BOSTON, 19th May, 2009 – Considering the economic hardships today and the necessity to invest in expensive networked storage to get the full benefits of server virtualization, advancements in virtual appliances have hit the market at an ideal time. Storage Virtual Appliances leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes.
Exanodes clustered Storage Virtual Appliances aggregate the unused capacity of ESX servers, and efficiently use the parallelism of the infrastructure to provide high performance, high availability and data protection features within a VMware infrastructure. Users enjoy the full benefits of server virtualization – such as data integrity and continuity of service – without complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.
Affordable midrange networked storage solutions offer low performance and little data protection in case of failure. With consolidation, those two pitfalls are especially problematic because many VMs sharing that storage can be hosted on each physical server. This further slows performance of each virtual machine, and impacts multiple applications in the event of a storage system failure. Obviously Higher-end systems deliver the high performance and reliability that matches the requirements of ESX environments, but few users can cost-justify two to four times the investment made in VMware to get advanced storage features such as multipathing, hardware redundancy for data protection and high availability from their storage vendor.
“The paradox in the ‘virtual world’ is that businesses invest in VMware Infrastructure to reduce costs and simplify their environment, but then find they need high-end network storage, which eliminates a large part of these benefits,” said Frank Gana, Business Development Director and Founder at Seanodes. “Although the model is sound, Storage Virtual Appliances are not immune from some of the same pitfalls, so we caution users not to trade a headache for a stomachache just because their budget is small.”
As a clustered Storage Virtual Appliance, Exanodes VM Edition from Seanodes provides some unique advantages among the emerging approaches. Monoserver Storage Virtual Appliances serve data to a large number of VMs using only a single Gigabit Ethernet link, one controller and a few disks, so they experience bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. With its symmetric design where each ESX server participates in storage tasks, Exanodes gives VMs a large number of access points to the storage, I/O controllers and disks to ensure that every VM will get the performance it needs. Exanodes was also developed with scalability in mind, another compelling economic advantage over competitive products.
“Exanodes VM edition pushes the right pedals for companies by presenting an easier way to manage IT, contain costs, and gain functionality,” said Colin Reid, Commercial Manager with Topsec Distribution. “Virtualization and Seanode’s Shared Internal Storage are considerably simpler, lower cost, and higher performing than even the most stripped-down SANs being marketed today.”
About Seanodes
The inventors of Shared Internal Storage (SIS), Paris-headquartered Seanodes is changing network storage technology. Seanodes’ SIS platform Exanodes™ runs as a Storage Virtual Appliance and radically alters the economics and possibilities in data storage and server virtualization. Seanodes, a Gartner ‘Cool Vendor,’ has earned multiple awards from industry analysts and media for its outstanding technology that virtualizes storage assets to convert unused internal disks and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) into a shared storage array. Founded in 2002, Seanodes is headed by storage industry veterans from two continents and backed by a number of private equity firms. More information can be found at www.seanodes.com or by calling 866-580-5515.
