sTec Announces Worldwide Availability of s3000 Solid-State Storage Appliance

New Highly Scalable s3000 Brings sTec SSD Performance, Reliability, Endurance to NexentaStor, Windows Environments

SINGAPORE, June 18, 2013 -- sTec, Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC), a leading global provider of solid-state storage solutions, today announced worldwide availability of its recently introduced sTec(R) s3000 storage appliance. The s3000 combines the performance, reliability and endurance of sTec's industry-leading solid-state drive (SSD) technology with the two foremost enterprise-storage operating systems -- NexentaStor from Nexenta Systems, and Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 -- to provide storage clustering, virtualization and management features within a unified, cost-effective hardware configuration.

With up to 96 terabytes (TB) of solid-state storage per appliance, the s3000 is a significant addition to sTec's solid-state storage product portfolio of enterprise SSD drives and caching software that are among the top performing in the industry. Furthermore, the s3000 demonstrates sTec's commitment to providing an expansive range of tailored solid-state storage solutions, directly to the enterprise or through the company's growing global partner program.

"As a provider of world-class SSD solutions, we discovered a significant opportunity in the Asia Pacific markets for an sTec-developed appliance that blends the power and performance of sTec SSDs with the capabilities and widespread deployment of software-defined storage operating systems," said Michael Burnie, senior vice president of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan, sTec.

"A driving factor in this fastest-growing storage market in the world is the proliferation of and reliance on mobile devices. There is a pressing need for storage systems to tackle the deluge of user-generated content on mobile platforms. At sTec, we understand the needs of our customers addressing such storage challenges and the s3000 provides best-in-class technology that delivers a unique, easy-to-use storage solution tailored to tackle the high-performance needs of customers' IO-intensive applications."

"The s3000 reflects a dramatic shift in enterprise systems in that its cost-effectiveness, scalability and expandability to several hundreds of terabytes flash storage are paramount requirements of today's IT managers," said Evan Powell, chief strategy officer, Nexenta Systems.

"Further, its ability to fit seamlessly into NexentaStor environments means the s3000 can be deployed quickly and take full advantage of the storage and data management features of our software."

As with all sTec solid-state storage solutions, the s3000 is architected for enterprise-class storage, enabling it to address the critical-data requirements of industries such as oil and gas, government, telecommunications, and cloud computing. With a large in-house team of storage, application and data center experts, sTec is able to work directly with customers to develop ideal approaches for tailoring their data centers to optimally incorporate the s3000 along with its other SSD solutions.

With performance as high as 1.2 million IOs per second (IOPS) and featuring sTec Serial Attached Storage (SAS) SSDs with up to twice the endurance of competing drives, the s3000 harnesses the power of sTec SSD technology to reduce application execution time and increase real-time access to high-demand, shared assets. By building the s3000 around NexentaStor and Windows Storage Server 2012, sTec is bringing to market a high-performance storage appliance that can be integrated with existing storage systems, enhance traditional file-serving capabilities, and extend hypervisors such as Hyper-V and file-based storage for application workloads such as, SQL Server and SharePoint.

The s3000 is particularly applicable in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments and those requiring performance-intensive I/O deployments to achieve higher virtualization consolidation factors.

The s3000 provides continuous availability and full redundancy through NexentaStor and Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces environments, and enables hot-swapping of drives and power supplies. It offers flexible, unified storage and data reduction through de-duplication and thin provisioning. Additionally, the s3000 is highly scalable; it can be configured with one or two 19-inch rack-mountable drive shelves, each accommodating as many as 24 SSDs, and can scale up to eight full interconnected appliances for a total of 768 TB of solid-state storage.