New Storage Vendor Looks For VARs To Extend Reach
Seanodes, which was founded in France in 2002 but in January opened a U.S. headquarters in Boston, is looking for solution providers to work with its Shared Internal Storage solutions and Exanodes software.
Shared Internal Storage is a software-only solution which lets users reclaim unused disk capacity, said Frank Gana, business development director and company founder.
"We are the VMware and the Xen of storage," Gana said. "VMware and Xen let users use processors from a pool of many processors. We do the same for storage."
The Exanodes software can be installed on any server, letting those servers share their internal direct-attached storage into a larger pool of clustered storage, Gana said.
As a result, users can get the benefits of high-performance and reliable clustered storage for less than the cost of iSCSI technology, Gana said.
"For example, if you have 30 servers, the software might cost about $15,000, with a throughput performance of 2 Gbytes per second sustained," he said. "So you get the equivalent of a high-end virtual storage array for the price of a low-cost storage array."
Because of the clustered technology, the data on a failing 1-Tbyte hard drive can be rebuilt in under 40 minutes with Exanodes, compared to about 15 hours for traditional RAID, Gana said.
"If you have 30 servers, you have 30 I/O nodes of storage," he said. "We use RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) for mirrored striping across nodes so that if a disk fails, there is a copy of the data on other nodes. We can sustain up to 16 server failures at one time. That's a lot of failure without interrupting service."
Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland, Ohio-based storage solution provider which has recently signed on with Seanodes, said he is excited about the company's technology.
"The value proposition for our end users is, it gives them the ability to utilize their unused storage space on their direct-attached storage," Knieriemen said. "And everybody has unused space in their direct-attached storage. This really drives efficiency in customers' existing storage. You wanna talk about technologies that add value in a recession? This is one of those technologies."
Because of the way the Seanodes technology treats unused server storage as nodes in a larger storage cluster, performance and availability of that storage is quite good, Knieriemen said. "This is not RAID," he said. "This gives better performance than RAID. Our engineer who tested it said it is a technology that could replace RAID."
Seanodes currently has 10 solution providers signed up in the U.S., and is in the process of recruiting new partners, Gana said, including traditional storage integrators and server integrators. "We are refocusing the storage world on the server world," he said. "So we want both types of partners."