Startup StorMagic is the latest vendor to try its luck in the iSCSI SAN market, touting a software-based solution for tying servers and storage together.
After almost 18 months in stealth mode, the vendor unveiled its SM Series software and its first customer today. "What we're offering is a software solution that will go into an organization and automate their storage environment," says Mike Stolz, StorMagic's vice president of marketing.
A number of vendors, including LeftHand Networks, IBM, and NetApp, have been cranking up their iSCSI SAN efforts over recent months, although StorMagic, unlike its competitors, has no interest in the enterprise market. "We're focused on developing solutions for the SMB marketplace -- we're focused on companies of 50 to 250 people," says Stolz.
The SM Series software runs on a standard Windows-based Intel server connected to storage. The solution uses software agents on application servers, such as file, print, and Web servers, to create a SAN. "The application server can access the storage behind the main server," says Stolz, explaining that this opens up the storage possibilities for smaller firms. "The big problem that organizations of this size face is that they dont have the bandwidth and resources to manage storage, so they have been staying with direct-attached."
StorMagic's first customer is Oxford University Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, which is using the SM Series to share 3 Tbytes of data held in a RAID array from Fibrenetix. "We have three application servers connected to it at the moment," says Jon Edwards, an IT officer at the Faculty, explaining that he will probably add another three servers to his SAN by the end of the year.
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