Of course, the size of the check may be enough to scare more than one potential customer away. Rainfinity's box still costs $80,000 per appliance, regardless of the amount of storage it's being used for. In addition, users wanting clustering support have to purchase additional modules.
"Youve got to have a burning problem to want to spend that kind of dough," says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. senior analyst Steve Duplessie. He says other larger players in this space -- including NetApp -- would have no problem undercutting Rainfinitys price if they were to introduce such a capability.
But for now, Rainfinity claims to be the only company to offer nondisruptive access to NAS during migration or backup. The startup, founded in 1998 to develop high-availability devices for firewalls, started shipping the first version of its RainStorage NAS management appliance nearly a year ago (see Rainfinity Fakes Out Filers). Both versions are designed to plug into the network between the clients and the server. While NAS backups and migrations typically require taking the data offline, Rainfinitys appliance redirects clients and servers to a copy of the data, allowing non-stop access.
The RainStorage appliance is able to move data in-band during active migration, then revert out-of-band for uninterrupted network performance, the company claims. It doesn't require changes to the users environment or the deployment of software agents on servers or applications.
"You can just drop it into your environment without changing your architecture, says The Clipper Group Inc. analyst Michael Fisch.
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