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Seanodes Is Doing Ok, Thank You For Asking

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Seanodes (earlier coverage), the creator and developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced strong growth and better-than-expected results for the first three quarters of 2008, with major customer wins, securing new funding and multiple industry awards for its Exanodes storage software.

Seanodes recently raised $2.4 million in funding from OSEO, France’s national agency for industrial innovation, in the form of a no-interest loan to support ongoing technology development and company growth. This latest funding will enable Seanodes to expand its R&D efforts and extend the Shared Internal Storage platform to VMware and Microsoft operating environments.

Recent customer wins include SMB customer Pack Solutions, one of France’s financial advisor firms, which chose Seanodes based on the reliability and high data availability of the architecture, and ServiSMART, a Portugal-based emerging service provider, which selected Seanodes to provide the virtualized storage platform for its new cloud computing infrastructure. Additionally, NASA’s infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), at the California Institute of Technology, selected Exanodes software to be part of an upgraded enterprise network architecture designed to process and store massive amounts of spectroscopy and imaging data generated by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), a four year project established to perform nightly scans of the skies to capture any new, undiscovered objects.

The company has scored several industry awards from leading technology publications:

  • Computer Reseller News included Seanodes in its “Emerging Tech Vendors,” the magazine’s annual list of channel-friendly companies that are recognized for providing superior technology, support and margins over more-established companies in today’s information technology industry.
  • Exanodes was named “Storage Virtualization Product of the Year” by Techworld, calling it “true innovation within the IT industry.”
  • eWeek chose Shared Internal Storage as one of the “10 Disruptive New Storage Technologies Promise Big Changes.” The publication recognized Seanodes for its “ground-breaking” storage software and proclaimed SIS as one of the “technologies that have emerged recently to set the industry on its ear.”
  • Network Products Guide named Exanodes Virtual Machine Edition a winner of the 2008 Best Products and Services Award. This respected annual award honors products and services that represent the rapidly changing needs and interests of the end-users of technology worldwide.

HP Buys LeftHand Networks For $360 Million In Cash

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HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks, a provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions who recently came out with some impressive numbers.

LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments.
Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.
With the addition of LeftHand Networks, HP will add midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. Customer needs at the low end of the market will be met with the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System (AiO) and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) product lines. The high end will be addressed by the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) line. Customers will further benefit since LeftHand Networks’ solutions are already certified to work with a wide range of HP products.
The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to be completed in HP’s first fiscal quarter of 2009. Following completion, the business will be integrated into the HP StorageWorks division within the Technology Solutions Group at HP.
LeftHand Networks

DataCore Announces European Partnership With Fujitsu-Siemens

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DataCore Software, provider of storage virtualization software, and Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Europe’s leading producer of IT-Infrastructure services, today announced a new partnership across Europe. With immediate effect, both companies will collaborate in distribution, marketing and technical support to optimize the experience for mutual customers and partners. The agreement is ongoing and has come about through the continued growth and market success of DataCore’s storage virtualization software projects and FSC’s IT-extensive hardware and project support.

The agreement focuses primarily in distribution and support, especially in the support of FSC reseller partners when they implement storage consolidation and SAN projects using DataCore’s SANmelody or SANsymphony solutions. Resellers, integrators and system vendors can utilize the technical support centers of FSC and can readily access information about products and developments, allowing them to reduce sales cycles and realize projects more efficiently. In addition, DataCore has been added to the Fujitsu-Siemens Computers catalog of recommended software solutions.

DataCore Software

iStor Introduces integraSuite Management Center

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iStor Networks today announced (PDF) that it has started shipping its new management interface, integraSuite/MC Management Center.

iStor’s storage virtualization technology eliminates the requirement for managing individual RAID groups and their LUN configurations. Instead, integraSuite presents a pool of storage that is easily carved up into individual customized volumes, reducing administrative, support, and other operational costs.
iStor’s virtualized storage supports multiple RAID levels across drives, allowing the storage Quality of Service level to be tailored to each individual application. integraSuite facilitates flexible storage configurations by managing integraStor’s storage virtualization engine which can fully utilize all drive capacity in a pool of mixed drive configurations. When new larger disk drives are added to a system with older, smaller capacity drives, the newer larger capacity can be fully utilized. It’s just as easy to grow volumes and migrate RAID levels on the fly during disk I/O with just a few mouse clicks.
integraSuite includes a Java-based Graphical User Interface (GUI), Command Line Interface (CLI), and Microsoft’s Virtual Disk Services (VDS) interface.

Seanodes Raises $2.4 Million From OSEO

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Seanodes, developer of what they call “Shared Internal Storage solutions”, today announced it has received about $2.4 million in funding from OSEO, France’s national agency for industrial innovation, in the form of a no-interest loan to support ongoing technology development and company growth.

“This additional funding will help to reinforce our R&D team and investments enabling us to accelerate the porting of our solution on VMware and Microsoft’s platforms,” said Christophe Guittenit, CTO of Seanodes.

Exanodes, the Seanodes software platform, allows virtualized infrastructure applications to marry unused disk space found in many server and storage clusters with existing or additional dedicated storage hardware to provide a powerful shared storage pool. Exanodes abstracts the storage layer from the physical devices enabling users to select the hardware and connectivity options that best suit their environment, today and tomorrow.

Seanodes

ONStor Surveys Businesses, Claims Europe Lags US In Storage Virtualization Adoption

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Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe by provider of clustered NAS solutions, ONStor, indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years. Only 27% of European respondents are actually implementing storage virtualization today compared to 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualized server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualized storage in their data centers. In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realize operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other results from the survey:

  • 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one to two years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%
  • Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualization solution. In Europe, the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

Respondents across both continents agree that as information continues to double year on year, storage virtualization is fast becoming a business imperative.