Seanodes’ Revival?

Seanodes is coming back. Born in 2002, the French start-up collapsed, entering in bankruptcy protection in December 2009 after burning €12 million in financial funding. Some assets were acquired by French distributor Deletec, now owning 50% of the firm, Eric Bueno and other private investors. The SAS, with capital of €100,000, is now based in Paris with offices in London and R&D center in Colomiers, near Toulouse, South of France, where was the original HQ.

 Previously at Microsoft and Sun, Eric Bueno, sales director since 2009 and now president and CEO of Seanodes, replacing Jacques Baldinger, told StorageNewsletter that the new company has now 20 employees, with 10 in R&D including 7 from the former team, and 4 in sales and marketing. He will add 3 to 4 sales people as well as one more in USA.

He intends to keep the technology but to change the company’s business approach. Formerly Seanodes was essentially trying to sell its technology to OEMs and had a limited number of end users – around 25 now – generating tiny revenues and being never profitable. For 2010, he speaks about only €60,000 in revenues but projects €1.5 million for 2011 with indirect sales through partners and distributors as well as agents in USA. A new one is Commeo, a French open source and virtualization software VAD handling approximately 400 partners. There is also owner Deletec and Cesges in the country, and Lifeboat Distribution in North America and The Netherlands.

Former Seanodes built a product that was really innovative in 2002 but has now competitors, for example Amplidata. Exanodes software is based on its Shared Internal Storage technology for SMBs and data centers. It virtualizes storage assets to convert unused internal disks and DAS of Linux and VMware servers into a shared storage array, avoiding to invest in expansive NAS or SAN. Price per year is €1,950 for two nodes or physical servers and €80,000 for 128 nodes, with 1TB per node.

The last version just released, Exanodes 4.0, can handle SATA, SAS and SSD drives, and get a new GUI. The next one will have the possibility to extend the total capacity dynamically and is supposed to be released in March. The plan for next June is to add applications – one of the weakness of the products – like asynchronous and synchronous replication using snapshots. There is also a project to build hardware appliances integrating Exanodes in partnership with other companies.

Bueno also said main competitors are currently DataCore, EqualLogic/Dell and HP/LeftHand.