Analysis

posted on 07 March 2008 10:45

SANRAD was formed within Israel's RAD group and is another example of that country's ability to act as a high-tech incubator. It was founded in 2000 and offered iSCSI SAN virtualisation and management technology with a difference: it could convert iSCSI messages to Fibre Channel (FC) ones.

Like EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks it can aggregate storage into a virtualised IP SAN but, because of its iSCSI-FC bridging capability it can link the iSCSI SAN island into the FC SAN. That is unique.

This means that its products can be used to extend Fibre Channel SAN access to servers lacking FC host bus adapters (HBAs). It can be done now. There is no need to wait for FCOE.

When iSCSI first arose it was mooted as having two potential markets: building IP SANs on the one hand; and extending FC SANs on the other.

By and large iSCSI as a FC SAN extension technology has not taken off, whereas IP SAN use has. The recent acquision of EqualLogic by Dell and the growing success of LeftHand Networks has raised iSCSI's profile considerably.

Kim Tchang, VP of marketing for SANRAD, (pictured left) reckons that Dell/EqualLogic and Lefthand Networks are mostly focused on small and medium enterprises (SME), whereas SANRAD is an enterprise play. The time, she thinks, is now ripe for a boom in iSCSI use in enterprises too, with the technology legitimised by Dell's EqualLogic acquisition.

Startup

SANRAD was founded in 2000. The company is privately-owned and now offering its third generation V-Switch product. There are 1200 installations world-wide. Product R&D is carried out in Israel but the company's operational HQ is in Mountain View, California.

In 2006 SANRAD entered Europe and, Tchang says, the UK is one of its fastest-growinfg countries.

There are three products:
V-Switch 2000 (pictured left); 3400; and 3800 with each model having more ports than the preceding one. All the products run StoragePro virtualisation and management software which has capabilities such as asynchronous and synchronous replication and other data protection features.

The FC port speed is 2Gbit/s and Ethernet at 1GBit/s is supported. A strong advantage of the V-Switches is, according to Tchang, the ability to have heterogeneous storage behind them and not to be locked in to one particular storage vendor.

A V-Switch looks like storage to accessing servers and looks like a server to storage arrays. It provides intelligence at the edge of the fabric and, to that extent, has similarities with HDS' idea of where storage intelligence should be.

Refocus
SANRAD was pretty much engineering-led but, commencing in May last year, the company started to change to a much more customer- and market-focused business.

Shaul (Uli) Gal-Oz, the then-CEO, 'left the company to pursue other interests' and the board promoted Dave DuPont (pictured left), then VP for pretty much all marketing and sales, to become the CEO. He joined SANRAD in February, 2006 and his background included being SVP sales and marketing for Plasmon, VP marketing and business development for LeftHand Networks and senior positions in Dell and HP.

SANRAD had used a direct sales model in the USA and an indirect one in Europe. That is now changing to 100 percent indirect.

DuPont recruited two experienced professionals to the management team in October last year. Tracy Hawkey was appointed as VP for Americas sales. He is a 25-year high-technology veteran and has held a range of senior management positions with companies such as EMC, Network Appliance, StorageTek, and Boeing.

The second appointment was of Kim Tchang, also with 25 solid years of experience. She previously worked at NetApp on the StoreVault line where she led world-wide marketing, HDS in channel marketing, and HP where, at one point, she knew Dave Dupont in HP's Grenoble facility.

Customer drivers
Tchang says there are three main driving forces affecting customers which prime them for becoming SANRAD V-Switch purchasers.

There is the general rise in the use of iSCSI SANS with their cost advantage over Fibre Channel SANs. Second is the rise, the seemingly unstoppable rise, in server virtualisation. Inevitably this drags networked storage consolidation in its wake.

Equally inevitably this, in turn, brings a need for disaster recovery facilities to protect the putting of concentrated server and storage facilities in one basket.

SANRAD's technology can be used, is being used, by customers to quickly and cost-effectively connect servers, hundreds of them, on the LAN to a FC SAN without giving them all HBAs. It can aggregate servers with their own direct-attached storage into an IP SAN - as LeftHand can do - but it can also join these, virtually, into a combined IP and FC SAN.

SANRAD's technology can extend FC SAN access to remote and branch offices. It has mirroring facilities and enables data migration from array to array in the SAN as needs change. It can replicate data between primary and disaster recovery sites. It supports active:active clustering and failover.

Tchang emphasises that, although SANRAD products can be used to build IP-only SANs, the company has its traction in enterprises already using FC SANs and needing to extend their access to large numbers of physical or virtual servers without the expense of a greatly expanded FC infrastructure, and with the benefit of protecting their FC SAN investment. 

Momentum is on SANRAD's side. In October it announced 'explosive Q3 over Q2 revenue growth of 87 percent' through its North American sales channel. In February it announced 'that the company experienced double-digit growth in Q4 2007.' Products and customers won awards.

There was channel recruitment and expansion in the USA, UK, Germany, and China. It experienced 'major wins in new enterprise accounts across all industries including financial services, healthcare, legal, education, and government.'

The company, you detect, thinks it's on a roll. The new strategy is working. We are going to hear much more from SANRAD because it has, it's convinced, detected the scent of an iSCSI boom in enterprises and it's going to boom, hopefully, with it.