The Coming Wave Of Plug-And-Play Storage

At least three vendors are now selling storage-specific operating systems embedded as firmware on a bootable module. The modules plug into an IDE port on nearly any standard server, turning the server into a NAS or iSCSI appliance.

After the module, known as a "dongle," is plugged into the IDE port, the installer turns the server on to boot the storage operating system, which in turn automatically configures the server as a storage appliance. No other software or storage media is required.

While the technology has been around for several years, the growth in the custom storage market and the entry of two new vendors into the U.S. custom-system channel over the past year are setting the stage for more widespread adoption, system builders say.

System builders that have tested the dongles say they make building storage appliances much easier. "This really opens the floodgate for resellers to build their own powerful storage systems," said James Huang, product marketing specialist for Amax Information Technologies, Fremont, Calif.

The dongles offer several advantages over traditional storage-building technology, said Barron Mertens, CEO of DSG Storage, London, Ontario, which integrates NAS and iSCSI appliances using dongles from Wasabi Systems, Norfolk, Va. Because the dongles are solid-state, there is less concern over failure, which eliminates the need for the extra drives required by some storage software, he said. "FalconStor Software, for instance, needs two hard drives to do the operating systems for redundancy," Mertens said.

But more importantly, the module has plug-and-play capability. "There's no cabling or mounting of hard drives. There's no configurationit just appears as an IDE hard drive," Mertens said. "And most motherboards are set by default to boot from an IDE master device."

Plug-and-play capability also gives users the advantage of prototyping different types of storage devices before putting them into operation, Mertens said.

There are currently three companies developing dongles for building simple plug-and-play storage appliances: Wasabi Systems; Puchheim, Germany-based Open-E; and the ANStor64 division of Cutting Edge, El Cajon, Calif.

Wasabi, a storage veteran in the U.S. market, recently added an iSCSI initiator to its Wasabi Storage Builder series of software. The software is built on the NetBSD kernel and then flash-copied onto a dongle.

The company offers two versions of its software: Wasabi Storage Builder for NAS automatically configures a commodity server as a NAS appliance, while Wasabi Storage Builder for IP-SAN configures the server as an iSCSI array, said Jim Schrand, vice president of marketing at Wasabi.

The IP-SAN version has an iSCSI initiator, so custom-system builders can build either a standard NAS appliance, with its own integrated storage, or a NAS gateway, which connects to other storage arrays over an IP network to serve the files on those arrays to users across a LAN, Schrand said.

Custom-system builders that have used the Wasabi technology say it is a great solution for building entry-level storage appliances. Mertens called it an elegant solution because of its efficient use of the NetBSD platform. "We like what they are doing," he said. "Wasabi has about half of the NetBSD kernel development team, so they can modify the kernel without having to share the modifications."

However, because of the NetBSD-based code, the Wasabi software is more limited in terms of hardware support than similar offerings from Open-E, which bases its software on Linux, Mertens said. He also said the efficiency of the NetBSD code is lost when the appliances are used with higher-performance applications.

The NAS and the IP-SAN versions of the Wasabi software are both available in entry-level, SMB and enterprise versions to system builders via Bell Microproducts, with complete Wasabi-based storage devices available from Xtore, City of Industry, Calif. End-user list prices start at about $495.