BridgeSTOR Introduces Data Deduplication Product For Less Than $20,000

A company called BridgeSTOR will emerge from stealth mode Tuesday and introduce a new data deduplication and compression storage appliance line that will carry a "street price" of less than $20,000. The products are targeted at the small-to-medium business (SMB) market that finds it hard to afford more expensive products. The appliances are designed for such environments as VMware virtualization, data backup, network storage and a variety of Microsoft enterprise software.

The company's line of Application-Optimized Storage (AOS) appliances feature virtual storage-advanced data reduction (VS-ADR) technology and virtual storage-network attachment (VS-NA) technology, a 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network connection standard. The appliances will come in a 2U rack form factor and run 2.5-inch low power consumption disk drives.

The BridgeSTOR appliances are called "application-optimized" because they adjust for the different ways that certain applications write data to storage, said John Matze, founder and CEO of BridgeStor. "What we have found is that almost every application has to be tweaked a little bit or tuned for the deduplication and compression that would occur underneath it," Matze said.

By compressing data and eliminating duplicate copies of many files, BridgeSTOR said it can reduce storage capacity requirements by up to 80 percent, thus reducing the cost to a company for storage technology. The AOS appliance can also encrypt data should the user choose to do so, although some don't because that can inhibit performance, he said.

Matze, a serial entrepreneur and one of the co-authors of the iSCSI networking protocol, said other companies have been in the same SMB space as BridgeSTOR, but have been gobbled up by bigger companies. Ocarina Networks was acquired by Dell and Storwize was acquired by IBM, both in July of this year. Other competitors include companies such as ExaGrid Systems, Nimble Storage or GreenBytes, but Matze said only BridgeSTOR provides deduplication and compression technology for both primary and secondary storage, and includes server and backup software and related networking technology in one appliance.For all that technology to be offered in one box is impressive to David Chapa, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "John Matze has taken what would otherwise be a complex, high-end offering and he has found a way to make it affordable to the masses," Chapa said.

SMBs are looking for more options for data deduplication and compression because their data storage needs are growing much faster than their IT budgets, he said. "Deduplication at the primary [storage level] is something that is quite appealing to customers just for the mere fact of all this data that is continuing to be stored and needs to be managed," said Chapa.

There will be two models of the AOS appliance available starting Nov. 29, the AOS Appliance for VMware Virtualization and the AOS Backup Exec 2010, which will include the Symantec Backup Exec 2010 Deduplication Suite. With that appliance, a user can turn off the BridgeSTOR deduplication feature and just use its compression capability.

The devices will be manufactured for BridgeSTOR by HP.