Symantec has announced Symantec FileStore N8300, a scale-out, clustered network attached storage (NAS) appliance designed to help customers address the business challenges associated with building out cloud storage, managing large volumes of data and controlling the associated storage costs. FileStore N8300 enables customers to manage unstructured data growth with a scalable, high performance and easy to manage solution for their file storage and archiving needs in on-premise and cloud environments.

Managing Data Growth
Business critical unstructured data is growing at an alarming rate and today accounts for 85 percent of all organizational information.1 To enable IT professionals in addressing the challenges associated with storing, managing and accessing this data, Symantec is introducing the FileStore N8300 appliance. Symantec FileStore N8300 is a scalable, clustered NAS appliance that is built upon the market leading clustered file system in Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation. FileStore N8300 natively integrates with other Symantec solutions including Enterprise Vault, NetBackup, Storage Foundation's SmartTier and AntiVirus security to provide a holistic solution for storing and managing unstructured data.

Symantec FileStore N8300 meets the demands of digital content growth by scaling linearly from 2 to 16 nodes, and with up to 1.4PB of storage within a single cluster. FileStore N8300 server and storage nodes can be scaled independently based on user requirements for availability, performance or data growth. FileStore N8300's native integration with NetBackup removes the requirement for long NDMP backup windows, while embedded AntiVirus eliminates the burden of file scanning over the network.

Building Cloud Storage
Organizations of any size wanting to implement cloud storage for the benefits of availability and the ability to manage large volumes of data can reduce their storage costs with Symantec FileStore N8300. FileStore N8300 is built on commodity hardware, scales capacity non-disruptively, and is one of the top performing NAS systems based on the SPECsfs benchmark -- offering organizations an ideal solution for building out cloud storage. FileStore N8300 offers a superior price performance solution for organizations to build scalable file-based storage services for their enterprise, including private and public clouds.

Data Archiving With Enterprise Vault
FileStore integrates with Symantec Enterprise Vault, the leader in data archiving, to provide a scalable and integrated data archiving solution for retention and compliance of unstructured data. The integrated solution reduces costs, simplifies product support and eases the product implementation process. With support for both WORM and non-WORM data, the solution allows retention policies to be set at a per-file level. FileStore N8300 is the only Enterprise Vault NAS target to enable Partition Secure Notification -- a new tool that enables Enterprise Vault to delete safety copies from primary storage upon notification that the archived data has been successfully backed up -- increasing data protection for the archive and reducing storage costs.

Pricing and Availability
Symantec FileStore N8300 is available now in the United States, U.K., Italy and the UAE and will be rolled out in phases to other regions. Estimated pricing for the FileStore N8300 appliance begins at $72,648 USD.