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.
