Seanodes Joins Hypervisors to Its Virtualized Storage

Seanodes has joined its "virtual SAN" software to virtual servers, looking to create pools of storage for virtual machines without requiring an underlying storage network.

Seanodes, founded in 2002 and headquartered in Toulouse, France, and Boston, emerged in 2007 with Exanodes Shared Internal Storage (SIS), comprising software that creates a virtual pool from storage available within multiple networked servers.

Because Exanodes doesn't require interaction with any external storage arrays, Seanodes has claimed it will scale more easily than storage pooled from SANs a la vendors such as Datacore. "We don't add more layers to the process," says Frank Gana, Seanodes's marketing director.

With this release of Exanodes Virtual Machine Edition, Seanodes is making its pooled servers' storage available to virtual machines. "We work within the hypervisor, presenting storage as an underlying array," Gana says.

Presently, Seanodes's Exanodes Virtual Machine Edition works with the Xen open-source hypervisor. Pricing starts at $500 per Tbyte. The product is offered through Seanodes's resellers. The vendor plans to release versions for VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V in October.At least one analyst thinks Seanodes is onto something. "Seanodes uniquely provides virtual server hypervisors the ability to utilize the internal and external DAS to itself and other virtual servers as a virtualized SAN without the requisite cost and complexity of a 'physical' SAN," said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, in a statement.

Seanodes resists comparisons with vendors like Cleversafe and RevStor, claiming its technique is entirely different. And while it compares with LeftHand Networks's ability to create virtualized storage pools without SAN arrays, Seanodes says its ability to pool together up to 128 CPU nodes makes it more scaleable than LeftHand.

At press time, LeftHand had not returned requests for comment.

On the downside, while Seanodes claims to have about 10 customers trialing its latest release, none are available to comment on it. The vendor presently claims about 20 customers total -- and about the same number of employees.

Further, Seanodes's approach isn't for everyone. Enterprises with separate storage and server support teams aren't likely to favor a tack that requires one team to do both. And unfortunately, that doesn't play to Seanodes's claims to be enterprise-friendly.Still, if Seanodes can produce the goods announced today and gain customers, the company may be in for some growth. It's certainly charging hard toward that goal.

Exanodes has garnered $10 million in funding since its founding.

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