EqualLogic is doing its part to show that iSCSI is ready for prime time.
The company announced its 100th customer on Monday — Johnson Health Network — and also took in $20 million in an oversubscribed third funding round.
EqualLogic marketing VP John Joseph boasts that the company is disproving the knocks on iSCSI — that it’s not a mature technology and has security issues.
“We’re taking each one of those pins and knocking them down one at a time,” Joseph tells Enterprise Storage Forum.
The company began a year ago with a half-dozen beta customers — all Fortune 500 financial companies — and converted all of them to paying customers. The company’s 100+ customers are all “paying customers that sought us out and paid for our product,” Joseph says.
The company’s PeerStorage IP SAN technology is being used for email, data warehousing, financial applications, Oracle applications, file systems and digital media content, among other uses, Joseph says. It is used “quite heavily” behind blades as a focal point for storage and to subdivide into volumes, and is usually used on a sub-network, he adds.
EqualLogic also reports few problems with low-cost serial ATA (SATA) drives so far, with annualized failure rates of 1 percent, in line with Fibre Channel and SCSI, Joseph says.
EqualLogic bills itself as “the only standards-compliant IP SAN solution provider to offer a comprehensive and fully integrated standard feature set at no additional cost.” The $39,000 PeerStorage Array 100E supports up to 3.5TB of storage capacity and comes with fully redundant fault-tolerant hardware and full-featured automated storage-management software. As many as 32 arrays can be combined to form a scalable enterprise storage grid of more than 100 terabytes.
“Our price point and functionality is second to none,” Joseph boasts.
The funding round was led by new investor Focus Ventures, and also includes current investors Charles River Ventures, Sigma Partners and TD Capital Technology Ventures. EqualLogic has raised $52 to date.
With 60 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth, Joseph says EqualLogic expects to reach profitability in the first half of 2005.