ScaleIO is a young startup that’s still working on getting its name out there, but what it lacks in marketing it more than makes up for with its software.  ScaleIO’s flagship product is a scale-out storage system that replaces regular SAN with a virtual parallel that runs on local disks rather than more expansive external storage.

By confining the SAN to the application server, the company says it can cut storage costs by 80 percent and deliver direct savings of up to 28 percent. The technology has been implemented by the likes of SAP, Check Point and Colt.

ScaleIO came out of stealth today and launched ECS v1.1, the latest version of its offering.  The big improvement is that the new release supports all the major Linux distributions and hypervisors, along with “any SSD or HDD of type, model, or speed.” To top it all off, the product is not only optimized for Intel x86 standard architecture but also ARM and other chipsets.

“Software-defined storage enables IT organizations to break out of the traditional SAN model that requires a staff of minions to perform mundane storage tasks,” commented Matthew Brisse, storage research director at Gartner. “Software-defined storage enables the promise of storage elasticity to match storage needs for traditional, virtual, and service-oriented cloud strategies in response to the ever‑changing business requirements found in most IT organizations.”

Software-defined storage is becoming quite a trend. Just last week Coraid and Big Switch, an SDN startup that is making a huge splash in Silicon Valley, announced an alliance to develop something very similar. This upcoming product will fuse sophisticated networking virtualization software from Big Switch with Coraid tech to automate provisioning and power big data analytics on a massive scale.