Heretical Seanodes Shares Storage With No External Hardware

Virtualization is the answer

Baldinger smiles at that kind of talk. The Seanodes CEO is a straight shooter who is totally convinced that his way works – and will scale. In his 30-year career, he worked at Sun Microsystems (11 years) and at NetApp (four years) before venturing into his own territory with this new company four years ago. So he knows a fair bit about data storage, its inefficiencies, and how to retool existing systems to be substantially more efficient.

“The storage systems out there right now are just wasting space and power,” Baldinger said. “They are way over-provisioned, in general, and you either don’t need all that capacity or you’d better put it to good use.”

There’s a pseudo-science cliche which says a human uses only a small part (perhaps 10 percent) of his or her memory capacity. It’s more verifiable that about the same amount of storage capacity is actually used in virtually all enterprise systems.

“We are doing for storage what VMware has done for applications,” Baldinger said.

“Exanodes is the exact symmetric: When VMware aggregates, organises and consolidates CPUs in application servers, Exanodes aggregates, organises and consolidates storage devices in application servers,” Baldinger said.

Although it is constantly in a development mode, Seanodes does have a number of customers using the original two-year-old Exanodes in their daily production.

Biggest challenge: Finding atypical thinkers

The biggest difficulty Baldinger and Seanodes have is to convince enterprise data centre managers to consider coming out of their comfort zones to try something bold and different that could start a revolution in data storage and save substantial amounts of money while still getting the job done well.

The latest development in the Seanodes package is that the product now has a business continuity feature. Whenever a disk anywhere in the system goes down or is replaced, whatever may be running on the system is not affected.

In one demonstration, Seanodes staff members showed a video stream running on the system. While it ran in one window on the screen, a staff member physically moved the node running the stream to a totally new location. No disruption in the streaming.

“For sales presentations, we often make it a point to physically pull the plug on a server while an operation [like a video stream] is running,” Baldinger said. “They [potential customers] always shout, ‘No, don’t do that!’ But the software uses the entire system as its domain, and if one or more disks go down, it’s no big deal – the job gets transferred automatically, and there is no disruption.”

Seanodes is soon to get some worldwide attention – and attendant credibility – for a new partnership with a top-tier software vendor whose name cannot be mentioned now. The announcement will come in a few weeks. “This will open a lot of people’s eyes,” Baldinger said.

For more information on Seanodes, go here.