VENDOR PROFILE Gridstore: A Different Approach to Scale Out Storage Amita Potnis Ashish Nadkarni IDC OPINION Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com Companies of all sizes, including enterprise and midsize, are seeing an increased dependency on technology that is significantly increasing the amount of data generated. The key expectation from a modern IT infrastructure is to maintain a balance between quality of service, providing uninterrupted service, compliance, and data protection, making management complicated. Adding to that, the difficult economic times put enormous pressure on IT personnel across companies to achieve this balance through maximizing the use of existing infrastructure and reducing costs. Midsize companies, while facing the same data growth challenges as the enterprise, need to solve these challenges with multifunctional IT personnel and tighter budgets. Companies no longer saw the benefit of deploying traditional monolithic systems owing to the proliferation of data as performance, and capacity upgrades typically required folklifting existing storage solutions and painful migration processes, not to mention increased expenses. As companies started looking for alternative storage solutions, vendors responded in kind by bringing to market scale-out storage architecture that would allow users to grow their infrastructure on an as-needed basis. Scale-out architecture gave users the benefit of linearly scaling capacity and/or performance in a modular fashion while keeping management simple and costs low. Yet scale-out architecture came with its own set of issues. Scale-out architecture relies on a clustered set of nodes to improve performance and redundancy. Data is typically funneled through a storage controller to keep management simplified. However, this clustered approach still requires a backplane, load balancers, cluster managers, and intercommunication between nodes, which effectively reduce the power and availability of IOPs. Ultimately, this clustered approach still requires overprovisioning of capacity. The storage controller therefore needs to be ighperformance hardware that can handle not only sophisticated software but also the high-speed network and large number of attached disks in the storage system. Since the storage controller is the centrifugal force in the storage infrastructure, it naturally becomes the bottleneck causing performance and latency issues. Gridstore is seeking to simplify this situation, specifically for midsize companies: Gridstore has combined the power of storage nodes, the network, PCs, and servers into a shared storage grid at a fraction of the cost. Gridstore has moved beyond the use of a physical controller node to a virtual storage controller (vcontroller) installed on every client that accesses storage. Gridstore claims that the use of a virtual storage controller reduces costs dramatically while improving performance. Filing Information: October 2012, IDC #237295, Volume: 1 Storage Systems: Vendor Profile
IN THIS VENDOR PROFILE This IDC Vendor Profile reviews Gridstore, a storage company with a scale-out offering that focuses primarily on midsize companies. Gridstore's scale-out storage products provide better performance, reliability, and scaling while offering users a simplified approach to storage. SITUATION OVERVIEW Company Overview Gridstore, a venture-backed company headquartered in Mountain View, California, was founded in January 2009. To date, Gridstore has raised $12.5 million in series A capital from GGV Capital and ONSET Ventures. In December 2009, Gridstore brought to market its Grid-based scale-out storage solution based on The Grid, a combination of software and hardware. At the core of The Grid is a virtual storage controller called the vcontroller. The vcontroller serves as a replacement for a physical controller used in a traditional storage stack. In a traditional storage stack, data is funneled from the storage nodes to the clients through a physical controller that controls I/O from the disks and network. As the storage pool and clients grow, the physical controller needs to be upgraded to better service performance and avoid bottlenecks resulting in additional expenses. Gridstore's vcontroller is software that is installed on every client that would connect to the storage nodes within a storage pool, thus eliminating the need for a physical controller. The vcontroller installed on each client directly connects to a Gridstore storage pool. A storage pool is a collection of Gridstore GS-1000 storage nodes. The Windows-based 1U GS-1000 can support one 1TB or 2TB SATA drive with an Intel Atom Processor and 2GB DDR2 RAM. Each GS-1000 supports one 1GbE connection. A storage pool can have several volumes. Each volume within a storage pool can be configured independently for fault tolerance, capacity, and specific physical storage nodes that will contribute to that volume. A Gridstore volume appears as a standard Microsoft Windows Network Share via MMC snap-in with a drive letter to end users and applications. For additional capacity, mode GS-1000 storage nodes can be added to the storage grid. The Gridstore Management Console finds the freshly added storage nodes, and existing volumes can be expanded or new volumes can be created. The storage nodes primarily accelerate performance as most processing is done at the client side, and they also increase reliability. The Grid is designed for failover and provides increased reliability. For example, when a client writes data to a storage volume, it calculates the redundancy using what Gridstore calls GP. is based on erasure coding technology, leveraged by several leading industry players. This reduces the overhead of replication and allows users to configure as many redundant nodes as required within a volume to safeguard against component or drive failure. Users have the ability to access data in case of storage node failures. Based on the calculation, data is sliced into pieces equal to the number of storage nodes in a volume and written to in parallel by the client. Similarly, a client 2 #237295 2012 IDC
communicates directly with the appropriate storage nodes to retrieve data. The vcontroller and are said to improve performance and reliability. The vcontroller also improves performance by eliminating duplicate data requests. As users grow on a virtual storage grid, the virtual controllers grow organically as well. Since processing is done at the client side, each additional client (and therefore a vcontroller) increases processing power. By doing so, Gridstore claims significant performance improvement. The vcontroller also maintains a list of storage nodes and can directly access any storage node within the storage pool. Gridstore allows its users to leverage existing storage infrastructure by combining it into a storage grid. Data from existing storage infrastructure is spread across storage nodes within the grid to eliminate single points of failure. According to Gridstore, the aggregation of performance and capacity through several smaller components while incorporating existing storage infrastructure leads to a larger reliable and affordable storage grid. This approach tackles the very core issues that midsize companies face: increased data growth, reduced IT budgets, and limited skilled IT personnel. Company Strategy Gridstore has an indirect sales strategy and sells its solution through resellers. The company is predominantly focused on the United States and Japan. It has plans to expand in Europe and has set foot in the United Kingdom in the recent past. Sales through resellers will give Gridstore exposure to a relevant audience not just domestically but across regions and help create its brand image. The company's existing customer base is in the small and midsize enterprise and departments within large enterprises. Its pay-as-you-grow model allows it to be scalable within businesses of all sizes. The company claims to have experienced 100% growth since its initial launch and has 30 customers, including Clackamas Community College, Interweb Technology Group, Heritage Bank, and Diamond Point. Gridstore focuses on companies that are suffering from an influx of data and can no longer afford to scale with traditional storage architectures. FUTURE OUTLOOK Gridstore's go-to-market plan positions itself as a low-budget, high-performance, highly reliable storage grid for midsize companies. Gridstore's solution has been used by several users for various use cases including primary storage, backup and archive, and cloud. In a short span, Gridstore has expanded its vertical base to education, media and entertainment, manufacturing, healthcare, and more. While the solution is appealing from an ease-of-use and upgrade perspective, it is also cost attractive for midsize organizations. Currently, the Grid supports file data but looks to support block as well in 2013. However, like every other aspiring new vendor in the market, Gridstore faces the challenge of creating its brand image as an affordable, reliable, and experienced storage player. 2012 IDC #237295 3
The midrange storage class held 48.2% share of total worldwide external revenue in IDC's 2Q12 Disk Storage Systems Tracker. IDC expects that the midrange storage class will soon cross the 50% revenue share milestone and believes it to be the fastest-growing class. The projected demands on storage create an opportunity for Gridstore to gain mindshare and market share in the coming months as it plans to expand globally. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Advice for Gridstore Gridstore's approach to simplify storage management and improve performance and capacity at a fraction of the cost will resonate well with midsize companies that constantly struggle with the challenges of data growth, tightened budgets, and limited resources. Gridstore's plans to expand sales through resellers will give it traction in the midmarket globally. To expand its horizon, Gridstore must: Standardize on its product terminology. Interchangeable use of NASg for The Grid, virtual storage controller for vcontroller, or RAIDg for is very confusing not only for customers but also for channel partners. Stay focused to penetrate the midmarket by recruiting specific partners that focus on this segment. Expand its support for partners and customers through necessary and targeted marketing materials as it continues to expand into various verticals. LEARN MORE Related Research Worldwide File-Based Storage 2012 2016 Forecast: Solutions for Content Delivery, Virtualization, Archiving, and Big Data Continue to Expand (IDC #235910, July 2012) Worldwide Storage and Virtualized x86 Environments 2012 2016 Forecast (IDC #235868, July 2012) Worldwide File-Based Storage 2011 2015 Forecast: Foundation Solutions for Content Delivery, Archiving, and Big Data (IDC #231910, December 2011) Worldwide Archival Storage Solutions 2011 2015 Forecast: Archiving Needs Thrive in an Information-Thirsty World (IDC #230762, October 2011) 4 #237295 2012 IDC
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