OnApp Launching Pay-as-you-Grow SAN for Service Providers and Enterprises

Headquarterd in London, UK, OnApp Limited announced OnApp Storage, a storage platform for service providers and enterprises that offers the performance and resilience of high-end SAN products using off-the-shelf disks and server hardware.

It’s a distributed block storage platform that enables companies to build performance, resilient SANs using standard SATA and SSD drives in hypervisor servers. It uses patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology to overcome the performance, scalability and price limitations of legacy SAN products, creating a fast, resilient storage platform with pay-as-you-grow pricing.
 
Storage has always been the biggest headache for service providers and enterprises deploying public and private clouds. Until now, they have faced a stark choice between high-end enterprise SANs with large entry costs, and even larger upgrade and maintenance costs; open source SAN products, which tend to be complex and lack reliable support; and low-end SANs, which sacrifice true scalability, performance and resilience for affordability. OnApp Storage overcomes the limitations of each approach in a single platform.
 
"OnApp Storage is on the cutting edge of storage virtualization and cloud technology," said Daniel Hoffman, CTO of SlicedTech, a provider of secure cloud services for government and enterprise clients. "By adding OnApp Storage to our OnApp cloud platform, we can increase the flexibility or our tiered storage offering without impacting our existing service delivery framework. OnApp Storage allows us to offer more robust and tailored storage solutions while, at the same time, saving money on rack space, power and cooling."
 
Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, said: "Storage is typically the biggest cost for a company deploying a public or private cloud, and it is also the most important component: if your SAN fails, people lose data. Our distributed storage model does away with the bottlenecks and scaling issues of traditional SANs – while keeping data safe – and doesn’t require massive capital outlay on proprietary hardware. We have removed the barriers for cloud providers to achieve fast, reliable and affordable storage, bringing high-performance storage to companies that would never previously have been able to afford it."
 
OnApp Storage was announced at the WHD.global 2012 exhibition in Germany, a large event for hosting and Internet service providers. OnApp also announced a beta program for the new storage platform.

OnApp Storage is developed in the company’s R&D center in Cambridge, UK. The team includes developers of the original OSS Xen and Citrix XenServer platform storage stack, and is led by Storage and Virtualization Architect Julian Chesterfield.

Pricing details will be announced when the available version is launched in the second half of 2012.

OnApp’s patent-pending, ‘smart disk’ technology

• All disks in an OnApp Storage installation are self-managing, self-discovering, self-healing and self-contained units. There is no centralized management system for the SAN, so there is no single point of failure at the storage management layer.
• Cloud environments tend to produce massively parallelized and highly duplicated content. OnApp Storage features a data de-duplication engine, so that disks need only store one instance of a unique piece of
  data, resulting in greater scalability and efficient use of hardware.
• Disks can be removed and added to the platform to simplify disaster recovery and content migration. Storage capacity and I/O performance grows proportionally you’re your cloud infrastructure, and scaling your storage capacity is as easy as adding more disks.
• OnApp Storage optimizes I/O for each disk, and enables companies to optimize storage performance to minimize the impact on network bandwidth, or to maximize stripe parallelization potential.
• It has configurable striping and redundancy options for data stored on the platform, so you can create as many redundant copies or stripes as you have disks.

About OnApp
OnApp software powers cloud, CDN and storage services. Its products include OnApp Cloud, a cloud management platform for service providers and enterprises; OnApp CDN, a federated CDN platform for service providers; and OnApp Storage, a distributed SAN for cloud environments. The firm launched in July 2010, has more than 100 staff across the EU, US and Asia-Pacific.