First Product From Start-Up Pranah

Pranah Storage Technologies, Inc. has created an easy-to-use and complete network storage system for the under-$50K price class. (This class is the fastest-growing part of the storage business, according to IDC’s latest report on storage industry revenues, issued June 5.) Pranah’s system features purpose-built hardware, designed specifically for data storage, combined with storage software applications that are typically seen only in high-end systems. Designed for simplicity and scalability, the company says its Pranah 2000 Series provides more value than any storage system available to small and midsized businesses (SMBs).

                 Pranah 2000 Series

"We’re doing nothing less than redefining reliability, flexibility, and value in storage networking for this underserved market," said Steve Carter, Pranah’s CEO. The company’s intelligent network storage products incorporate both standards-based and patented proprietary technology. By developing and controlling its own hardware and software, Pranah improves ease-of-use for sophisticated storage applications. "In a difficult economic environment, our solution allows customers to cut their costs both for the amount of hardware required and the staffing associated with overly-complex systems," he said.

Performance and Scalability
Pranah’s 2000 Series storage controllers can be aggregated, thereby delivering increased storage performance previously unavailable on systems in this price class. The company’s support of 10Gb/s iSCSI allows it to stand out from the competition and delivers unique advantages in supporting applications requiring massive storage demands, such as video surveillance/security, medical imaging, document retention, video production, and cloud computing.

Power, Cooling, and Density Improvements
The new product line features ‘green-friendly’ design that utilizes a U.S.-patented side-vented rail system to improve cooling by 31%, and allow a storage density improvement of up to 50%. Pranah 2000 Series systems do not require dedicated data racks, and therefore can share the same rack with IP switch and routing equipment, telco equipment, and racked servers.

The elegant design of the Pranah 2000 Series system is based on simplicity, delivering more value in a 1U form factor than any other product on the market today, including more disks per U, and featuring plug-and-play expansion with SAS, SATA, or Fibre Channel drives.

• Each system comes with standard software (called the Pranah Control Suite), which includes Thin Provisioning, Snapshot, and Integrated NAS, all managed from a simple browser interface.
• Tiered Storage, Replication, and Distributed File System (enabling disk optimization and geographic diversity of critical data) are options.
• It integrates both SAN and NAS within the same (1U) storage unit.
• It can include dual hot-swap storage controllers and multiple host connections in the same chassis.
• It features a patented cooling system.
• And it’s scalable without extensive product support or costly reinvestment.

Value Proposition and Differentiation
Because Pranah has developed its own hardware and software intellectual property, it offers a unique value proposition to its customers. Elegant design and tight integration make the system simple to operate and easy to maintain. A key benefit of the company’s systems is that NAS is integrated as a standard feature. By doing so, the customer does not have to do their own time-consuming, expensive integration, and maintain third-party software and hardware to support file-based data. Storage applications such as Thin Provisioning, Tiered Storage, Snapshot, Replication, and Distributed File System (DFS) were developed by Pranah to be easy to use yet fully functional, and they all come loaded on the system, easily activated with a software key when required.

Company Strengths
Pranah has a seasoned management team, with a proven history in the data storage, software, and military markets. Its development team has a combined 200 years of hardware and software experience in bringing storage and server products to market, and a strong intellectual property position. Pranah’s products redefine storage networking by simplifying operation, increasing reliability, reducing complexity, and significantly lowering both cap ex and op ex costs.

"Small businesses, workgroups, remote, and branch offices now have another option when it comes to multi-protocol, small form factor storage with the new offerings from Pranah," said Greg Schulz, Senior Analyst at the StorageIO Group, and author of The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC). "Pranah is joining an industry-wide movement of delivering solutions specifically designed to the needs of small business – to provide value, flexibility, and feature-functionality, not to mention ease-of-use."

Product Availability
Pranah’s 2000 Series product line will initially include three different control units, and three expansion units. Product is shipping in late July in limited availability to 15 key customers and resellers for testing and evaluation, with general availability in September.

Advantages for Smaller Businesses
"Now, businesses that balked at six-figure price tags for a shared storage system have a better answer," said Dave Walstad, Pranah’s VP of sales and marketing. "Pranah’s systems were designed with the small business customer in mind. To gain further leverage on a Pranah investment, Disaster Recovery can be easily deployed, since shared storage can be replicated off-site. What’s more, SAN and NAS are delivered in the same box, so there’s no need for two separate systems, with the attendant complexities of integration and maintenance. We’re confident our storage systems are the lowest cost, smallest footprint, easiest-to-use in the under-$50K price class. And they have the flexibility to meet the ever-changing needs of growing businesses."

Specs of Pranah 2000 Series Control Units

• Drive Bays: 4
• Drive Types: SAS, SATA and Fibre Channel
• Host Connect: 1 or 10 Gb/s iSCSI, Fibre Channel and SAS
• Supported RAID levels: 0,1,5,6,10
• Maximum LUNs: 1,024
• Snapshots: 8
• Included Software: Web-based management software, NAS, Thin Provisioning, Snapshot
• Optional Software: Tiered Storage, DFS/Automatic Network Failover, Synch and Asynch Replication

Specs of Pranah 1000 and 3000 Series Expansion Units

• 1080 – (8) 3.5” Fibre Channel drives, Four 4Gb/s FC ports
• 1180 – (8) 3.5” SATA or SAS drives, 4 SAS ports (3Gb/s) 4 lanes
• 3036 – (36) 3.5” SATA or SAS drives, 8 SAS ports (6Gb/s) 4 lanes

Software

• Thin Provisioning: Maximize drive efficiency and delay capex on additional drive purchases.
• Snapshot: Make instant copies of drive volumes for fast and simple recovery of data.
• Integrated NAS: Stretch your budget by freeing up expensive hardware for other uses.

Other software available as options include:

• Replication (synchronous and asynchronous): Efficiently duplicate your data off-site for disaster prevention.
• Tiered Storage: Reduce storage costs by assigning different data types to appropriate drive technology.
• Distributed File System (DFS): Geographically dispersed data while providing transparency and data redundancy to the end user.