Seanodes

The inventors of Shared Internal Storage (SIS), Paris-headquartered Seanodes is changing network storage technology. Seanodes' SIS platform Exanodes™ radically alters the economics and possibilities in data storage and application processing. Seanodes 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.

• editor's comments:- in June 2009 - Seanodes disclosed results of tests using entry level SSDs with its Exanodes virtual SAN software.
  
  In an ESX environment of 8 servers with 1 SSD drive per server, IOmeter benchmark results showed 36,000 IOPS (random read 4K) for a system with an overall cost under $20K (including the cost of SSDs and Exanodes VM Edition).
  
  "'Traditional arrays have been designed to work efficiently with spinning disks and can't give the promise of SSDs in terms of performance and scalability for example," said Frank Gana, Business Development Director at Seanodes. "This limits the usage and markets and as a consequence most people use them as Direct Attached Storage with all the usual known problems that come with DAS. Thanks to Exanodes and its innovative design we can aggregate and use SSDs efficiently, opening new markets and applications to this technology".
  
  Seanodes says it's trying to fix the problem of aggregating and sharing multiple low capacity, low cost SSDs between servers without requiring special tuning skills. But I have to say the quoted IOPS don't sound impressive to me compared to the fastest SSDs. So why wouldn't you use less servers and a better SSD instead?
  
  With so many other competing solutions in the rackmount SSD and PCIe SSD market - I suspect that Seanode's solution may only provide an economic price point for a tiny fraction of possible applications - or none at all. There isn't enough data in the press release to be sure.