ACADEMIA

OnApp has announced OnApp Storage, a new storage platform for service providers and enterprises that, for the first time, offers the performance and resilience of high-end SAN products using off-the-shelf disks and server hardware. OnApp Storage is a distributed block storage platform that enables companies to build high performance, highly resilient SANs using standard SATA and SSD drives in hypervisor servers. It uses patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology to overcome the performance, scalability and price limitations of legacy SAN products, creating a fast, resilient storage platform with simple pay-as-you-grow pricing.

Storage has always been the biggest headache for service providers and enterprises deploying public and private clouds. Until now, they have faced a stark choice between high-end enterprise SANs with very large entry costs, and even larger upgrade and maintenance costs; open source SAN products, which tend to be complex and lack reliable support; and low-end SANs, which sacrifice true scalability, performance and resilience for affordability. OnApp Storage overcomes the limitations of each approach in a single platform.

“OnApp Storage is on the cutting edge of storage virtualization and cloud technology,” said Daniel Hoffman, CTO of SlicedTech, a provider of secure cloud services for government and enterprise clients. “By adding OnApp Storage to our OnApp cloud platform, we can increase the flexibility or our tiered storage offering without impacting our existing service delivery framework. OnApp Storage allows us to offer more robust and tailored storage solutions while, at the same time, saving money on rack space, power and cooling.”

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, said: “Storage is typically the biggest cost for a company deploying a public or private cloud, and it is also the most important component: if your SAN fails, people lose data. Our distributed storage model does away with the bottlenecks and scaling issues of traditional SANs – while keeping data safe – and doesn’t require massive capital outlay on proprietary hardware. We have removed the barriers for cloud providers to achieve fast, reliable and affordable storage, bringing high-performance storage to companies that would never previously have been able to afford it.”

OnApp Storage was announced today at the WHD.global 2012 exhibition in Germany, the world’s largest event for hosting and Internet service providers. OnApp also announced a beta program for the new storage platform, and is now accepting registrations at http://onapp.com/storage.

OnApp Storage is developed in OnApp’s R&D center in Cambridge, UK. The OnApp Storage team includes developers of the original OSS Xen and Citrix XenServer platform storage stack, and is led by Storage & Virtualization Architect Julian Chesterfield. Pricing details will be announced when the generally available version of OnApp Storage is launched in the second half of 2012.

Central to the effectiveness of the OnApp Storage platform is OnApp’s patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology.

It provides a number of benefits:

• All disks in an OnApp Storage installation are self-managing, self-discovering, self-healing and self-contained units. There is no centralized management system for the SAN, so there is no single point of failure at the storage management layer.
• Cloud environments tend to produce massively parallelized and highly duplicated content. OnApp Storage features a highly efficient data de-duplication engine, so that disks need only store one instance of a unique piece of data, resulting in greater scalability and more efficient use of hardware.
• Disks can be removed and added to the platform at will to simplify disaster recovery and content migration. Storage capacity and I/O performance grows proportionally you’re your cloud infrastructure, and scaling your storage capacity is as easy as adding more disks.
• OnApp Storage optimizes I/O for each disk, and enables companies to optimize storage performance to minimize the impact on network bandwidth, or to maximize stripe parallelization potential.
• OnApp Storage has configurable striping and redundancy options for data stored on the platform, so you can create as many redundant copies or stripes as you have disks.