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In its salad days, Rainfinity attempted to navigate through a younger, evolving computing market with its Reliable Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) technology, which was commercialized in the security space.
RAIN is a patented clustering technology that was conceived and developed by a team of Caltech scientists who are among the company’s founders. Though it was first developed for NASA, RAIN ultimately was doled out to the likes of Symantec and HP, which used it in their security products.
The Caltech team formed Rainfinity to bring this technology to the commercial market, focusing specifically on applying RAIN’s availability, performance, and scalability characteristics to Internet applications.
Now San Jose, Calif.’s Rainfinity carries a different tune and different products. The company Tuesday introduced a network attached storage (NAS)
According to Rainfinity Vice President of Marketing Jack Norris, the RainStorage
appliance improves performance and increases return-on-investment by helping move data across volumes and NAS systems without restricting client or application access to those storage systems.
Mike Fisch, Director of Storage and Networking at research firm The Clipper Group, believes data migration should be a non-event and that RainStorage meets such requirements.
“If the storage industry will realize its promise of a brighter future, data movement must be less painful and disruptive than it often is today. Rainfinity addresses this need with RainStorage, a solution that makes file migration a normal, useful, and non-disruptive part of storage management.”
Norris maintains one of the things that sets RainStorage apart from offerings by such NAS appliance makers as Network Appliance, whose products RainStorage is meant to be complementary to, is its ActiveBand technology. This allows the product to move in-band during active migrations and then revert to out-of-band for uninterrupted network performance.
What this feature does is make implementation easier for users because no changes are required for end-user mount points and there’s no need for the deployment of software agents on servers or applications. The RainStorage architecture also obviates concerns surrounding data integrity, disaster recovery, and throughput.
RainStorage supports heterogeneous environments and includes support for Network File Systems (NFS) and Common Internet File Systems (CIFS). Other features includes a web-based management console, self monitoring with automated recovery/restart functions, clustering support, a command line interface, automated scripting capabilities, and integration with industry standard management tools.
RainStorage is available now for $80,000 with support for unlimited terabytes of NAS.
This story originally appeared on Internet News.
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