Starboard brings new investor and $13 million on board

A $13 million funding round will help accelerate the transition from Reldata to Starboard Storage Systems.

Starboard closed the round today, three months after re-launching with a new name and re-architected multiprotocol storage system, the AC72. Its lone venture capitalist investor at the time was Reldata investor Grazia Equity of Germany. Starboard’s latest round is led by another German VC, JP Ventures GmbH, with participation from Grazia.

Starboard chief marketing officer Karl Chen said Starboard will use the funding to expand its sales, marketing and customer support. Chen said Starboard has about 40 employees now at its Broomfield, Colo., and Parsippany, N.J., offices and he expects that number to increase significantly over the next three months.

Starboard claims more than 40 customers and more than 1.5 PB of capacity sold for its AC72 systems. Chen said the vendor competes mostly with NetApp FAS2000 and FAS3000 and EMC VNX 5000 unified storage systems.

The AC72 supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NAS storage but merely having multiprotocol support isn’t enough these days because the market is flooded with unified storage systems. Starboard will only win if it can live up to its promise to deliver greater storage efficiency and performance at substantially less cost.

Each AC72 system includes three solid-state drives (SSDs) for an acceleration tier. The system automatically writes large sequential workloads to cheaper capacity SAS drives and writes random transactional workloads to 15,000 rpm SAS drives.

Chen said the Starboard’s typical customer is a small enterprise with 50 to 5,000 employees, $10 million to $1 billion in revenue and 50 to 500 virtual machines. “Our customers want to consolidate mixed workloads of unstructured, structured and virtualized data,” he said.

What’s next for unified storage?

Oracle gives Sun 7000 storage a Fibre Channel option

Oracle upgraded its flagship disk storage platform this week, adding Fibre Channel host connectivity to the Sun Storage 7000 multiprotocol series while doubling down on its SAS disk interface support.

Sun originally launched the 7000 as a ZFS-based Ethernet platform, mainly focused on handling file data with iSCSI thrown in for block storage. That was in late 2008, more than a year before Oracle closed its acquisition of Sun. But Oracle’s senior director of storage products Jason Schaffer says customers wanted Fibre Channel to make the 7000 better suited for primary storage.

“When we first launched the 7000, we had a strong lineup of Fibre Channel with our 6000 series and the gap in our portfolio was NAS,” he said. “Early adopters used [the 7000] mainly for disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. Over time people started to trust it in other environments, like for virtual servers, and it was being brought in more as primary storage for consolidated workloads.”

Schaffer said current customers can download software for Fibre Channel support. He says about 15% of 7000 customers already downloaded software to use it for Fibre Channel over the past few months, even before Oracle officially announced FC support.

The 7000 also features built-in data deduplication, which Sun added to ZFS late last year. Another big part of the 7000 upgrade is support for 2 TB SAS drives, doubling the total capacity of the system to 576 TB. Schaffer says he sees no need for FC drives because the 7000 supports 6 Gbps SAS, solid state drives (SSDs) and SATA – especially with ZFS’ ability to use SSDs as high-speed disk cache.

“DRAM flash and SAS drives are more cost efficient than 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel drives,” he said.

The 7000 also takes advantage of data deduplication built into ZFS.

Oracle severed its OEM deal with Hitachi Data Systems to sell the Sun StorageTek 9000 enterprise SAN systems earlier this year, choosing to concentrate on the 7000 platform. But Schaffer said Oracle also remains committed to the Sun StorageTek 6000 series of Fibre Channel arrays, which consist of LSI Corp. controllers and Sun management software. “We’re still supporting and growing the 6000 platform,” he said, “although the bulk of our engineering will be on the 7000 series going forward.”

Windows Storage Server ‘08 shows up

Remember Windows Storage Server 2008, the OEM product from Microsoft built on its Widows Server 2008 file serving capabilities? Microsoft talked about it a bit last year before going quiet – the official Microsoft Windows Storage Server blog was last updated in June.

But Microsoft sent word today that WSS08 was released to OEM partners, which means you should be seeing products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others based on it over the next few months.

Microsoft has taken what was essentially a NAS platform — Windows Storage Server 2003 – and given it block storage capabilities with an iSCSI software target. WSS08 will also include single instance storage to store duplicate files only once. Microsoft will host a webcast introducing WSS08’s new features on Thursday.