Seanodes today announced first official customer shipments of its Storage Virtual Appliance, the Exanodes software for VMware environments.
Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) is ideal for designing high-end, clustered virtual iSCSI SANs that leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes. Users can configure shared virtual storage to maximize capacity, reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network storage. Exanodes VM Edition presents a compelling value for SMBs and hosted storage services such as cloud computing struggling to contain storage costs in VMware deployments without sacrificing availability or performance.
Installation, configuration and deployment of Exanodes VM Edition is simple and requires no additional hardware, no external SAN storage or fabrics, and no specific storage competencies. Thanks to a 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 VM Edition is the only SVA inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, and resistant to bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. Its clustered design addresses known issues with centralized SVAs, either monoserver or dual-server with one server dedicated to high availability.
As businesses look for greener alternatives that reduce power consumption, capital and operating expenses, virtual infrastructures such as Exanodes VM edition can maximize the network’s wasted disk capacity, and eliminate the need for over-provisioned external RAID storage with its excessive space, power and cooling costs. Users enjoy the full benefits of server virtualization and can leverage VMware features such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware High Availability, and VMware Consolidated Backup without complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.
Exanodes VM Edition costs $950 per ESX server and is available now through solution providers in Seanodes’ worldwide network of channel partners.
The cost is right, and as the article states, you are also getting a reduction in electrical usage, so you are saving there too (and being friendly to the environment). We have looked at several alternatives for our virtual terminal requirements and am glad to see this article.