Symantec Corp. today upgraded its FileStore N8300 clustered network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, adding deduplication for primary storage, metro-clustering and cascading replication, and cloning of VMware images.

FileStore N8300  5.7 now can be used as a storage target in virtual machine environments, where a file-level cloning feature is used to create a golden image and users can clone that image into thousands of VMDK files, said Yogesh Agrawal, Symantec’s vice president and general manager for the FileStore Product Group. Symantec also leveraged code from Veritas Cluster File System  to create a deduplication module in the FileStore appliance to reduce redundancies in the VMDK files.

The NAS device also now supports metro-clustering replication for disaster recovery that automates the process of bringing up the disaster recovery site when the primary site goes down. Previously, the disaster recovery site had to be made live manually.  Metro-clustering is based on synchronous volume mirroring and the cluster limitation is 100 kilometers. Cascading replication now allows replication to be done from a secondary to a tertiary site. “In that scenario, we can do synchronous replication,” Agrawal said.

FileStore starts with about 10 TB of capacity and can scale to 1.4 PB. A common customer configuration is a two-node, 24 TB system that has a list price of $69,796.