BridgeStor Launches Storage Optimization Appliance

BridgeStor LLC has announced a storage appliance intended to bring high-end features such as data deduplication and compression to the small-to-midsize business/small-to-midsize enterprise market. The Application Optimized Storage Appliance for Network Storage can reduce storage capacity requirements, power, cooling and management costs in network-attached storage and iSCSI storage area network environments by up to 70 percent.

The device consists of hardware from Hewlett-Packard, combined with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 and BridgeStor's Virtual Storage-Advanced Data Reduction technology, which provides in-line block-level deduplication and data compression functionality, as well as "disk on demand" thin provisioning, which lets users add disk drives to the device only as needed.

BridgeStor, based in Poway, Calif., was just founded last November by CEO John Matze, who says he has started up a variety of storage companies in the past 20 years. He plans to compete with other vendors aiming at the SMB space by offering more functionality, and by offering it at a lower price that is more attractive to SMBs, he says. The company's overall strategy is to move its technology into the cloud, which users will see coming out in the near future, he adds.

Analysts said the appliance would be particularly attractive for the SMB/SME market. "BridgeStor is targeting the SMB/SME market with a very capable capacity optimization storage appliance," says Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of validation services with the Taneja Group. "This part of the market has been too long overlooked by the vendors of what are typically much more expensive products."

Moreover, he adds, BridgeStor is bringing a product to this market that is more versatile than many of the enterprise solutions, as it has been designed to cover a range of storage demands, from the primary workloads behind virtual servers to backup optimization.BridgeStor has developed solutions to serve a market segment that is typically under-served in the industry, says Randy Kerns, senior strategist for the Evaluator Group. The BridgeStor advantage is that it can bring high-value functions such as compression and deduplication to the market as a simple and economical appliance, he says, adding that he thinks the company's focus and its ability to take complex functions and make them usable with a simple system provides a high-value product for the SMB customer.

The device is available now and is priced at $19,995. It can be shipped with up to nine drives and up to 33TBytes of storage, but the disk-on-demand thin provisioning feature means that users can buy it with as few as 2.6TBytes, allocate more storage, but add physical storage only as it is needed.

This reduces capital expenditures on hardware, as well as reducing operational expenses on power, cooling and storage administration. It supports Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) 5. Compression and deduplication are supported across both block and file data pools. The company also offers AOS appliances for VMware Virtualization, Backup Exec 2010 and Microsoft Data Protection Manager.

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