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8 Hot Startups: This year's choices emphasize carrier economics
by Joan Engebretson
"You can't move a data center to the edge of the network," says Dennis Hoffman, president and co-founder of Storigen, developer of what Hoffman calls the first and only "edge storage server."
Although Storigen initially is pinning most of its hopes on the enterprise market, the company's product ultimately could play a key role in supporting service providers' content delivery initiatives, including Web-based video-on-demand. Such Internet-based offerings will only take off if they're different from TV, says Hoffman. "One-to-many delivery is solved by TV," says Hoffman. "If 1000 people want to see the same thing at the same time, you can use a broadcast model. But if each of those 1000 people wants to see the same thing one second apart, that's where traditional servers break. The service provider is forced to massively deploy storage and servers to handle it."
Storigen's edge storage server is designed to address this "simultaneity of access problem," says Hoffman. The system provides up to 40 terabytes of capacity - enough to fill two OC-192 pipes - and eliminates the need for multiple servers and load balancing. The system also will support differentiated classes of storage services, with higher or lower delivery guarantees. Wholesale ISPs, along with local exchange carriers deploying DSL or other broadband access providers, are among Storigen's service provider prospects.
Tony Prigmore, senior analyst for consultancy Enterprise Storage Group, applauds Storigen's offering. "We study 200 companies in the storage market. These guys have a really unique position and that's not something we say very often."
Storigen consolidates the functionality of four different types of servers-including caching, streaming, file serving, and a standard Web server, says Prigmore. "That makes management way easier and lowers total cost of ownership. And the price point is so low that it doesn't take CIO-level approval."
Those economics could cause service providers to adopt the product now, even if they aren't ready to deploy on-demand services, says Prigmore.
From America's Network
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