Taurus Group launches ClusTaur company to provide customised software-defined storage solutions

Hoofddorp, September 14, 2018 – the Taurus Group, specialist in volume IT distribution, announced today the launch of ClusTaur, a new software-defined storage (SDS) solution provider. ClusTaur provides customised storage clusters that are hardware agnostic, cost-effective, highly scalable and semi-automated. The SDS solutions are optimised for cloud and internet service providers, manufacturing and media companies.

ClusTaur has entered strategic alliances with A-brand partners, including Intel, Super Micro, Western Digital, Micron, Excelero and Mellanox, integrating their products into tailored storage platforms. The compute and storage nodes of the SDS clusters are based on commodity x86 compatible hardware components. To manage and provision the storage, ClusTaur adds a scale-out, semi-automatic software layer. Advanced features such as self-healing and auto-tiering capabilities significantly reduce system administrator workloads.

ClusTaur has a number of SDS solutions available for major industry verticals such as data-centres and big data, manufacturing, financial services and health care. One such system is designed as a scratch disk for post-production in a broadcasting environment. By combining Excelero’s NVMesh platform with leading technologies from Intel and Mellanox, ClusTaur achieves latencies between 14-100 microseconds. This low range is made possible by NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) technology, which allows distributed NVMe storage to be accessed across a network at local speed, throughput and latency. Remote Direct Drive Access (RDDA) functionality allows the CPU to be bypassed, resulting in minimum processor overhead. Advanced networking technology such as RoCE v2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and 100 Gbit/s InfiniBand from Mellanox provide for ample bandwidth.

Generally the SDS clusters consist of brand new HDD, hybrid or all-flash arrays provided by ClusTaur, but existing customer infrastructure components can be reused as well to minimise costs. As the clusters are hardware agnostic, there is no vendor lock-in and hardware from various suppliers may be utilised. The scale-out clusters of ClusTaur make storage growth easily manageable and keep all customer data within one single namespace. Because of the elasticity of this scaling solution ClusTaur can provide storage for a large project fast and efficiently.

ClusTaur tailors SDS platforms according to the customer’s requirements. “The storage market is diverse and data is an asset that requires agile, scalable and open storage solutions at the lowest price point possible,” says  “This is why we work with prominent partners, such as Excelero and Intel. These alliances enable us to deliver enterprise-grade solutions, tailored to the use-case with a pay-as-you-grow model. This makes our storage clusters more user-friendly and cost-effective than traditional SDS products.”

As part of the launch, ClusTaur will attend the IBC 2018 trade show in Amsterdam from September 14 to 18. The company will join leading technology provider Intel at stand 5.65, showcasing a live post-processing demo of 8K raw 10-bit footage throughout the event.