News

posted on 04 March 2008 06:51

Clustered NAS supplier Exanet has introduced its ExaStore Clustered NAS 2008 product to cope with unceasing, if not accelerating, unstructured file growth.

Exanet says its new system 'features scalable capacity and performance, leverages virtualized storage, and offers enterprise-class features. It can independently provision petabytes of capacity and scale performance to unprecedented levels online with existing applications, while its load balancing and single file system maximize storage utilization and minimize the total cost of ownership.'

The server nodes, re-branded IBM servers, use Intel quad-core CPUs and the software provides a single name space supporting in excess of 100 billion files. A choice of storage hardware is available and the system can manage petabyte-levels of capacity, managed from a central point.
(DX array pictured.)

ExaStore 2008 is available immediately directly from Exanet and its authorized distributors worldwide. No prices were released.

Background
Exanet was started up in 2000 to provide virtualised, scalable network-attached storage (NAS). The ExaStore software, shipping since 2003, runs on paired clustered Linux Intel server nodes connected by gigabit Ethernet wih DX Series Fibre Channel drive arrays. The nodes can be connected together to form a grid presented to servers as a single NAS entity through ExaFS, its distributed file system. It is a very fast system and has impressive SpecFS benchmark scores.

ExaSync provides replication and ExaSearch, running on a connected Windows server, provides search facilities. The company has headquarters in Israel with offices in the USA, France, Germany, and Japan. NASA was recently announced as its 100th customer.

At the end of June last year Exanet raised $18 million in a C funding round led by a US venture fund, Coral Capital Management, and including a hedge fund, QVT Fund, and existing investors such as Evergreen Ventue Parners and Intel Capital Management. That took total funding to $40-60 million. It was meant to be the final round before break-even.

A further, D-round, of funding has been reported, amounting to $10 million or so.

A continuous data protection facility, Exanet CDP, was trailed by the company with a September, 2007, launch, but did not appear. Exanet does have a snapshot capability. The competition consists of other scalable NAS suppliers such as BlueArc and Isilon and NetApp.

Dr. Giora Yaron (pictured left) has been chairman of Exanet since 2001 and was the CEO before Rami Schwartz, who was appointed in 2005.

Exanet's board replaced CEO Rami Schwartz with Dr. Arnon Gat (pictured left) in October, 2007, saying his job, as president and CEO, was to lead the company in its growth phase, something that it thought Schwartz could not do so well. His background is semiconductor engineering followed by investment banking.