Seanodes: Small Company Willing to Stand Up Against All Data Storage Conventions - Virtualization Is the Answer (
Page 2 of 2 )
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."
As it has been estimated that a human uses only a small part (perhaps
10 percent) of his or her memory capacity, Seanodes estimates 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, organizes and
consolidates CPUs in application servers, Exanodes aggregates,
organizes 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 center 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.
Data Storage News & Reviews 
