Fujitsu has launched Eternus CD1000, a storage array that can scale up to a whopping 56 Petabytes, making it perfect for the most ambitious big data projects.

The appliance brings together block, object and file storage in a single distributed cluster, using Red Hat’s open source management software tweaked by Fujitsu.

Eternus CD1000 is aimed at cloud and telecommunication service providers, financial, media and business analytics organizations. It is fully compatible with OpenStack environments.

Hyper-scale
Fujitsu believes that IT departments in large organizations are facing three problems: growing demands on scalability, greater complexity and increasing costs.

In an attempt to tackle these challenges, the company has created the Eternus CD1000 storage array. It can securely store up to 56PB of data across 224 nodes, and manage all of this as a single pool.

One PB of data is equivalent to 1,000TB or approximately 100,000 hours of full HD 1080p video.

Fujitsu says Eternus will be pushed much further next year, as it attempts to create a storage system that can hold an unlimited amount of data, for unlimited periods of time.

On the software side, the array runs Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise. Red Hat acquired Inktank in May 2014 to buy into Ceph - the distributed, open source block store and file system especially suitable for huge datasets.

The Ceph Enterprise platform has been further enhanced by Fujitsu in order to deliver comprehensive data management through a single ‘pane of glass’. The Japanese company will also provide full enterprise-level support for the open source software.

Eternus CD1000 enables IT staff to add, exchange and upgrade individual storage nodes without downtime, and new nodes are backwards compatible with older Eternus systems.

“The ETERNUS CD10000 revolutionizes the way that organizations deal with ever-increasing online data. Fujitsu is the first mainstream, global storage technology provider to deliver a hyperscale, open source-based storage optimization platform for online storage, removing future bottlenecks and allowing organizations to regain control over cost,” said Hiroaki Kondo, SVP and head of Storage Systems Business Unit at Fujitsu.