Is Starboard Storage a startup or Reldata 2.0?

Starboard Storage Systems launched today, portraying itself as a brand new startup with a new technology and architecture for unified storage. But Starboard is in many ways a re-launch of Reldata, which had been selling multiprotocol storage for years.

Starboard didn’t volunteer information about its Reldata roots, although representatives freely admitted it when asked. With its new AC72 storage system, Starboard wants to appear as a fresh, shiny company rather than one that has been around the block many times without making much of an impact on the storage world.

“It’s not a rebranding of Reldata but Starboard is not your typical startup,” said Starboard chief marketing officer Karl Chen, who joined the company after it became Starboard. “[Reldata] had great technology, so why not absorb Reldata and reduce our time to market? This way, we were able to get to market a lot faster by leveraging what Reldata had. We had the option of starting brand new or taking something that would accelerate our time to market.”

Starboard has the same CEO, CTO, engineering VP and sales chief as Reldata, and has not yet raised any new funding. Starboard’s 30 employees are a mix of Reldata holdovers and new hires. The AC72 includes Reldata intellectual property and was developed in part by Reldata engineers.

“Absolutely, there is technology that we are leveraging from Reldata to build the Starboard Storage product,” Chen said. But he points out that the Starboard product is a new architecture with a different code base. The RelData 9240i did not support Fibre Channel, it was a single controller system, and used traditional RAID blocks. There was no dynamic pooling or SSD tier. “It’s a completely different product from what (Reldata) was selling,” Chen added.

The company also moved from Parsippany, NJ to Broomfield, Colo., which has a deep workforce with storage experience. Starboard CEO Victor Walker, CTO (and Reldata founder) Kirill Malkin, VP of engineering John Potochnik and director of sales Russell Wine were all part of Reldata. They are joined by chairman Bill Chambers, the LeftHand Networks founder and CEO who sold the iSCSI SAN company to HP for $360 million in 2008.

Starboard will continue to service Reldata 9240i systems, but will not longer sell the Reldata line.

(Sonia R. Lelii contributed to this blog).

What’s next for unified storage?

Oracle upgrades ZFS Storage Appliances

Oracle’s big storage product launch at Oracle OpenWorld today wasn’t much of a surprise. It rolled out the next generation of its ZFS Storage Appliance line, bumping up the speeds and feeds and adding tight integration with Oracle software. That’s what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the vendor would do back in January, shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Ellison also said the new unified storage appliances would be announced at Oracle OpenWorld during Oracle’s earnings call last week.

The ZFS Storage Appliance is Oracle’s name for what Sun called the Sun Storage 7000 series. Today, Oracle replaced the Sun Storage 7110, 7310, and 7410 with the Sun ZFS Storage 7120, 7320 and 7420, and added the 7720 for bulk storage and capacity.

The 7120 is a 2U system for SMBs and departments, and scales to 120 TB with two shelves of 2 TB SAS drives. The 7320 is a 1U configuration that can be clustered for high availability, and scales to 192 TB with four disk shelves. The 7420 3U system scales to 1.15 PB with 24 disk shelves and the 7720 is a 42U device that scales to 720 TB in one chassis. All the systems support solid state drives (SSDs), and they range from four Intel processing cores for the 7120 to 32 cores for the 7420 and 7720.

The appliances also include Oracle RMAN backup, Oracle Database Cloning, and Oracle Fusion Middleware for backup and recovery of Oracle apps, and are optimized for Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

NetApp’s Georgens: Mulitprotocol storage hot, tiering not so

NetApp appears to be the big winner in storage sales at the end of 2009 as spending picked up after a slow year. NetApp Wednesday reported $1.01 billion in revenue for last quarter. Its product revenue increased 17% over the last year, while larger rivals EMC and Hewlett-Packard had year-over-year declines in storage product revenues.

NetApp’s increases are more impressive when you consider its last quarter included January, which means one-third of the quarter came after companies flushed their 2009 budgets.

NetApp execs say low-end systems had the biggest increase, which likely reflects a surge in organizations turning to networked storage as a result of adding virtualized servers. NetApp also sold its largest mix of multiprotocol storage systems ever. In fact, for the first time it sold more systems with SAN and NAS protocols than NAS alone. Multiprotocol systems rose from 34% the previous quarter to 42% while NAS-only systems fell from 48% to 42% and SAN-only systems dropped from 19% to 15%.

NetApp CEO Tom Georgens says that’s likely a sign that organizations want more flexibility to run multiple applications on a system.

“As customers seek to build an infrastructure that can run multiple applications, typically those applications have the need for multiple access methods, both file and block,” he said. “As a result, as we see more of this virtualized shared infrastructure rollout, I see more and more customers that are interested in products that can run both at the same time. The other thing is, it gives them an option that if it’s NAS today, it could be SAN tomorrow or vice versa. … I think single-protocol products are going to become obsolete over time.”

Interestingly, there was no mention on NetApp’s earnings call of any impact from its scale-out NAS clustering capability. Last year at this time, NetApp frequently talked about how its integration of its GX clustered technology with its Ontap operating system was coming soon, and it finally began shipping a converged OS with Ontap 8 last August. Yet lack of a fully integrated scale-out NAS product hasn’t hurt it. Maybe the market for scale-out NAS is overrated – either NetApp customers don’t care about it or are willing to wait.

Georgens maintains automated tiering is definitely overrated, although it’s being hailed as another “must-have” offering within a year or so due to the rise of Flash solid state drives (SSDs) in enterprise storage. NetApp’s smaller competitor Compellent has been trumpeting its Data Progression software while EMC is pushing its burgeoning Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology. Georgens downplayed tiering when asked about FAST. He also downplayed FAST.

“FAST is a collection of things, not a specific capability,” he said. “FAST on Symmetrix is different from what FAST is on a Clarion and different from what FAST is on Celerra and different from what FAST is on Atmos. FAST an umbrella name for a bunch of point technologies that are different on every platform. But whatever NetApp does, it’s going to be consistent across all SAN and NAS, high-end and low-end.

“Second of all, I think the entire concept of tiering is dying. The simple fact of the matter is, tiering is a way to manage migration of data between Fiber Channel-based system and SATA-based systems. With the advent of Flash, basically these systems are going to go to large amounts of Flash, and that will be dynamic with SATA behind them, and the whole concept of have tiered storage is going to go away.”