Startup BridgeSTOR, carving its own niche by building upon the storage advances of the last few years, on Nov. 16 launched both itself and its first two products-rather plainly called Application Optimized Storage appliances.
The new machines combine the most important current data reduction and storage optimization features-deduplication, compression and thin provisioning-that can be found as standard, or near-standard, in most new storage systems.
The AOS is designed for the SMB market, which BridgeSTOR CEO and co-founder John Matze described as "businesses with enterprise IT problems but without enterprise checkbooks."
BridgeSTOR handles both primary (Tier 1 hot data) and secondary (Tier 2 warm data) storage, dedupes data as it comes into the gateway and has baked-in readiness for virtualized machines-which make it basically a plug-and-play component for cloud systems.
One of the new appliances-as might be ascertained from the name, BridgeSTOR AOS Appliance for Backup Exec 201-is designed specifically to work with Symantec's data protection system, one of the industry's best-selling. It is configured in the box with Symantec's Data Deduplication Suite, the one that dedupes at the gateway.
Matze told eWEEK without hesitation that the appliance can reduce by as much as 90 percent all the data stored for both primary and backup.
"We're going to do for storage what VMware did for servers," Matze said. "In most data centers, you walk around and see that half the servers are often out of commission. And next to those server racks are racks of storage arrays. We can cut that down to half or less.
"I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't like that message."
BridgeSTOR for VMware VDI
BridgeSTOR's second product is the AOS Appliance for VMware Virtualization, which is designed for housing ESX hypervisor data and backing up VMware virtual desktop images.
"VMware automatically copies the same virtual desktop images hundreds of times," Matze said. "Using our dedupe, there's only one copy, so it's a lot more efficient in saving space."
BridgeSTOR appliances are modular, start at 3TB and can scale to a capacity of about 30TB. Pricing starts at around $20,000.
Matze, who founded Siafu Software (which was acquired by Hifn, which was in turn sold to Exar last year), told eWEEK that BridgeSTOR will be working in new ways with channel providers, who have a hard time making profits with cloud computing deployments.
"BridgeSTOR is a 100-percent channel-focused company," Matze said. "We will be selling our appliances to resellers and covering their backs when they sell them to their own customers. We will work with our best resellers to bundle the new storage appliances with other solutions."
The new appliances become widely available at the end of November, Matze said. BridgeSTOR is based in Poway, Calif.
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