Gridstore announces industry's first NAS grid Storage solution 14 December, 2009 By Mark Cox

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"Scalable NAS solutions today are reliable but are proprietary, expensive and require specialized experts to manage," said Kelly Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Gridstore. "Lower end stand-alone NAS devices are affordable and offer simplicity and convenience, but they lead to storage sprawl because the inability to do forklift upgrades keeps customers adding more NAS, which creates higher risk, and more potential points of failure."

The Gridstore NASg addresses storage sprawl by aggregating the processing power of client systems and performing complex parallel storage processes on existing NAS resources. Its' foundation is the Gridstore NASg Storage Block, an Intel/Microsoft-based storage node that features embedded Windows XP, an Intel Atom core, 1GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of SATA hard disk drives.

"This is like anything on the market today because it offers a great ability to scale," Murphy said. "It aggregates processing power, and allows us to apply massive amounts of processing power in a single pool of storage. As your grid grows, you can expand your capacity with more Blocks, which gives an unlimited amount of capacity and network bandwidth. " NASg eliminates server network bottlenecks by optimizing the bandwidth of each storage node, so that every storage node adds 1 Gb/s of parallel network bandwidth. As the number of storage nodes increases, each storage node performs less work and the parallel data path to the Gridstore NASg increases.

"You can also add unlimited amount of redundancy, so it's a very fault-tolerant system," Murphy said. By leveraging the processing power of the client machines across many storage nodes, there is no single point of failure. Any pre-configured number of storage nodes can fail without data loss or downtime.

"Aggregating the processing power and then using everything in parallel processes allows distribution of the workload over low-cost devices," Murphy said. "That's where we get the economics from."

And the economics are impressive.

"It costs about a third of the price of entry level NAS, but has enterprise capacity," Murphy said. The cost is $USD 300-400 per 1 or 2 TB node, plus $USD 800 for the platform.

Murphy said the Gridstore solution combines the company's use of new technology with its' willingness to bring such a disruptive technology to market.

"It's disruptive to most storage companies, so it's not something they would want to do. And the technology with fast enough processes has just become available."

Managed Service Providers will be the main channel to take the product to market initially.

"MSPs have a major pain point in managing hundreds of single points of failure," Murphy said. "Every time a disk goes in a NAS box, the trucks have to roll. If the MSPs don't have to go on site they make more money, and customer is happier. It has been generally impossible for MSPs to break free of server sprawl unless they can convince the customer to move to enterprise class storage."

The Gridstore product solves these problems for MSPs in a painless manner, Murphy said.

"Our management console fits into the Windows management framework, so it integrates into what they are already using, and doesn't require replacing anything. They can leverage the existing infrastructure. They can use servers in parallel, so the one with newest data isn't doing 95% of the work. If a server fails, it can reallocate, with no down time, and the customer wouldn't even know a failure had occurred. The MSP doesn't have to go on site, so there is massive cost savings from not sending someone out once or twice a week on a half day exercise. And they give the customer a more reliable structure they can build on, and which saves the customer money."

Murphy said that they plan to eventually supplement the MSP channel by moving into the ROBO (Remote office/ Branch office) market and add to the platform's functionality.

"We will use the cloud to offer additional components that will let them do services like replication. Everybody will be a winner out of this."