Startup Pranah Storage Technologies has entered the SMB storage market with a channel-only appliance, with a software stack that includes most of the top enterprise storage features.
Pranah’s new 2000 series storage appliance includes a purpose-built hardware box combined with a software stack that includes thin provisioning, snapshot, and both NAS and iSCSI SAN capabilities, said Dave Walstad, vice president of sales and marketing for the St. Paul-based vendor.
The appliance also includes a 10-Gbit Ethernet connectivity; support for SAS, SATA, and Fibre channel hard drives; dual controllers and power supplies; three fans; and an enclosure to make it easy for solution providers to configure the storage capacity.
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Options include distributed file systems, tiered storage, and synchronous and asynchronous replication, Walstad said.
However, price is what makes Pranah shine.
“We are both a hardware and a software company,” he said. “The technologies are not disruptive. But the product is disruptive because of the price points.”
Pricing for the Pranah 2000 series appliances starts at $2.15 per Gbyte for a 1U enclosure configured with a dual controller and 8 Tbytes of iSCSI storage, Walstad said. When configured with 80 Tbytes in a 4U form factor, the price drops to about 61 cents per Gbyte, he said.
That puts Pranah’s entry-level systems squarely within the $12,000 to $25,000 price band, said Steve Carter, president of the vendor.
That pricing makes Pranah an easy company to work with, said Jim Wolford, owner and CEO of collocation infrastructure firm Atomic Data Center and its sister company and Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) reseller, The Foundation, both based in Minneapolis.
Wolford called that price band a space that other vendors have missed.
“And Pranah plans to come out with stable pricing,” Wolford said. “Depending on the time of the month, other companies may cut prices by 50 percent. Pranah is very easy to work with.”
Since most of the customers which use collocation infrastructures or who deal with Apple for developing creative materials are smaller businesses, they are big storage and SAN users, Wolford said.
“I use a lot of SAN,” he said. “But when a customer goes to a collocation facility, and is looking at a $100,000 SAN, it’s hard to swallow. With Pranah, customers can put two devices in collocation and snapshot them to each other for low-cost disaster recovery.”
Full article: channelweb.com
