Snap Tackles Blocks

PHOENIX -- Snap Appliance Inc. is poking around that part of the low-end NAS market formerly reserved for its conceptual big brother Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP).

In an announcement at the Storage Networking World tradeshow here today, Snap unveiled iSCSI support that lets its storage systems move block data as well as file-level data over an IP network (see Snap Appliance Intros New Products). That's something NetApp began doing last spring and has continued to build on (see NetApp Squares Off With Redmond and NetApp Blitzes on iSCSI).

Until now, Snap has been content to sell high-volume, low-cost NAS systems, mostly to customers too small for NetApps radar screen. But the company that Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS) spun off in late 2002 is now tiptoing onto NetApp's turf (see Quantum Evicts NAS Unit).

The iSCSI support is part of an upgrade to Snap's GuardianOS operating system, along with an enterprise NAS controller that allows the addition of up to seven expansion arrays, expanding capacity on Snap systems from 5 Tbytes to 29 Tbytes. Snap’s previous systems scaled from 320 Gbytes to 3 Tbytes.

Snap's GuardianOS version 3 also includes NetVault backup-and-restore software from BakBone Software Inc. (Toronto: BKB) and eTrust Antivirus data protection software from Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA).Product manager Jim Sherhart says Snap expects its iSCSI support to be certified by Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) in May. “We’re going to populate iSCSI all over the place,” he says. “NetApp and us are the two guys who really have block and file support.”

You can’t exactly call this a David and Goliath story, because this David isn’t looking for a fight. Rather than replace NetApp and other rivals, including EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Sherhart hopes Snap storage can carve a niche for secondary storage and backup in organizations that also use the market leaders.

“I think we fit well in environments with EMC and NetApp,” he says. “I’m not telling you we’re not going to compete, but I honestly think there will be more synergies than competition.”

Snap's using price as one way to define its niche. Its new storage system starts at $35,000 -- considerably lower than the starting price of a system from one of the larger players. The upgraded GuardianOS ships standard on Snap’s storage system and is available as an add-on for existing systems starting at $700 per unit.

Snap claims to have shipped 142,000 NAS units.— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch