Sanrise unleashes storage services
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Calling Sanrise a start-up is misleading. The managed storage service provider, which incorporated less than a year ago, already has more than 600 ready-made customers in the U.S., Europe and Asia using its network back-up and recovery services.
The Dublin, Calif., company last week rolled out its first suite of Storagetone storage services aimed at midsize to large companies and Internet data centers that don't want to monitor data capacity and handle storage management themselves.
With Storagetone Disk-on-Demand service, customers are offered gigabytes of high-availability storage. Storagetone Backup and Restore handles data backup customized to the user's schedule. Storagetone Safestore Vaulting provides off-site tape storage.
Sanrise provides services by installing "storagecels" at customer locations for corporate data or hosting centers for Internet data. A storagecel consists of Hitachi Data Systems Freedom 9900 storage arrays, Brocade Fibre Channel switches and StorageTek tape libraries. With Sanrise's Storagetone services, customers can choose to manage their storage via management software located at a storage portal called storagetone.com or have Sanrise technicians manage it.
The company, founded by engineers from AT&T and network-attached storage vendor Auspex, is looking to tap a growing storage provider market, says research firm Gartner Dataquest. Due to a shortage of trained IT staff and an inability to predict the storage capacity a company network will need, Gartner Dataquest estimates that the 2000 market of $10 million will grow to more than $7 billion in 2003.
"The market conditions that enable a move toward outsourcing are excellent," says Steve Duplessie, an analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group. "There's strong demand and still no talent. Rather than concentrating on a niche market, the companies that are broad-based storage service providers are missing the boat."
Most of Sanrise's customers opt for back-up and restore services first and disk-on-demand second, the company claims. Disk-on-demand provides storage quickly to customers on a leased per-gigabyte basis as they grow.
"People [stink] at backup. It's a problem that can only get worse as the amount of data grows, and no one user is good at managing it. Let a professional deal with it," Duplessie says.
In January, the company bought Exodus Communications' DataVault back-up and recovery service, and assumed responsibility for supporting its customers.
Among the clients are such well-known companies as General Electric and Fidelity Investments.
The price of Sanrise's services differs. For instance, 100G bytes of storage would be available for about $50 per gigabyte. Backing up 100G bytes of storage would cost as much as $18 per gigabyte.
Sanrise: www.sanrise.com
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