Street price of under $20k opens SMB market

BridgeSTOR emerged from stealth, offering solutions that feature advanced data reduction for VMware and backup. These products are the first application optimized storage appliances from the privately funded venture. BridgeSTOR’s founder and CEO is John Matze, a well-known “serial entrepreneur” in the storage industry.
CRN Magazine recognized Matze, one of the original authors of the iSCSI protocol, as one of the Top 25 Innovators. The publication further recognized him in 2010 as a ‘Storage Superstar.’ He is responsible for creating notable products including the Overland Storage REO family and the Siafu iSCSI Swarm. Matze most recently served as Vice President of Storage System Products for Exar, Inc.

BridgeSTOR’s Application Optimized Storage (AOS) appliances are based on two innovative virtual storage technologies: Virtual Storage-Advanced Data Reduction (VS-ADR) that performs inline data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning and encryption and Virtual Input/Output – Network Attachment (VIO-NA), a 10GbE technology that delivers superior performance and reduced latency for both VMware virtual machines and Hypervisor tasks including vMotion and Storage vMotion.

BridgeSTOR’s advanced data reduction reduces storage capacity requirements by up to 80 percent and is priced for the cost-conscious SMB storage buyer, with a street price under $20,000.

“We set out to provide advanced data reduction solutions that storage buyers can use today and into the future,” said company founder and CEO John Matze. “Primary and secondary storage data reduction are among the most in-demand technologies in IT departments, but the SMB customer has been shut out of the market until now by price and complexity. BridgeSTOR’s Application Optimized Storage appliances change that dynamic.”

BridgeSTOR announced two purpose-built storage appliances in its AOS product line today: the BridgeSTOR AOS Appliance for VMware Virtualization, a certified VMware Ready™ appliance, and the AOS Backup Exec 2010 Deduplicating Backup Appliance, an all-in-one appliance that includes the Symantec Backup Exec 2010 Deduplication Suite.

The BridgeSTOR AOS Appliance for VMware provides up to 30 TBs of virtualized capacity and optional high availability and 10 GbE connectivity for VMware environments.

The BridgeSTOR AOS Appliance for Backup Exec 2010 combines Symantec’s Data Deduplication Suite with BridgeSTOR’s hardware-accelerated data compression to reduce backup data by as much as 90 percent, effectively delivering the equivalent of up to 200 TBs of virtual backup-to-disk capacity in 2U of rack space containing 25 2.5-inch low-energy-consumption disk drives.

“Organizations of all sizes are grappling with explosive data growth and the need to store, manage and protect their valuable business information. Storage efficiency technologies like deduplication, compression and thin provisioning are fast becoming an essential toolset to effectively manage this rapid data growth,” said Robert Amatruda, Research Director for Data Protection and Recovery at IDC. “Solutions such as BridgeSTOR AOS appliances that complement widely-adopted solution areas such as VMware virtualization and data backup, will be highly attractive to small and medium-sized companies as well as smaller departments and workgroups within large enterprises.”

Joining John Matze at the helm of BridgeSTOR is company president Dawn Matze who will head up the team. She is a seasoned leader with more than 20 years of executive management experience. She was vice-president of marketing for Siafu Software and prior to Siafu she was president of San Diego, Calif.-based Crossware Development Corp. for 15 years, where she supervised multimillion-dollar custom projects.

BridgeSTOR AOS appliances will have a street price under $20,000 and will be available through select channel partners.

For more information: www.bridgestor.com.