OnApp Storage Beta Tested

OnApp Limited has revealed initial pricing details for OnApp Storage, the distributed SAN for cloud providers and enterprises.

When it reaches general availability later this year, OnApp Storage will be bundled with the OnApp Cloud platform for no additional cost.
 
Traditional SAN technologies are expensive, take up datacenter space and power, and do not scale well for typical cloud workloads. OnApp Storage enables cloud providers and enterprises to create a performance, resilient SAN for cloud applications by plugging standard SATA and SSD disks into the spare drive bays of their existing servers.

Using patent-pending ‘smart disk’ technology, it overcomes the performance, scalability and price limitations of legacy storage products.

Providers will be able to use OnApp Storage alongside, or instead of, existing SANs.
 
"Storage is easily the most expensive part of cloud hosting," said Andreas Kunter, CEO of Dolphin IT Services. "What I like about OnApp’s approach is that we can use existing capacity in hypervisors, and extend that simply adding more disks. There is no need to use traditional storage systems. This has the potential to really shake up the storage market, and change storage in the same way OnApp has changed the cloud."
 
"Bundling OnApp Storage with OnApp Cloud is just the latest way we’re adding features that help our customers stay profitable and competitive, and reducing TCO in the cloud hosting market," said Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp. "We’re taking storage scale and cost problems away, for no additional cost. Any provider with a Full OnApp Cloud license will be able to build enterprise-class storage using their existing cloud infrastructure. That makes a huge difference in CAPEX compared with traditional centralized SANs, and it also means their storage scales in a completely linear and affordable way: as they grow and add hypervisors to their cloud, their storage scales too."
 
The OnApp Storage team includes developers of the original OSS Xen and Citrix XenServer platform storage stack, and is led by storage and virtualization architect Julian Chesterfield.
 
"We expect strong take-up from customers who currently use local hypervisor storage: they can get all the resilience and scalability benefits of an enterprise SAN in their existing cloud," Chesterfield said. "We’ll also see plenty of cloud providers using OnApp Storage to replace hardware-based SANs, since we offer high performance and configurable redundancy without outrageous purchase, upgrade and support costs. OnApp Storage will also let cloud providers offer multiple tiers of storage to offer a range of performance characteristics at different price points for different application requirements."
 
OnApp Storage is currently in public beta testing.

340 cloud providers and enterprises are taking part in the current phase of the beta program (registration needed).

The company aims to complete the beta test around the end of Q3 2012, and make the OnApp Storage platform generally available to OnApp Cloud users shortly afterwards. A standalone version for companies that do not use OnApp Cloud will follow. Pricing for the standalone version has not been announced, but is expected to use a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model with competitive pricing of a few cents per gigabyte of allocated storage.