Rainfinity today entered the storage management market with RainStorage, the first plug-and-play appliance to offer uninterrupted data access while moving data between network attached storage (NAS) devices.
"Today, as IT professionals are starting to realize the benefits of networked storage, we are seeing a trend of moving away from direct access storage (DAS). Data migration is a huge pain point for networked storage administrators, and having a tool to assist them in data migration makes their life much simpler," said Steve Kenniston, analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "Rainfinity enters the storage management market with a unique approach that brings many of the dynamic attributes usually associated with SAN environments to NAS without the cost or complexity."
The RainStorage appliance enables NAS administrators to perform all of their data migration, volume expansion, capacity management, load balancing, file server consolidation and other storage management duties quickly and easily while ensuring the highest level of data integrity and reliability. Clients continue to mount directly to NAS devices throughout data moves, and clients and servers have non-stop data access with no disaster recovery, data access or data integrity exposure. RainStorage simply plugs into the existing network switch and integrates without changes to storage devices, servers, clients or storage management tools and utilities.
"Rainfinity's RainStorage appliance gives our enterprise customers the unprecedented ability to manage their NetApp Filers easily and efficiently by eliminating downtime during data migration, and is an important ingredient in our total business continuity market solution," said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "With RainStorage, NetApp customers will benefit not only from improved end user productivity, but cost savings as well."
Moving data from one NAS device to another can be very difficult for customers who require maximum uptime. Typically, data migration requires a disruption in service and therefore storage administrators must coordinate this downtime with end user departments. Some industry analysts estimate that the cost of lost productivity due to network server downtime ranges from $200 to $2,000 per hour. Until now, there have been no real alternatives to this costly and time-consuming task.
"Migrating data between storage systems has been a logistical nightmare," said Doug East, high performance systems division leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Alternating sets of users could experience up to four hours of downtime for a migration, which is a lot when you're running a 24/7 environment. With this technology, we can do the transition while providing our users with nonstop access to their data and applications, which is a huge advantage and our ultimate priority."
The RainStorage appliance comes configured with dual Intel Xeon processors, 4 gigabytes of SDRAM memory, dual mirrored, hot swappable SCSI hard disk drives and dual power supplies in a 2U rack-mount chassis. The appliance runs a hardened version of Linux 2.4.
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