Stonefly to roll out SAN starter kit

Stonefly Networks this week is expected to launch an entry-level IP storage-area network that provides an alternative to pricier Fibre Channel offerings.

ValueSAN, which starts at $9,000, consists of a Stonefly i3000 Storage Concentrator and an array of Serial ATA disk drives. The concentrator connects to the LAN via Gigabit Ethernet and to the storage array via SCSI. A Gigabit Ethernet adapter with an iSCSI driver is installed on each Windows, Linux or Unix host computer, which connect to the array.

Cost was one of the factors that pushed Darin Soll, CIO at Ace Asphalt in Phoenix, to an IP SAN from Stonefly. He says Dell initially pushed him toward working with EMC , a Dell partner.

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Stonefly Networks this week is expected to launch an entry-level IP storage-area network that provides an alternative to pricier Fibre Channel offerings.

ValueSAN, which starts at $9,000, consists of a Stonefly i3000 Storage Concentrator and an array of Serial ATA disk drives. The concentrator connects to the LAN via Gigabit Ethernet and to the storage array via SCSI. A Gigabit Ethernet adapter with an iSCSI driver is installed on each Windows, Linux or Unix host computer, which connect to the array.

Cost was one of the factors that pushed Darin Soll, CIO at Ace Asphalt in Phoenix, to an IP SAN from Stonefly. He says Dell initially pushed him toward working with EMC , a Dell partner.

"We're a $75 million company with 300 employees and EMC just doesn't fit the economic model," he says. "We were looking for something more cost-effective. Dell recommended Stonefly for a mid-market solution."

Stonefly's use of iSCSI rather than Fibre Channel was another important factor in his decision to implement the company's technology, Soll says.

"We don't have Fibre Channel expertise," he says. "With Stonefly, we are just basically working with Gigabit Ethernet."

IT administrators use software supplied with ValueSAN to manage, configure and provision the array. The software includes the ability to take snapshot copies of the data or mirror the data for disaster recovery purposes.

"We can monitor volume status, we can expand volumes and add them," Soll says. "As our storage needs increase we can go out and expand volumes."

Stonefly says it competes most often with vendors such as Dell/EMC, HP and IBM . IBM recently introduced the DS400 Fibre Channel array and a 10-port switch that the company bundles for $16,376 with 500G bytes of storage. EMC and HP also have low-priced SANs. EMC's dual-controller AX100 with four Fibre Channel host bus adapters starts at $10,600.

The starting configuration for ValueSAN includes six drives for a capacity of 960G bytes. Disk drives can be added to increase the capacity to nearly 2T bytes in a single enclosure. Additional capacity is available by stacking arrays. The drives in ValueSAN can be changed out or added without interrupting customer applications.

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