It’s always interesting to watch as companies exit stealth with new products intended to address perceived market needs or shortcomings.  This week, Exablox, a new player in the increasingly crowded storage space, exited stealth and announced their OneBlox/OneSystem storage hardware/management software combination.  As a company, Exablox has made it their mission to “reinvent” storage and address a number of the pain points that storage buyers face today, particularly SMB and midmarket organizations that face the same growing data management challenges but that may not have the funds nor the staff to acquire and manage a larger enterprise grade system.  Exablox’s goal is to bring some enterprise grade features downmarket in an easy to use and affordable system.

Exablox takes the “disk is cheap” approach to data protection and eschews some of the data protections structures – such as RAID – that have traditionally been used to protect data. Instead, Exablox breaks files down into 32KB blocks and creates three copies of every one and spreads them out across multiple hard drives or multiple OneBlox appliances, described below.  This approach means that organizations are able to use about one-third of the total capacity of their systems.  Given just how cheap hard drives can be these days, this isn’t a bad approach.  Each array can support up to 32 TB of raw capacity when using 4 TB SATA disks.  In addition, each OneBlox has a solid state disk that stores the object index, making it very fast to look up data location.

The 2U OneBlox appliance is the hardware portion of the equation and Exablox has taken its cues from other industry players in how storage should be handled.  For example, to add additional capacity to a OneBlox appliance with available hard drives slots – each appliance has eight 3.5” hard drive slots that can accept SATA, SAS, and SSD – the administrator simply buys a hard drive and slides it into the appliance.  From there, OneSystem, Exablox’s cloud-based management tool, picks up the new device and makes it a part of the storage pool.  Likewise, it’s possible to replace smaller capacity disks with larger capacity ones using a similar technique.  If you’re thinking that this sounds a lot like Drobo, you’re right.  In fact, Exablox has looked a number of what they consider best of breed players for individual features and they liked how Drobo handled capacity expansion and emulated it for their business array.

Exablox’s triple copy approach means that a customer can suffer the loss of two hard drives in a single appliance or lose up to two OneBlox appliances from a Ring.  A Ring is a cluster of up to six OneBlox devices, providing up to 192 TB of raw capacity – 64 TB usable – to an organization.  Exablox also supports asynchronous replication of data from one Ring to a remote Ring, thereby providing SMB and midmarket organizations with relatively easy to use disaster recovery opportunities.

The Exablox platform takes a RAID-less, LUN-less, volume-less approach to storage wherein administrators simply log into the OneSystem – a single OneSystem account manages all of a company’s OneBlox appliances – and create shared folders that are then accessed using the Server Message Block (SMB) or Common Internet File System (CIFS).  No other protocols are supported and that’s actually by design.  Exablox’s intended to bring just enough to the platform to make it powerful and easy to use, but does not add features not commonly used in SMB/midmarket spaces.

On the data protection front, Exablox provides customers with continuous data protection, enabling very granular recovery of older versions of files.  Better yet, these previous file versions are completely accessible to end users through the familiar Windows Explorer interface.  On the encryption side, Exablox provides 256-bit AES encryption by default across the system, and this functionality cannot be disabled.

Likewise, many of OneBlox’s other features can’t be disabled or modified, either.  This includes the product’s inline deduplication capability, which is also always on by default.  The reason: Exablox aims to make storage simple by changing what it means to “manage” storage.  By providing fewer touch points and making sure that things just work, the company hopes to win the hearts and minds of SMB and midmarket organizations that think that enterprise-class storage is out of their reach or too complicated to manage.

Pricing for an individual OneBlox node starts just under $10,000 for a 32 TB unit $312.50 per TB or just over 30 cents per GB, which is pretty cheap when compared to other solutions) and under $40,000 for a replicated four-node 64TB disaster recovery solution.  Given the plethora of options on the market today, Exablox’s pricing will make it an attractive option for many. The company will start shipping product later this year.