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General Information
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March 30, 2007
• Vol.29 Issue 13
Page(s) 29 in print issue
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IP SAN Solutions
StoneFly Offers Reliable, Affordable Packages
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 San Diego-based StoneFly Networks (www.Processor.com/StoneFlyNet), a maker of cost-effective SANs using the iSCSI standard, was founded in 2000, getting its name from co-founder John Downing, an avid fly fisherman (a stonefly is a type of trout fly used for fly fishing). Downing’s choice of name turned out to be prescient because six years later it landed $34 million in funding by DNF (Dynamic Network Factory; www.Processor.com/DNF), a leading maker of high-performance NAS, SAN, RAID, and iSCSI systems, when the latter acquired StoneFly early last year.
“Our goal with the acquisition was to make [StoneFly] stronger than ever by building upon its proven IP SAN expertise while expanding its OEM and reseller channels in the U.S. and abroad where demand is high for reliable, scalable, and affordable iSCSI storage,” says DNF President and CEO Mo Tahmasebi.
Tahmasebi says StoneFly made a splash in 2000 when it launched a new form of iSCSI-based data storage technology that caught companies’ eyes. “These companies must store tremendous amounts of information about their customers, partners, and products, including transactions, email, and more,” says Tahmasebi. “StoneFly’s products combine hardware and software technology to help organizations minimize the cost and complexity of managing that data.”
 SME Storage Sweet Spot
Jame Ervin, technical account manager at StoneFly, says the company started developing its line of SC (Storage Concentrators)—StoneFly's IP SAN product line—and its StoneFusion storage operating system with small to midsized enterprises in mind, although Ervin adds that StoneFly’s three core SC lines are scalable for organizations of all sizes.
Ervin calls StoneFly’s ISC (Integrated Storage Concentrator) product family the workhorse of StoneFly’s IP SANs as it provides users with a cost-effective and easy-to-deploy SAN-in-a-box solution. “The ISCs are a great fit for most organizations with storage capacities ranging from 2 to 18TB, and [it offers] options for supporting 10GB IP SANs in the future,” Ervin says.
StoneFly’s MSC (Modular Storage Concentrator) product line is the anchor of the StoneFly product line, says Ervin. Its fourth-generation MSC-i4000 offers extensive expansion and deployment flexibility with support for SAS and SATA drives for tiered storage applications and can even function as a bridge to Fibre Channel SANs, along with maximum scalability in excess of 100TB.
“The MSC was designed with business continuity and high availability in mind; MSCs can be configured in an active/active failover cluster for mission-critical deployments,” says Ervin. According to Ervin, the i4000 offers great performance, dual-core processing power, and large amounts of internal bandwidth, among other features.
“We spent a great deal of time looking at the future applications and interconnects we identified on our roadmap and built [the i4000] to take advantage of high-performance SAS, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand for all of our advanced applications in the pipe,” Ervin says.
StoneFly’s newest IP SAN product line is its HSC (Hybrid Storage Concentrator). According to Ervin, the HSC is a best-of-breed system that provides the benefits of both MSC and ISC IP SANs and can support clustering and cluster mirrors in the future.
Ervin points out that StoneFly’s IP SAN systems supply users with a broad range of deployment options and expansion scenarios. “[They] can scale vertically or horizontally, giving our customers the choice of scaling performance and/or capacity depending on their requirements,” she says.
Install & Forget It
“Our SCs were designed with ease of use in mind and are easily deployed and configured. Our IP SAN can be deployed in as little as 15 minutes, depending on how many servers will be connecting. They are ‘install and forget it’ products,” Ervin says.
Ervin says one of StoneFly’s long-term customers opened a support case for his first- or second-generation SC because he wanted to reset his administrator password in order to perform a Daylight Saving Time update. He had forgotten his original one. “He had not had an occasion to change, restart, or modify his system settings since he set it up four years ago!” says Ervin. “Many of our customers [have] small IT departments staffed with IT generalists, and we understand that easy-to-use tools are a must-have.”
“Grand Slam” Storage Operating System
StoneFusion is StoneFly’s dedicated storage operating system, Ervin says. It includes a wealth of features, including a robust storage virtualization engine to isolate the iSCSI volumes from the physical storage volumes for flexibility, availability, redundancy, and ease of migration. StoneFusion offers advanced storage services including active/active clustering, load balancing across multiple SCs, volume management, snapshots, local and remote mirroring, and centralized management. There are also application-aware host agents to ensure transactional integrity for mission-critical apps for those who need it. “With StoneFusion, the features of enterprise-class SAN management are available to the masses,” Ervin says.
All StoneFusion configurations are fully featured. The only feature that is not enabled across all of the product families is clustering and load balancing because StoneFly’s entry-level ISC product family does not support failover clusters, says Ervin.
“It’s kind of like going to Denny’s. Instead of getting your pancakes and eggs a la carte, we think it is better to just get the Grand Slam and have everything. You can always have the leftovers later, and we think you will grow into the advanced IP SAN features as you need them,” Ervin says.
Partners & Channels
Tahmasebi says StoneFly’s sales break down evenly between direct sales and channel partners. Early last year the company launched its “MVP Partner Program” and has more than 50 registered partners, including CommVault (www.commvault.com), Novell (www.novell.com), and Microsoft (www.microsoft.com). In addition, StoneFly recently formed a partnership with VMware (www.vmware.com) to support its customers using virtual servers.
“We offer two types of partnerships: Channel Partners, which are resellers, and Alliance Partners, which are affiliates and consultants,” Tahmasebi says. “In addition to the resellers and system integrators that make up the bulk of our MVP Partners, we have recently entered into partnerships with PAC Data [www.pacdata.com] . . . as well as with UK-based JAD Logic [www.jadlogic.co.uk], an agreement that will allow us to expand our reach into Western Europe.” 
by Robyn Weisman
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