A unique company with years of military IT contracts and relatively unknown commercial storage products will announce a new application for storage-area management next week.
Syred Inc. will announce CloudStor, which gives users in-band virtualization results using a partial out-of-band method, and which converts the data gradually without having downtime, said founder and CEO Simon Fridmann.
“While your existing processes run, youre creating a mirror,” he said. The product also has features for security, clustering and SAN-free backup.
“We really have the protocol layer sitting on the fabric. Were almost as fast as the switch,” he said, referring to the products 500 MB/sec of throughput. Its been tested at 50 beta sites, and will be shown more thoroughly at Gartner Inc.s PlanetStorage 2002 event in Las Vegas next week, he said.
Available now, CloudStor runs as embedded firmware and costs $150,000 to $250,000 for an average 25-node configuration, Fridmann said.
One customer is Jorge Scientific Corp., an Arlington, Va., military contractor for technologies like Geographic Positions Systems (GPS) and various weapons systems. Joe Hartranft, director of information systems, chose Syred for Jorge Scientifics needs on an upcoming $200 million homeland security project, which he expects to generate hundreds of terabytes of data to manage.
“I like the level of service,” compared to a bigger vendors like BMC Software Inc., Computer Associates International Inc. or Veritas Software Corp., Hartranft said. Syreds met Jorge Scientifics network-attached storage needs in the past, and that alleviated concerns about the small firms commercial viability, he said.