U appliance, the gateway automatically places data on any or all storage devices and locations based upon what works best for the access requirements and data protection policies.
Read the Full Story or View the Slides on Slideshare.
Over at 
