Rainfinity Airs Appliance to Manage NAS Cleanly

In its salad days, Rainfinity attempted to navigate through a younger, evolving computing market with its Reliable Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) technology, which was commercialized in the security space.

RAIN is a patented clustering technology that was conceived and developed by a team of Caltech scientists who are among the company’s founders. Though it was first developed for NASA, RAIN ultimately was doled out to the likes of Symantec and HP, which used it in security products.

The Caltech team formed Rainfinity to bring this technology to the
commercial market, focusing specifically on applying RAIN’s availability, performance and scalability characteristics to Internet applications.

Now San Jose, Calif.’s Rainfinity carries a different tune and different products. The company Tuesday introduced a network attached storage (NAS) management appliance that attempts to ensure smooth data migration across NAS environments that employ disparate NAS events. NAS is hard disk storage that is set up on a local area network (LAN) rather than being attached to the department computer that is serving applications to users.

According to Rainfinity Vice President of Marketing Jack Norris, the RainStorage
appliance improves performance and increases return-on-investment by helping move data across volumes and NAS systems without restricting client or application access to those storage systems.

Norris said one of the things that sets RainStorage apart from offerings by such NAS appliance makers as Network Appliance, whose products RainStorage is meant to be complementary to, is its ActiveBand technology. This allows the product to move in-band during active migrations, then revert to out-of-band for uninterrupted network performance.

What this feature does is make implementation easier for users because no changes for end-user mount points or software agents on servers or applications. The RainStorage architecture also obviates concerns surrounding data integrity, disaster recovery and throughput.

Mike Fisch, Director of Storage and Networking at research firm The Clipper Group, said data migration should be a non-event and that RainStorage meets such requirements.

“If the storage industry will realize its promise of a brighter future, data movement must be less painful and disruptive than it often is today. Rainfinity addresses this need with RainStorage, a solution that makes file migration a normal, useful, and nondisruptive part of storage management.”

RainStorage supports heterogeneous environments including support for
Network File Systems (NFS) and Common Internet File Systems (CIFS). Other features includes a Web-based management console; self monitoring with automated recovery/restart functions; clustering support; command line interface, automated scripting capabilities; and integration with industry standard management tools.

RainStorage is available now for $80,000 with support for unlimited
terabytes of NAS.