Security, storage and systems management solutions provider, Symantec Corp. has released Symantec FileStore, a new solution enabling organizations to build scalable, high performance file based storage services for their enterprise, including private and public clouds. FileStore has already earned ground breaking results for file serving in Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) tests, far exceeding current benchmarks.

A system using FileStore software yielded record results of 176,728 SPECsfs2008 nfs.v3 operations per second with an overall response time of 1.67ms in the tests. The FileStore results, using currently available software, demonstrated 47 percent greater throughput and 14 percent faster overall response time than the NetApp FAS6080 results posted in August 2009.

Symantec currently deploys FileStore as the file based storage architecture in its own cloud services, with more than 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users, the largest SaaS storage environment in the world. Symantec also uses Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows and Veritas Cluster Server to manage this backup storage. With FileStore, Symantec delivers reliable, high performance online backup services at a fraction of the cost by driving up storage utilisation rates and eliminating planned downtime required to scale performance, capacity or daily administration tasks

The Regional Director for Africa at Symantec, Mr. Gordon Love expressed satisfaction over the industry leading results and the unparalleled price performance advantages of the new software. “The SPECsfs benchmark demonstrates that FileStore software delivers the high performance today’s enterprises need for their cloud storage environments without locking them into an expensive, proprietary hardware infrastructure,” he said.

Mr. Gordon further stated that, FileStore integrates natively with Symantec’s leading security and information management solutions, including Symantec NetBackup and Symantec Endpoint Protection. These services run directly on the FileStore nodes, thereby reducing performance bottlenecks, enhancing security and simplifying operations by eliminating the requirement for additional server and storage resources for backup and security. A single FileStore system scales up to 16 nodes, and 2 PB of total storage. The product is designed to scale from entry-level configurations in affordable increments that match the IT organisation’s need and budget.