Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

SCALE8 TURNS SERVICES INTO PRODUCT WITH HIGHLY SCALABLE NAS
By John Abbott for the451.com

Scale8 has made its long-promised move into products, by launching its first network-attached storage system, the N2200. Until now, the company has used a service provider model to deliver its storage offerings to media companies. The new product uses the same core technology that Scale8 has previously used in its own datacenters -- namely its 8FS distributed file system and a distributed logical volume manager. It enables commodity hardware to be strung together into a high-capacity, highly available system that can scale up to 108TB.

IMPACT ASSESSMENT

The message

Scale8, best known for its storage service provider business aimed at media-related customers, has turned its service offering into a NAS product. Its selling points for the N2200 are that the system is highly scalable and reliable, but built out of commodity components, which reduces the cost.

Competitive landscape

EMC's Centera and NetApp's NearStore are the primary competitors. Scale8 claims its offering is cheaper than either, scales up more easily and doesn't require custom APIs to link to applications. Startup Zambeel claims greater levels of scalability for its NAS boxes.

The451 assessment

Scale8 has proven that the general concepts behind its technology are sound ones, after three years in the services business. But those three years have left it weak, and ready for a significant cash injection if it is to survive. We're assured that news of further funding is imminent.

Context

Founded in 1999, Scale8 was one of a group of companies that originally focused on the storage service provider model, and specialized in hosting storage off-site for large media customers. Few of those companies survive now in their original form, with even the largest, StorageNetworks, struggling for survival. Scale8 pitched its technology specifically at media serving, and that helped it gain some valuable customers -- most notably the Microsoft Network, MTV and Fujitsu PFU.

But things haven't turned out as Scale8 planned. It's soaked up three rounds of funding totaling $55m, the last $23m of which was declared to be the "final" round in August 2001. Back then, the company was expecting to have reached the break-even point by the end of 2002. But it became clear that the SSP model wasn't going to sustain the company, and so a massive effort to convert services into products was embarked upon. That too, took much longer than expected. Scale8 first began talking about its new NAS products a year ago. Now it's hoping to close another round of funding very soon, and promises an announcement shortly. We believe that closing this round is a matter of some urgency.

In the run up to this, Scale8 has put new management in place. Bo Ewald was hired as president and CEO in October last year. Ewald -- best known for his time at Cray Research from 1984 until 1996, where he was eventually president and COO -- took over for the COO, HP veteran Patrick Rogers, who took over when Scale8 lost its original CEO, Dick Watts, in 2001. Founder Joshua Coates, still in place as CTO, worked at network caching firm Inktomi before founding Scale8, and before that worked with Jim Gray at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center on high-performance disk and network I/O problems.

Products The N2200 uses a set of server appliances with distributed storage software on top, making the multiple nodes look like a single system. The hardware, based on Intel 2.4GHz Xeon processors, includes ATA drives from IBM (now Hitachi), which have been tied together with dual-data protection RAID (Raid 55, or data striping in two directions) and built-in head failover capability, so that data remains available even in the case of multiple node or disk failures.

The "8" in the Scale8 name is meant to represent the infinity symbol (usually placed on its side). Storage capacity and file systems on the N2200 scale to 54 nodes, or 117TB, nondisruptively. Using the 8FS journaling file system, large numbers of NAS head appliances can be pooled together into a single system and managed through the built-in distributed storage manager. It supports NFS versions 2 and 3 over TCP and UDP protocols. Up to 32 separate file systems can be supported. Scale8 is still working on a fully distributed file system, which should increase throughput considerably. The DLVN volume manager virtualizes volumes of storage across multiple physical block devices.

Pricing starts at $105,000 for a three-node, 6.5TB configuration, or $145,000 for 13TB. The head failover software costs $20,000 extra. Trials at four companies have been going on for some time. General availability in volume is promised for the end of March.

Strategy

Why has it taken so long to convert Scale8's in-house technology into a packaged product? One of the major tasks was redesigning the system so that all the nodes operate in the same way. In-house, the system was divided into areas of nodes handling different functions. Initially, Scale8 will sell its products directly, while continuing to market and operate its current services offerings, although the growth potential is all on the product side. Next year, it also plans to sell its software -- independently of any hardware -- through OEMs and resellers. Existing relationships, many of them three years old, should help the company gain traction for its products.

EMC ignited the 'fixed content' market -- that is, long-lasting and unchanging digital objects that must be retained for active reference and use -- with the launch of Centera last year. But Scale8 will stay within the confines of its existing customer base for now, of media serving and e-business customers. It won't try for the broader commercial space until it's picked up momentum, and presumably until its full-blown file system is ready for prime time. Lack of CIFS support will also restrict its market opportunity somewhat.

Competition

Network Appliance's NearStore and EMC's Centera are Scale8's target competitors. It says it has priced its storage at about one cent per MB (for 13TB), compared to NetApp's two cents. But perhaps more importantly, Scale8's N2200 has a 5-10 times capacity advantage over NearStore, and can be expanded in increments of 2.1TB rather than 12TB. The head failover software gives it another selling point over NetApp: if a NearStore head fails, then the entire system goes down.

As for EMC, Scale8 points to the specialized APIs required to use Centera's content-addressable file system, which means that EMC has had to court application vendors to support the system. Scale8 says it has its own content-addressable storage scheme helping to run its services offering, but decided not to offer it as a product, in order to avoid vendor lock-in. And as with NetApp, Scale8 claims "significant cost advantages" over EMC.

Also in the same competitive space of highly expandable NAS systems is Zambeel, which uses a switch-based architecture for its Aztera storage system. In Scale8's view, the architecture limits the degree of scaling it can achieve. Zambeel disagrees, claiming scalability beyond Scale8 of up to 200TB.

Courtesy www.the451.com