Tech Alert: IT Increasingly Turns to Storage Virtual Appliance to Control Costs During...

Tech Alert: IT Increasingly Turns to Storage Virtual Appliance to Control
Costs During Economic Downturn

BOSTON, May 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Considering the economic hardships today and
the necessity to invest in expensive networked storage to get the full
benefits of server virtualization, advancements in virtual appliances have hit
the market at an ideal time. Storage Virtual Appliances leverage the storage
resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a
powerful virtual SAN in minutes.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090130/SEANODESLOGO)

Exanodes clustered Storage Virtual Appliances aggregate the unused capacity of
ESX servers, and efficiently use the parallelism of the infrastructure to
provide high performance, high availability and data protection features
within a VMware infrastructure. Users enjoy the full benefits of server
virtualization - such as data integrity and continuity of service - without
complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.

Affordable midrange networked storage solutions offer low performance and
little data protection in case of failure. With consolidation, those two
pitfalls are especially problematic because many VMs sharing that storage can
be hosted on each physical server. This further slows performance of each
virtual machine, and impacts multiple applications in the event of a storage
system failure. Obviously Higher-end systems deliver the high performance and
reliability that matches the requirements of ESX environments, but few users
can cost-justify two to four times the investment made in VMware to get
advanced storage features such as multipathing, hardware redundancy for data
protection and high availability from their storage vendor.

"The paradox in the 'virtual world' is that businesses invest in VMware
Infrastructure to reduce costs and simplify their environment, but then find
they need high-end network storage, which eliminates a large part of these
benefits," said Frank Gana, Business Development Director and Founder at
Seanodes. "Although the model is sound, Storage Virtual Appliances are not
immune from some of the same pitfalls, so we caution users not to trade a
headache for a stomachache just because their budget is small."

As a clustered Storage Virtual Appliance, Exanodes VM Edition from Seanodes
provides some unique advantages among the emerging approaches. Monoserver
Storage Virtual Appliances serve data to a large number of VMs using only a
single Gigabit Ethernet link, one controller and a few disks, so they
experience bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. With its symmetric
design where each ESX server participates in storage tasks, Exanodes gives VMs
a large number of access points to the storage, I/O controllers and disks to
ensure that every VM will get the performance it needs. Exanodes was also
developed with scalability in mind, another compelling economic advantage over
competitive products.

"Exanodes VM edition pushes the right pedals for companies by presenting an
easier way to manage IT, contain costs, and gain functionality," said Colin
Reid, Commercial Manager with Topsec Distribution. "Virtualization and
Seanode's Shared Internal Storage are considerably simpler, lower cost, and
higher performing than even the most stripped-down SANs being marketed today."

About Seanodes
The inventors of Shared Internal Storage (SIS), Paris-headquartered Seanodes
is changing network storage technology. Seanodes' SIS platform Exanodes(TM)
runs as a Storage Virtual Appliance and radically alters the economics and
possibilities in data storage and server virtualization. Seanodes, a Gartner
'Cool Vendor,' has earned multiple awards from industry analysts and media for
its outstanding technology that virtualizes storage assets to convert unused
internal disks and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) into a shared storage array.
Founded in 2002, Seanodes is headed by storage industry veterans from two
continents and backed by a number of private equity firms. More information
can be found at www.seanodes.com or by calling 866-580-5515.

CONTACT AGENCY: CONTACT CLIENT:
Dan Miller Frank Gana
JPR Communications Business Development Director
818-884-8282 +33 141 22 1380
danm@jprcom.com gana@seanodes.com

SOURCE Seanodes

AGENCY, Dan Miller of JPR Communications, +1-818-884-8282, danm@jprcom.com,
for Seanodes; or CLIENT, Frank Gana, Business Development Director of
Seanodes, +33 141 22 1380, gana@seanodes.com