Features - Storage Innovations:

SPINNAKER TRANSFORMS ENT NAS MARKET WITH SPINSERVER 3300

Spinnaker Networks Inc, a leader in the development of next generation distributed storage systems, recently announced general availability of the Spinnaker SpinServer 3300 product family. The SpinServer 3300 is a revolutionary network attached storage (NAS) solution that eliminates the complexities of storage management inherent in traditional NAS architectures, while offering unprecedented capacity and performance scalability.

Combining Spinnaker SpinFS, a 2-stage distributed file system, with a switched Gigabit Ethernet clustering design, Spinnaker does away with the "island" nature of current NAS products. Up to 512 SpinServers can operate in a cluster as a single global storage pool -- dramatically reducing the time, complexity and cost of effectively managing large-scale NAS assets.

The SpinServer 3300 combines the power of a unique 2-stage distributed file system with industry leading performance in both single-server and clustered configurations. By separating network and disk-related functions, the SpinServer architecture provides high performance and high capacity storage, while enabling centralized management of large, global (including multi-server) file systems for both NFS and CIFS. Simple to deploy, scale and manage, the SpinServer solution helps organizations meet expanding demands for storage, and simultaneously reduces management costs, improves storage ROI, and virtually eliminates access downtime.

"For at least 24 months I have stated that virtualization concepts need to be applied to NAS so that the systems administrators in large IT shops with tens or hundreds of NAS boxes don't spend tons of time on mounting and cross-mounting file systems and other menial administrative tasks. It is refreshing to see products like SpinServer hit the market. I think this will get a good reception in these shops," said Arun Taneja, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group.

Ron Bianchini Ph.D., president and CEO of Spinnaker, agreed. "Traditional NAS has not evolved to meet the manageability, performance and capacity scaling demands of enterprise users. It's been obvious for some time that a better NAS architecture was required. The SpinServer is that better solution. The combination of power and simplicity will make the SpinServer 3300 Series the secret weapon for storage administrators managing large, complex infrastructures."

"Spinnaker's entrance signals a new era for NAS by providing an innovative approach for solving NAS management, scalability and performance issues," according to Jamie Gruener, Senior Analyst with Yankee Group. "Enterprise customers should strongly consider the Spinnaker SpinServer 3300 in their future NAS vendor evaluations."

The truly distributed architecture of the SpinServer 3300 exceeds the requirements of rapidly changing enterprise and service provider environments. As a single NAS server, the SpinServer 3300 delivers as much as 40 percent more performance than competitive NAS systems. In a clustered NAS environment, simply enabled with the addition of Spinnaker SpinCluster software and a Gigabit Ethernet switch, the storage administrator can utilize the cumulative performance of up to 512 clustered servers and also have the simplicity of a single global name space across the entire cluster. From the second to the 512th server, each SpinServer delivers a near-linear performance increase as it is added to the SpinCluster. SpinFS delivers the performance required to run a broad array of enterprise-class applications without requiring users to split tasks into single server segments.

"The SpinServer architecture is elegant in its simplicity and exceptional in its performance. Spinnaker's industry leading distributed NAS architecture is reliable, easy to manage, scales gracefully and is fast! Our outstanding beta experience demonstrated that Spinnaker is committed to the highest level of customer support. We are implementing a 2-node SpinCluster with 3 terabytes of storage into our production environment. With Spinnaker, we are creating a high availability, high speed and easily scalable data environment for our mission critical financial services applications," said Joe Mayer, Director, Technology Center, AccessData, a managed services provider for the financial services industry.

According to Dan McLaughlin, president of Enterprise Storage Solutions, a storage reseller, "Spinnaker's SpinServer next generation NAS storage solution offers exactly the kind of novel, cutting edge technology that our customers look for when they turn to us to address their storage requirements. We are excited to include SpinServers in our comprehensive storage solutions offerings, which include best-of-breed products from the industry's leading vendors. During our rigorous in-house testing, the SpinServer delivered amazing performance and non-disruptive scalability. The SpinServer's unique distributed file system will allow us to address our customers' ever-increasing demands for performance and scalability while giving them the tools required to easily manage growth."

The Spinnaker SpinServer 3300 system supports single-server scaling up to 22 terabytes, file sizes up to 22 terabytes, and file system sizes up to 11,000 terabytes. A single file system can be scaled across any number of SpinServers -- without requiring changes to user shares, mount points or namespaces. Non-disruptive (to both users and applications) scaling allows seamless expansion, even during times of heaviest access.

The SpinServer solution brings unprecedented advances in management flexibility and simplicity to significantly lower the time and costs associated with managing enterprise storage solutions. SpinFS lets network managers define virtual servers that present application and/or users with customized views of the global storage pool. This capability enables storage resource segregation independent of physical resources for improved utilization, resource management, and application-specific storage pools.

Effectively eliminating data downtime during normal administrative operations by reducing management complexity and streamlining daily data management tasks, the SpinServer 3300 significantly lowers the time and costs associated with managing NAS. The ability to quickly move data to another SpinServer -- even when that data is in use -- combined with the single global view and point-of-control for all resources in a SpinCluster offers many wide-ranging benefits to IT managers. Administrators no longer need to allocate additional, unused storage in order to prepare for unforecasted increases in storage demand. Capacity can be quickly reallocated, or, when necessary, be expanded by deploying additional disk capacity or SpinServers. Changes are quick and invisible to users and applications. The ability to flexibly define, assign, and change storage allocations lets administrators consistently optimize usage of all available resources. Administrative flexibility streamlines distribution of data among geographically dispersed sites for improved performance and failover protection.

Additional management features include efficient backup and restore operations, as well as high availability functions. Spinnaker SpinShot and Spinnaker SpinRestore software solutions streamline disk-to-disk copies for immediate snapshot duplication and full file or file system restore. For tape backup and restore operations, Spinnaker fully supports network data management protocol (NDMP) and is compatible with popular tape backup/restore solutions. The SpinServer also supports simple network management protocol (SNMP) for integration into existing management architecture and is also fully common information model (CIM) compliant for the future. Spinnaker SpinMirror and SpinHA enable efficient data mirroring and the implementation of redundant server configurations for a no single point of failure solution to satisfy demanding mission critical applications. SpinHA goes beyond basic 1+1 failover and allows full flexibility to failover a portion of any SpinServer to any other SpinServer in the cluster -- a significant reduction in failover hardware requirements.

Price and Availability

The Spinnaker SpinServer storage system is available immediately, with list pricing starting at $125,000.

About Spinnaker Networks

Spinnaker Networks Inc, a leader in the development of next generation NAS storage solutions, delivers the Spinnaker SpinServer, a powerful 2-stage distributed storage system. The SpinServer 3300 allows cost-effective, non-disruptive management of multiple servers as a single storage pool, which significantly reduces management costs and complexity. Founded in December 1999, Spinnaker Networks is a privately held company with more than 100 employees headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company has secured $51 million through two series of funding rounds. Spinnaker was recently named one of UPSIDE Magazine's "Hot 100," which recognizes private companies for innovation, leadership and performance. For more information, visit www.spinnakernet.com.

Contact: Joy Burd, Spinnaker Networks, 412-968-7792, joy@spinnakernet.com.