Rasilient Storage - Wanting To Introduce Themselves To My Office

Rasilient was recently a part of Milestone's technology showcase at our annual US kickoff, and before that I had met with them while I lived in Australia. I believe our Melbourne team still have a system in the rack for testing, though I don't know if Tas has put it through it's paces yet.

My understanding of their strategy is that they have much more cache than usual in a write-back cache, and strategically cache writes to keep IO as sequential as possible. There's some other bonuses regarding intelligently cloning to spare disks when a drive is beginning to go bad.

A lot of this is Milestone-centric but if it helps, you can review their solution here:

https://www.milestonesys.com/solution-finder/rasilient-systems/nfd-systems/

To get past all the marketing-speak, scroll down and click on the link to download the certification results under documents & whitepapers.

I know they have been around for a long time and they were often rep'ed by the same firms that carried Arecont.

We reached out to them at the end of 2012 to do an article, sending them a list of 13 questions. They responded saying they wanted to wait 6 months to answer them, they never followed, and we rarely get requests for them.

They and Promise (even more so) seem to be ramping up marketing for video surveillance recently.

Everybody has 'secret sauce' (remember Intransa), nobody can ever really prove it.

I would take there power points, key point indicators and break them down like a well honed internet troll. Dissect each caveat application and develop a strategy to challenge them with real world case scenarios (Your own experiences). If they survive all your attacks or buy you lunch and start sending gift packages to your office then ask if you can bench their product in house prior to publishing this to your customer base. Again if they endure spitefully wicked security knowledge and awry tutelage perhaps gives them a shot at tapping in. Everyone's got to eat, however I choose to serve appetizers last. Stay razor sharp!

Maybe I can ask them to contact John Honovich and respond to his 13 questions before I agree to meet with them... :)

This is Sean Chang, CEO of Rasilient. I think we have something special to offer. We focus on mission critical projects, where losing video, down time are unacceptable.

Some customer examples are the Public Safety Department of City of San Francisco. Chile Mint uses our products. Our most recent big project is Qatar Doha Festival City with 8PB of storage.

We are a engineering focus company. We like to solve customers problems. What kinds of problems? When you add more cameras, increasing resolution, frame rate, upgrade firmware, and even under drive failure, you don't want to see losing video, or recording gaps. Our Milestone certification is done under a drive failure with the RAID rebuild condition while recording 1K HD cameras. People normally point to storage when they have performance problem. So, we provide visibility if our storage cannot handle the load.

Another concern is RAID rebuild time. Now, it takes a week with 10TB drive. People hesitate to use large capacity drives as another drive failure during the rebuild (e.g., RAID5) the whole RAID is gone. We solve this problem with our "cloning" technology.

Replacing a failed drive is a hassle because our customers have to travel hours to the site. Because surveillance is normally managed by 3rd party outside. So, we look carefully at the reason for drive failures. We eliminate "transient" errors, or false alarm for drive failures.

A lot of these are done in our storage controller, where is built from scratch and only deals with the surveillance traffic. Some of our competitors have products for several verticals. It is very hard, as an engineer myself, to optimize for different traffic patterns.