StudioBytes: Q+A with Steve Modica of Small Tree Communications

How did you decide to focus on serving Macs exclusively when starting Small Tree?

We were all SGI guys, so prior to SGI converting to Linux and spiraling in like they did, it did Irix, which was kind of a BSD UNIX. One of our founders, Jeff Perrault, was an engineer working for me at SGI. One day he came in with a Mac PowerBook and we were amazed to find it was running UNIX. It was outwardly running Mac OS X, but Jeff showed us that it was UNIX underneath. As SGI started laying off workers, we branched out and formed Small Tree back in 2003. What we noticed was that all the network cards we wrote drivers for at SGI, didn’t exist for Mac. There were very few: no 10 Gb Ethernet offerings, no Link Aggregation, no Multi-port or Optical Gigabit Ethernet card support. So we pulled up the Power Mac specs and thought, this is a high-performing machine, it can handle the cards, but no one’s written the drivers for them.

One of the benefits of being in the Mac space is that it is largely proprietary so you don’t get all this competition from Windows. It’s a smaller market and so is easier for us to handle. We can focus on it narrowly, develop our expertise and grow with it vs. jumping into the Windows pool and struggling with super low margins and tons and tons of existing intelligence that we’re competing with.

How does abcSAN expand and build on your GraniteSTOR line? What perceived needs in the market were you addressing?

All of our products come from a technology focus. We developed abcSAN because it’s an iSCSI driver and we like that it runs over Ethernet. We started working on the iSCSI 2 years ago and at the time we knew it would be good for some shared storage, some Final Cut editing, where there’s volume sharing, and Pro Tools, since they require direct-attached storage. We started looking at all these iSCSI targets and we finally lit upon one we really liked because it did iSCSI and AFP (Apple’s file-sharing system). So for our money it’s a fast box that can do anything: if you’re an everything shop or a media shop, if you’ve got Pro Tools editors or Final Cut Pro editors, our product can basically drop into that environment and do everything.

We’ve had it around quietly for about 6 months. We learned long ago that prior to releasing something publicly and making a big splash, it’s better to let it into the hands of a few customers and learn how you can improve it.

Well, abcSAN is a great example. Mount at boot is something that we thought people would want, but we didn’t think it was that important. We thought, well, usually people are going to bring it up on their desktop, choose what they want to work on and click on it. But, it turns out that most people using this product want to mount as soon as they come up, many of them are not administrators and those who are administrators want to mount it on their desktop and have it be there all the time. They don’t want the user to interact with it at all, so we added that functionality.

We have a new product coming that’s based on a new 10 Gb Ethernet chip and we’re in the middle of that. We can’t yet “Beta test” it because we have to wait for the hardware to come out, but, we do have it in-house. As part of this, we have a GUI now in Beta that’s going to drop over our 10 Gigabit and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. It’s basically a way for customers to tune the card to their network, plus check for updates for the driver. We have a few customers currently trying this out.

Well, the abcSAN product supports a lot of resiliency features. The hardware itself has N+1 power so if you lose one power supply, you can keep going. If you need 1 or 2 drive redundancy, it has that built in. It also supports virtualization. Let’s say you’ve got a project that can span a RAID. You can create a RAID 5 or 6 and then have all of your projects sitting on that RAID as virtual volumes. So you can have both an iSCSI and a NAS volume sitting on the same RAID. And, further, since the device supports multiple Ethernet ports, you can have 2, 4 or 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports coming out of the box and connect to it with multiple connections. Hence, you can have a system with 2 or 3 or 4 ports connected back to your box and we’ll stripe the bandwidth over all the ports. That’s called MCS (Multiple Connections per Session). And when we detect that we have multiple ports going back to that RAID we’ll use them all, just like Fibre Channel will. So if one gets dropped, the system keeps going.

We’ll be highlighting GraniteSTOR abcSAN and EasyAoE at NAB, but, I’ll tell you, our business for Final Cut Pro editing over Ethernet has just exploded recently. With our cards in a server and some extra memory plus fast storage, you can easily have 6 or 8 clients, sometimes as many as 20 or 30 depending on the speed you need, editing off of a single server. Bentley University came up to me at MacWorld to tell me that they had 30 MacBooks editing off one server, just using one of our 6 port Gigabit Ethernet cards. Take the basic premise of buying a fast card and sticking it in your server, buying a fast switch that really moves a lot of data and then editing over the network-it’s so much less expensive than $30K to $40K XSAN, that people just can’t believe it. That’s been our toughest problem: People look at a $6K or $7K system and don’t trust it’s going to work. So lucky for us, we have lots of case studies we can point to.