Interviews

posted on 11 July 2008 03:59

StoneFly is an iSCSI block storage software supplier and we had the opportunity to interview Jame Ervin, the firm's product manager and ask some questions to help us locate StoneFly in the storage landscape

Blocks & Files: How does StoneFly's product compare to Dell EqualLogic's iSCSI offering?

Jame Ervin: StoneFly offers three product families to fit a range of deployments and requirements. We designed our IP SANs to scale horizontally or vertically, so customers can determine where to allocate money for growth and expansion: storage capacity, system bandwidth or both. With our 3 product lines customers can choose to keep high availability systems, and implement the maximum infrastructure in a primary site, while reducing costs in the secondary site, DR location or branch office with lower cost IP SANs. We wanted to leave our customers with maximum flexibility in designing their infrastructure to suit their requirements or budget.

Blocks & Files: How does it compare to the LeftHand Networks' iSCSI offering?

Jame Ervin: StoneFly’s SANs take a layered approach to building redundancy across all critical components, the physical disks, controllers and management systems. As mentioned above, we offer vertical or horizontal scalability, and our engineers have spent a good deal of time to design our O/S to handle divergent loads and applications stably at all times for maximum system uptime.

Blocks & Files: Can StoneFly's software, like LHN's, operate as a virtual machine in a VMware server?

Jame Ervin: This is planned for release later this year. Right now we are concentrating on Virtual Server hosts connecting to our IP SAN appliances, and improving the performance and management of volumes for virtual servers.

Blocks & Files: How does StoneFly's offering compare and contrast to NetApp's iSCSI offering?

Jame Ervin: NetApp has dozens of iSCSI offerings at all ends of the spectrum. ... We don’t run into the StoreVaults frequently but are a good match for the higher end systems. We have a similar set of features and scalability in a more cost-effective package -- uniquely we have also added SAN-based encryption  for organization concerned about data security. Unlike NetApp, our product families “talk to each other” so organizations can mix and match product families when deploying across multiple sites.

Blocks & Files: What does StoneFly think of Sun's Open Storage products and iSCSI software available as open source?

Jame Ervin: We are really excited about the growth of open source storage platforms. The growth of Open Source on the whole really shows that the real value of any system is the usage, services and ecosystem surrounding it. Currently, some of the open-source platforms are a bit immature, but rapidly catching up to the commercial alternatives. The most important thing for any storage system to stay relevant is to work on improving the customer experience, by ensuring compatibility and extensibility with key applications, commercial or open source, and adhering to the industry standards to ensure easy deployment.

We plan to continue to improve our application, our appliances and our customer service to make sure our customers are happy and find our SANs easy to use, easy to maintain and easy to grow with.

Blocks & Files: What factors are driving the iSCSI market?

Jame Ervin: Convenience, ease of implementation and simple scalability. iSCSI is one of the most open storage protocols: it is platform independent, utilizes common infrastructure and is built to grow with your environment. I think most iSCSI implementations were designed to put the customer first with ease of use and scalable architecture in mind. These basic tenets have allowed the protocol to grow year over year, and be extended into new markets with new applications: like the proliferation of virtual serves, disaster recovery and WAN replication. As we are moving to a unified network and networking layer, iSCSI will pay a large role in the so-called next generation datacenter, which is sure to include Ethernet.

Blocks & Files: What is StoneFly's strategy in the iSCSI market?

Jame Ervin: We aim to offer a flexible storage platform for a range of deployments and applications. Our customers are dynamic, implementing new applications and systems to consolidate onto their IP SANs constantly, so we aim to adhere to open standards and simplify integration and interoperability for our customers. It’s been an interesting ride in the iSCSI space as large vendors have moved in and the technology in general has become more prominent. We aim to grow with the industry and maintain our reputation for a flexible and open IP storage platform.

Blocks & Files: Is there a need for StoneFly customers to have file-level storage and will StoneFly satisfy that?

Jame Ervin: Many of our customers aim to consolidate as many servers as possible to an IP SAN, but continue using dedicated file servers, standard servers or gateways. We currently offer a Windows-based NAS gate, the StoneFlex product line for our customers. At this stage we haven’t incorporated file serving into our core operating system, but it is something we are investigating.

Commentary: The view that DCE, Data Center Ethernet, will become a unified data center networking platform and will help increase the popularity of iSCSI is that that another iSCSI vendor, Dell, shares. Server virtualization is also an iSCSI driver and StoneFly is responding to the rise and rise of virtual servers by develping a virtual machine version of its software.

The availability of iSCSI SAN software on industry-standard servers, enabling customers to use industry-standard, off-the-shelf drive arrays helps keep storage costs down. We're seeing the iSCSI market growing much faster than the Fibre Channel SAN market, in terms of ports connected, and StoneFly is well-positioned to take advantage of customers needing to consolidate storage to better support vitualized servers.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}