Features - Storage Innovations:

RAINFINITY'S NAS APPLIANCE OFFERS TRANSPARENT DATA MOVEMENT
by John Abbott, the451.com

Rainfinity is using its core clustering and protocol routing technology to break into a new market -­ storage. The company is launching RainStorage, a management appliance for network-attached storage boxes that enables data migration without downtime. It's a high availability alternative to the mirroring and snapshot software that comes with the boxes themselves, the company claims.

The message

The RainStorage appliance uses intelligent clustering and protocol routing software to separate out data movement traffic from day-to-day operations so that access to NAS boxes can be maintained even when data migration is taking place. It's Rainfinity's first move into the storage world.

Competitive landscape

Z-force and a few others offer similar appliances, but the main competition comes from SnapMirror software included with NAS boxes, or from more complex SAN solutions. Rainfinity claims there are no other alternatives that maintain availability.

The451 assessment

This product uses sophisticated technology to carry out a well-defined task ­- NAS data migration -­ that currently causes users considerable trouble. By staying closely focused, the company could gain some significant traction, establishing a base for a wider product line in the future.

Context

Founded in 1998, San Jose, California-based Rainfinity has built up a software security and connectivity business around technology it calls RAIN (for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes), which was originally developed at the California Institute of Technology in conjunction with NASA. Rainfinity, a CalTech spinoff founded by Professor Jehoshua Bruck, has the exclusive intellectual property rights to RAIN. The company has raised $45m, the last $30m of it in February 2001, and has been shipping products for the last few years. For a while it was overly dependent on an OEM relationship with Check Point, but more recently it won Symantec, Compaq/HP and Siemens as new OEMs for security appliances. It has about 300 customers.

Technology

The base RAIN technology observes network traffic and makes intelligent routing decisions at the driver level, without a need to go too far up the networking stack. So far it has been used for clustering firewalls and virtual private networks, or for sharing network connections between multiple systems. For the RainStorage appliance, its job is to decode the NFS and CIFS file-level protocols, so that data-moving can be carried out at the same time as other activity.

Sitting on the network between clients and NAS boxes, the Rainfinity device is transparent and doesn't need any additional software on clients or servers. Interestingly, it works as both an in-band and out-of-band appliance by using two VLAN segments with a Layer 2 switch in between. In this way, filers involved in a RainStorage move or transaction are moved in-band for the duration, while the rest use the out-of-band "public" VLAN. Rainfinity claims it achieves Gigabit wire switching and 10,000 I/Os per second while in band, and no performance impact out of band.

Customers need this kind of thing so that they can offload a heavily used filer if it runs out of space or is needed for a new project, without having to spend as much as two days taking that capacity offline while the transfers are done. Typical customers have from five to six filers to up to 150 or more. The RainStorage appliance is based on standard dual-processor Intel servers (sourced from Compaq/HP), with 4GB of memory, 4-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and dual, mirrored SCSI drives. The operating system is a 'hardened' version of Linux 2.4.

Cost is $80,000 per appliance, and although there's no limit as to how many filers can be supported, bandwidth considerations mean that a RainStorage device is needed for every five to 10 filers. Many customers buy two per location.

Strategy

CEO John Schroeder says that customers get comfort from the fact that Rainfinity has an established user base, but he admits that the storage device will be sold to a different set of buyers than the security administrators it's been selling to so far. That will require an expansion of sales channels to target the new market sector. Although some custom work has been done to make the system work better with Network Appliance and EMC boxes, the RainStorage appliance is essentially heterogeneous, and has already been sold in conjunction with Sun filers and BlueArc's high performance NAS device. Schroeder has plans to expand the range with further protocol support and additional functionality, such as synchronous replication between remote locations, in the future. A block-level version is under development.

Competition

Traditionally, NAS data migration has been a "3am Saturday night" task for storage administrators, says Schroeder. SnapMirror-like tools are best for asynchronous mirroring, he says, but don't eliminate downtime. That drives some customers to SAN-based systems from companies such as Veritas, but these are more complex and less granular, he claims. Somewhat closer comparisons can be made against other NAS appliance vendors, such as LeftHand Networks and Maximum Throughput, although most of these are also trying to sell their own storage. One that isn't is Z-force. Schroeder says Z-force uses an exclusively in-band approach and is more interested in virtualization.

Courtesy the451.com.