Exanodes Software Enables “Inside-Out” SANs to Redefine the Metrics and Economics of Shared Network Storage: Seanodes introduced a new and revolutionary storage product that enables organizations to make under-utilized internal application server storage available for the first time as a high performance virtualized storage pool. With an architecture designed for high performance computing and enterprise environments, Seanodes’ new software architecture gives IT managers the ability to easily avoid the overwhelming cost and complexities of conventional SAN and NAS network storage architectures. Seanodes’ new Exanodes software transforms the storage components inside commodity application servers into high-end virtualized storage pools, enabling businesses to quickly identify and take advantage of under-utilized internal storage capacity. Implementing Exanodes dramatically reduces management costs, minimizes the need for additional external network storage arrays, saving data center floor space and reducing power consumption, opening a whole new category in the Storage space: Shared Internal Storage. “The success of VMware Xen, and Microsoft’s Virtual Server has been built by answering a very simple question: why would I buy a large number of new servers when I already own so much unused processing power in my infrastructure?” said Frank Gana, Director of Business Development at Seanodes. “Exanodes is the exact symmetric: when VMware aggregates, organizes and consolidates CPUs in application servers, Exanodes aggregates, organizes and consolidates storage devices in application servers. With Seanodes’ Shared Internal Storage, server virtualization is pushed one step ahead to provide full storage infrastructure virtualization and full storage infrastructure consolidation. ”The new Exanodes’ software leverages the Shared Internal Storage architecture reclaiming storage resources to provide capacity and performance scalability. Shared Internal Storage takes advantage of what IDC calls an “inside-out SAN.” Exanodes Shared Internal Storage architecture creates a self-healing, self-organizing, highly-resilient storage infrastructure. Each node can function as both an application and storage server, eliminating the need and expense of dedicated storage servers, thereby enabling the full infrastructure consolidation. Exanodes will work with any block storage devices, hard disk drives, SSD, RAID and external DAS and is the only any-to-any connect shared internal storage software on the market today. The Shared Internal Storage-enabled Exanodes’ software is poised to transform network storage with new standards for affordability, simplicity, reliability and performance at levels that are unprecedented in the commoditized server marketplace. Exanodes takes maximum advantage of the parallelism of the infrastructure by allowing a sustained read or write performance of several gigabytes per second at a fraction of the cost of a traditional high-end NAS storage device giving an ultra-high performance without the addition of any dedicated storage hardware. The extreme scalability of the Exanodes platform dramatically simplifies enterprise storage management by enabling massive numbers of internal disks to be managed as a single shared storage pool. Exanodes supports ultra-fast RAID rebuilds by intelligently distributing the RAID set across multiple network nodes so that 1TB of data can be rebuilt in under an hour, minimizing the risks of a second disk failure during the rebuild window. A similar rebuild with conventional disk arrays can take days. Shared Internal Storage is a true paradigm shift in network storage technology,” said Jacques Baldinger, Seanodes CEO. “Exanodes shatters the SAN/NAS platform with the affordable, highly-scalable, high-performance Shared Internal Storage platform that radically alters the economics and metrics of shared storage. If you have an unlimited budget, IT resources, floor space and no problem with power consumption or concerns with the environment, Exanodes is not for you.” "The concept and benefits of an inside-out SAN are pretty obvious once you see them,” said Laura Dubois, Program Director, Storage Software at IDC. “All the aggregate formatted capacity is available to all the application computers. No stranded capacity exists and there is no single point of failure, since mirroring across computer systems would be employed. The inside-out SAN architecture helps to validate the converged IT infrastructure model for reduced complexity and lower TCO.”