* What you get when you attach together gear from Netgear and Zetera
It turns out that there may be something pretty useful in store (sorry about the pun… but only a little) for smaller businesses in the area of networked storage. Equally important, it may have some profound implications for remote offices in the very near future, and for enterprise storage applications not long after that. Let me tell you about something I have recently found. For about a month now I’ve been playing with a device in my home office that gives me a $400 storage-area network. Really? Really.
First, let’s calibrate our expectations. What I’ve got running is certainly not a high performance environment such as what I would see from a SAN running a McDATA switch and some HP arrays, for example, but then what I am running also costs a fraction of 1% of such SANs. What I do have is a virtualized storage environment spread over two devices that gives me mirrored storage accessible from any of the nodes on my home office network and which operates at the bandwidth capacity of my home office LAN.
Netgear, probably best known as a provider of home networking gear such as wireless routers, has a SAN appliance (the MicroSAN) that costs $150. Put a couple of drives in there – in my case two Seagate 250G byte 7200 RPM drives (cost, $235 off the Internet), connect it to my existing Ethernet router, and I now have a quarter-terabyte of mirrored, sharable storage.
A piece of software called Local Storage Manager gives me the ability to add and reduce capacity to the storage pool, mirror partitions, and perform other basic management functions. I’ve had multiple applications access the same file, including streaming video to several clients, all hassle-free.
Local Storage Manager actually comes from Zetera, an Irvine, Calif.-based start-up that provides Netgear with an appliance the size of a small toaster. With a little bit of imagination, the heat sinks on the top even make the device look like a toaster. I’m now prejudiced, I guess. I’ve used the toaster as my metaphor for an appliance for years. Appliances after all should be easy to install (15 minutes maximum installation time – otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a bundle), and easy to operate. Looks like Zetera has gone me one better, and turned my metaphor into reality.
This particular configuration is really intended for home use – probably for home networks where families want to share TiVo data, pictures, videos and so forth. Not unexpectedly then, the device has some limitations for business environments. It cannot co-exist with my Cisco VPN, for example, which steps on the Zetera virtualization software. The Zetera folks tell me that the office version (likely to manage many more than the two disks in my early, home version) will have this capability along with additional management capabilities. Zetera declined to publicly say when the office version will be released.
This is all pretty interesting stuff. Zetera has produced what is essentially a switchless SAN, or if you prefer, “controller-less” IP storage. Theoretically, this should be able to scale well into the range where it becomes attractive for inclusion for companies building systems for enterprise storage. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I’ll keep you informed.
