SNW - Storage vendors continue product march

27.10.2004
Von Bob Francis

Storage companies continued to demonstrate a wealth of new products and technologies Wednesday at the Storage Networking World in Orlando.

Nexsan Technologies demonstrated its SATAblade SATA (Serial ATA) storage system designed for businesses requiring a scalable, high-performance storage solution. SATAblade supports the latest 10,000 RPM SATA drives in an extreme density, low-profile form factor that can store as much as 3.2TB of data.

Network Executive Software Inc. (NetEx) showed off its new remote IP storage application architecture that uses the company"s IP acceleration technology. The new architecture for IP storage applications attaches to an existing network infrastructure and requires no changes to servers/storage controllers, applications, and network devices, according to company officials.

Also demonstrating new technologies at the show was LSI Logic Corp. The company demonstrated its iMegaRAID iSCSI storage controller, a near line storage solution that uses Intel Corp."s IOP321 I/O processor. LSI Logic utilized disk backup software from Yosemite Technologies Inc. to demonstrate using the system as a simple backup solution. "In the end user-tiered storage model, it is important to be able to quickly back up data while storing or retrieving data from the near line storage," said Kevin Reinis, CEO at Yosemite Technologies.

Iomega Corp. showed off its recently announced disk-to-disk autoloaders, the Iomega REV Autoloader 1000. Designed to replace SCSI-based tape autoloaders and other backup devices in small and midsize business networks, Iomega"s REV Autoloader 1000 will ship during the fourth quarter. The Iomega REV Autoloader 1000 is a single-drive desktop device featuring 10 slots for a native capacity of 350GB using software compression.

Also at the show, Emulex Corp. announced its new family of 4Gbps I/O controllers and HBAs. The new controllers and HBAs maintain backward compatibility with existing 1Gbps and 2Gbps Fibre Channel SANs.

Computer Associates International Inc. unveiled a new option for its BrightStor ARCserve Backup Enterprise that ties the backup snapshot technology included with Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Ltd., and EMC Corp. storage arrays with Microsoft Corp. Windows 2003 Server"s Volume Shadow Copy Service. CA says the option will give users access to nearly instantaneous backup and recovery.