world's first terabyte class SSDs announced in 2003, February week 4 news archive on STORAGEsearch.com


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storage news - 2003, February, week 4

Adaptec Restructures Eliminates 11% of Jobs

MILPITAS, Calif. - February 28, 2003 - Adaptec today announced it has restructured, targeting annualized savings of approximately $17 million.

The restructuring will include staff reductions of approximately 11 percent, or 165 people, through job elimination. Adaptec expects to take a one-time charge of approximately $7 million related to the actions.

"This restructuring will enable us to maintain our investment in new products and technologies while continuing to improve bottom-line results for stockholders," said David A. Young, chief financial officer of Adaptec.

EMC Launches Symmetrix Z8000

Hopkinton, Mass. - February 28, 2003 - EMC today introduced the Symmetrix® z8000 series of networked information storage systems.

Symmetrix z8000 is a pre-packaged, high-end networked storage solution optimized for FICON and ESCON connectivity in mainframe environments. The Symmetrix z8000 series delivers superior price/performance levels for mainframe storage applications in FICON and ESCON environments. When combined with EMC's SRDF and TimeFinder business continuity software, the Symmetrix z8000 provides customers with a feature-rich, high-end mainframe storage solution at highly attractive price points. List prices begin at $258,000 and vary based on configuration.

Editor's notes:- older readers may remember another distinguished product with the Z8000 moniker - a 16 bit processor chip launched by Zilog in the late 1970s which became a serious threat to Intel's nascent 8086.

Zilog was rubbish at marketing the Z8000, and the threat to Intel came from Zilog's second source - AMD - whose campaign "the Z8000 is better" led to more design wins than Zilog's own efforts. Intel killed off the Z8000 by offering AMD second source rights to the 8086 thereby establishing it as the #1 shipping 16 bit processor long before IBM announced its first PC. The original IBM PC used the 8086 architecture with a lower priced 8 bit memory bus chip called the 8088. But that's another story.

Iverdean Launches with Custom CDs Powered by SwiftCD

Atlanta, GA - February 27, 2003 - Iverdean and SwiftCD.com today announced that SwiftCD.com had been chosen by Iverdean to power the Iverdean CD delivery service.

With this new capability, Iverdean customers can offer their digital products on custom, individually produced and shipped CDs - without paying setup fees, maintaining inventory or having any type of minimum volume requirements.

"We're excited to have been selected by Iverdean to power their CD delivery offerings," said Vinnie Jensen, President of SwiftCD.com. "Iverdean was a great fit for us. They were able to integrate rapidly with our system, to quickly and easily offer a customized CD delivery solution to their customers."

"Offering CDs was a critical feature for our launch requirements. We wanted a partner with a tremendous amount of capability, flexibility and experience and SwiftCD was the clear - and only - choice," said Donovan Janus, President of Iverdean. "Thanks to the robust SwiftCD solution, we were able to offer a comprehensive physical fulfillment option to our merchants and customers with minimal implementation on our part."

Iverdean merchants can update their CD master content at any time and can include dynamically generated content (content that updates with each CD produced), such as unique registration codes. Merchants determine their own customer CD pricing - thus can choose to give away CDs, for example, as a premium incentive item, or can mark up the CDs to generate revenue.

Lucent reaches agreement with SEC

MURRAY HILL, N.J. - February 27, 2003 -Lucent Technologies today said that the company reached an agreement in principle with the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would resolve the commission's investigation of the company.

The agreement is subject to final approval of the commission.

In November and December 2000, Lucent identified certain revenue recognition issues that it publicly disclosed and brought to the SEC's attention. Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Lucent said it would consent to a settlement enjoining the company from future violations of the anti-fraud, reporting, books and records and internal control provisions of the federal securities laws. Under the agreement in principle, the company would pay no fines or penalties and would not be required to make any financial restatements. The settlement would conclude the SEC's investigation of Lucent.

QLogic Fibre Down Now Shipping in IBM BladeCenter

ALISO VIEJO, Calif. - February 26, 2003 - QLogic . today announced that its Fibre Down™ I/O architecture is now shipping in IBM eServer BladeCenter systems.

Fibre Down is the integration of single-chip Fibre Channel host bus adapters, management controllers and switches onto blade servers.

Dataram Doubles Memory in HP's Itanium 2 Workstations

Princeton, NJ - February 26, 2003 - Dataram today announced the availability of memory upgrades for HP zx2000 and zx6000 workstations.

In addition to the standard 512MB, 1GB and 2GB memory options, Dataram features a 4GB memory upgrade that expands the HP zx2000 to 8GB of total memory and the HP zx6000 to 24GB - the largest amount of memory to date configured in an Intel-based workstation. This memory option is currently not available from HP and represents another first to market product from Dataram.

Texas Memory Systems Announces the Tera-RamSan

Houston, Texas - February 26, 2003 - Texas Memory Systems announces a ground-breaking SAN system for enterprise storage customers interested in the ultimate in performance for their mission critical data: the Tera-RamSan, providing up to 1 Terabyte of non-volatile solid state disk for the enterprise that requires unlimited performance.

The Tera-RamSan is the ultimate storage device. With a storage unit based on SDRAM, it has an access time measured in microseconds instead of milliseconds as is usually found on rotational devices. The Tera-RamSan utilizes 32 RamSan-220 (SSD storage) modules, known as the World Fastest Storage®. The Tera-RamSan provides an astonishing 2 million IOPS, a 1024 gigabyte capacity, and 128 2-Gbit Fibre Channel links. It requires 2 racks and 5000 watts.

The Tera-RamSan represents our solution to realistic requests from a broad range of entities from the U.S. Military to Fortune 500 companies who have requested Terabyte solid state disks for applications such as database acceleration, high definition video access/editing, OLTP, data retrieval, ERP, and SAN storage. Lower SDRAM prices make the Tera-RamSan a realistic competitor to other Enterprise storage solutions with much smaller RAM caches. The Tera-RamSan offers industry leading price-per-IOPS.

The Tera-RamSan incorporates specially designed 2-Gbit Fibre Channel interfaces that include performance-enhancing hardware to reduce I/O latency to under 20 microseconds. With I/O requests being served so quickly, an order of magnitude more requests per second are executed by a single Tera-RamSan interface as compared to other Fibre Channel interfaces. By scaling RamSan devices to 32 units (4 Fibre Channel links per unit), the Tera-RamSan is the ultimate storage solution for high-performance applications in total IOPS and total bandwidth. Also, because the Tera-RamSan is SDRAM based, there is NO penalty for RANDOM accesses. Data requests need not be tuned for performance. User access time is not compromised, even if tens of thousands of users access the system simultaneously. Extreme performance is the key feature of the Tera-RamSan.

"We see the Tera-RamSan filling a unique niche for companies that require high-performance and high capacities," said Holly Frost, CEO of Texas Memory Systems. Texas Memory Systems has always focused on providing the World's Fastest Storage®. "The Tera-RamSan confirms our industry-leading performance and engineering capability."

The Tera-RamSan costs $1.6 million, making it a great value for those demanding the best performance in a storage subsystem.

...Later:- in the following decade the SSD market expanded significantly as you can see in SSD market history. See also:- this way to the Petabyte SSD.

Acer selects LSI's Ultra320 PCI RAID

MILPITAS, Calif. - February 26, 2003 - LSI Logic today announced an agreement to supply its market leading Ultra320 PCI RAID storage adapters to Acer's high-performance tower and rack mount server lines.

Acer will offer LSI Logic's MegaRAID SCSI 320-1 and MegaRAID SCSI 320-2 storage adapters across all high volume and enterprise class server lines including the Altos G510, a powerful and reliable general-purpose server. The G510 features dual Intel® Xeon® processors, ideal for meeting the needs of most small-to-larger business server requirements.

"Acer's commitment to offer an extensive line of caring and innovative server solutions reinforced our decision to select LSI Logic Ultra320 MegaRAID® solutions," said Evis Lin, Head of Enterprise Product Line, IT Product Business Group, Acer Inc. "By offering proven, fault tolerant storage adapters that deliver enterprise class features, such as background initialization, fast and efficient online array rebuilds, and online capacity expansion and RAID level migration, the Acer Altos and LSI Logic MegaRAID solutions allow the flexibility and scalability our customers demand."

Designed with a low-profile (MD2) form factor for tight enclosure environments, the MegaRAID SCSI 320-1 incorporates high-performance I/O processor-based technology, and is ideal for high-density server environments. The half-size, dual-channel MegaRAID SCSI 320-2, featuring the LSI Logic LSI53C1030 dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI controller, targets high-performance, mid-range servers and I/O intensive environments requiring dual-channel RAID configurations.

Cisco Qualifies Emulex Host Bus Adapters

COSTA MESA, Calif. - February 26, 2003 - Emulex today announced its LightPulse family of HBAs are tested and qualified byCisco Systems for use with its Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches.

The qualification of Emulex HBAs is a result of rigorous testing conducted at Cisco's state-of-the-art interoperability lab, and ensures complete compatibility of Emulex host bus adapters and Cisco MDS 9000 Family.

"Qualification of Emulex's market-leading HBAs ensures that the Cisco MDS 9000 Family are compatible with both Emulex's large installed base of more than 900,000 HBAs and new SAN infrastructure deployments," said Bill Erdman, director of Technology Alliances in the Storage Technology Group at Cisco. "We look forward to continuing our close working relationship with Emulex, and are confident that the two companies' industry-leading products deliver the robust features and functionality that our mutual customers demand."

ClariStor changes name again to ONStor

LOS GATOS, Calif. - February 25, 2003 - ClariStor announced today its new corporate name, ONStor.

The ONStor name reflects the company's commitment to deliver a new class of file services that offers an always-on storage environment. ONStor's innovative SAN filer solutions combine a petabyte-scalable storage architecture and high-availability software to deliver continuous data access and complete data protection.

"Our new company name accentuates our dedication to fundamentally changing the way companies access, store, manage, and protect data across the storage network," said Bob Miller, president and CEO of ONStor. "The introduction of ONStor underscores our vision to deliver an always-on storage environment for continuously available file services."

Editor's comments:- the marketing ineptitude of a $40 million funded start up company which has changed its name twice before even achieving anything in market terms is not unusual.

See also:- article:- Marketing Nomenclature, and the Naming of Names

New release of VERITAS NetBackup

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.- February 25, 2003 - VERITAS Software today announced significant new enhancements to its VERITAS NetBackup™ data protection software, helping companies to dramatically reduce data center downtime through new technologies focused on streamlining backup and recovery performance.

Key new features of the new VERITAS NetBackup 4.5 Feature Pack include:

Instant Recovery Option - allows companies to recover data directly from disk, virtually eliminating data center downtime

Streamlined Microsoft Exchange Support - faster backup and recovery at the mailbox-level of Microsoft Exchange environments through single instance store technology

Integrated Disaster Recovery - new tape management and reporting capability helps companies better manage the transport of backup tapes to an off-site location and easily integrate local backup programs with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan

These and other new features extend the technology leadership of VERITAS data protection software, which commands 48.8% percent of the UNIX and Windows backup and recovery market.

VERITAS NetBackup™ 4.5 Feature Pack is now available globally from VERITAS Software and through VERITAS Software's network of authorized partners starting at a suggested retail price of $5,000 for Windows and Linux platforms and $10,000 for UNIX platforms.

Unisys Provides Worldwide Support for MaXXan

SAN JOSE, CA - February 25, 2003 - MaXXan today announced a global service and support agreement with Unisys.

Under this agreement, Unisys will provide a range of installation and support services for MaXXan's storage networking solutions, which include the SG100™ NAS gateway and the MXV320™ intelligent storage switch and computing platform. MaXXan's customers are now able to place service and support calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using toll-free phone numbers or by accessing MaXXan's website through a user-friendly web-based tool. Effective immediately, the agreement initially covers North America and, as MaXXan expands its distribution channels to other parts of the world, Unisys will extend coverage through its global network of local providers.

Snap increases capacity for 1100, 2200, & 4100 NAS

SAN JOSE, Calif. - February 25, 2003 - Snap Appliance. today announced it has increased the storage capacities of all models in all three of the successful Snap Server® 1100, 2200 and 4100 NAS series by as much as 100% to 120G, 240G and 320G respectively.

This, along with enhancements to Snap's robust, award-winning SnapOS™ operating system, makes the popular Snap Server NAS appliances an even greater value. These Snap Servers deliver full multi-platform file sharing in mixed Windows, Netware, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh environments and come standard with PowerQuest's DataKeeper backup software, which enables secure, automated backups of unlimited clients in a Windows environment without any licensing fees. Snap Servers automatically connect to all supported networking protocols without additional configuration of other servers or clients on the network. All of these models feature an auto-sensing 10/100 Ethernet connection.

Double-Take is IBM TotalStorage Proven Status

Hoboken, N.J. - February 25, 2003 - NSI Software today announced its Double-Take® product has achieved the comprehensive level of testing under IBM's TotalStorage Proven Program.

This qualification can help reduce customer risk and speed deployment by delivering an interoperable solution using Double-Take and IBM's NAS product offering. Double-Take combined with IBM's TotalStorage NAS 200, 300 or 300G helps provide customers with an affordable and reliable data protection solution for continuous data availability.

"We understand that business continuity and disaster recovery are top of mind with IT professionals and this program helps provide customers the tools they need for timely selection and implementation of interoperable solutions," said Kathleen Smith, vice president of Emerging Business Markets, IBM Systems Group. "Participating in the IBM TotalStorage Proven Program assures customers that NSI Software's Double-Take product interoperates with our broad portfolio of NAS TotalStorage products and helps them quickly design and develop high-quality solutions."

Double-Take is IBM TotalStorage Proven Status

India - February 25, 2003 - Moser Baer India today announced that it has signed a strategic long-term sourcing deal with Imation. to provide high quality optical media solutions.

In another significant development, both the companies have entered into a strategic Joint Venture in which 51% of the equity will be held by Imation Corp. The Venture, entailing a total investment of US$10 million, will focus on customer servicing, long-term technology transfer and Joint R&D. Both these developments could result in incremental revenues of approximately US $100 million per annum for Moser Baer, catapulting the company into a global leadership position in the optical storage media industry.

"The marriage of Moser Baer's competence in process technology, rapid commercialization and world class manufacturing, with Imation's global presence, strong technology and Intellectual property portfolio, creates a very powerful combination. " said Deepak Puri, CMD, Moser Baer India. "This deal strengthens Moser Baer's global competitive positioning and will significantly enhance future earnings flows, thereby benefiting all stake holders' added Mr. Deepak Puri.

Imation Corp will significantly enhance Moser Baer's global reach and presence by helping grow its marketshare in the US, which is one of the largest and relatively more lucrative markets for optical storage media. Additionally, the JV Company will effectively and efficiently target new high growth markets like Africa, the Middle East and South America, and also address new market segments.

Techno Systems Research Co expects sales of DVDR/RW media to explode to over 2 billion units by CY06, from 123.7 million units in CY02, as DVDR/RW drive and media prices decline. This in turn will fuel a sharp growth in the installed base of DVD drives and correspondingly an explosion in the demand for media

IEI Launches 2TB rackmount NAS

Taipei, Taiwan - February 25, 2003 - IEI today announced the launch of two new NAS units aimed directly at enterprise-level clients.

The NAS-4300 and NAS-4300S are both 3U, 19" rack-mountable devices, equipped with a high-power Intel Pentium 4 processor and a vast amount of RAM, with a storage capacity of up to 2TB.

"The launch of the NAS-4300 series brings IEI's storage solutions in to higher plane," said Simon Hsieh, IEI's Chief Strategic Officer, "and the extra power, performance and features of these two new products now offers the most demanding enterprises around the world the opportunity to consolidate their data and files in the most cost-effective manner."

Put a new spring in the step of your old mainframe

Editor:- February 2003

Who do you call to speed up your old mainframe?

If you're managing a bunch of high end 64 bit servers from Sun or IBM then during the last year or so you've been seeing dismal speed ups in new processor performance, with clock speeds barely crawling ahead. Even if you could afford to upgrade your processors, is it worth it just to get maybe 10% more real performance?

But even if you get more megahertz, the real bottlenecks for most users are in their networks and mass storage.

As we reported last summer, there are dozens of companies which have been working on wire speed iSCSI accelerators which will enable users to get SAN type performance from their legacy IP based cabling. But most of that performance isn't realised in practise with the relatively slow access speeds of rotating disk drives. That's why users have been turning to Solid State Disk manufacturers for solutions that boost their database access when everything else has failed.

The recent announcement by Imperial Technology that they are now offering 1 million IOPS solid state storage with upto 1TB capacity is good news for all users who feel constrained by their current applications server speed. This is five times faster than the fastest storage products shipping to commercial users in 2002, and 25% faster than specialist storage systems used by the military.

Even if you don't think you're in the market for a $2 million storage accelerator right this minute, you will benefit from the trickle down effect from this class of product soon. Remember, there was a time when 32 bit processors were considered to be the stuff of minicomputers based in computer rooms. Now they're in your kid's den.

There was a time when fuel injection was a research project on the racetrack. Now it's just the letter "i" above your car's rear bumper.

The price points for solid state storage track memory prices, and their capacity tracks Moore's law. So over the next few years it will become a standard option to have a solid state disk accelerator fitted to most medium level servers.

What could you do with a million IOPS system?

Chances are it's a different way of working than what you're doing right now. Now is the time to start planning for a new applications environment which puts more intelligence in the sharp end.

Your kids have been using solid state storage to speed up their computer games for years. It's now something that the data center can afford too.

...Later:- less than a week later, rival Texas Memory Systems reclaimed title to their "World Fastest Storage®" crown by announcing the Tera-RamSan, a terabyte SSD system with 2 million IOPS random access performance. The buyer is always the winner in hot markets like this.

.....

SSD topics from A to Z

1.0" SSDs
1.8" SSDs
2.5" SSDs - all
2.5" PCI Express SSDs
3 contenders once threatened flash SSDs
3.5" SSDs

7 SSDs is all you need for enterprise
11 key symmetries in SSD architecture

2012 - SSD market milestones

About the publisher -21 years of guides
Acquisitions in the SSD market
Adaptive R/W flash management in SSDs
Advertising SSDs
After SSDs... what next?
Analysts - SSD market
Animal brands in the SSD market
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Architecture guide - storage
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Bad block management in flash SSDs
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Branding Strategies in the SSD market
Buyers Guide to SSDs

Calling for an end to SSD vs HDD IOPS
Can you tell me the best way to SSD Street?
Chips - storage interface / processors
Chips - SSD on a chip & DOMs
Cloud storage - with SSD twists
Consumer SSDs guide
Controller chips for SSDs
Cost of SSDs - why so much?

Data integrity in flash SSDs
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Disk sanitizers
DSP in SSD IP

Education - re SSDs
Enterprise MLC SSDs - how safe?
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Endurance - in flash SSDs
Enter the SSD market - 3 easy ways
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Failure model flaws in SSDs

Fast purge / erase SSDs
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Flash Memory
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flash SSD vs RAM SSD
Forecasts for SSD market

Garbage Collection - SSD jargon
Green storage

Hard disk drives
HDD vs SSD
High availability enterprise SSDs
History of data storage
History of SSD market
Hybrid Drives

Iceberg syndrome - invisible SSD capacity
Industrial SSDs
InfiniBand
IOPS - a problematic metric for flash SSDs
iSCSI SSDs

Jargon - flash SSD

Legacy vs New Dynasty SSDs

Market research (all storage)
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military / rugged data storage
MLC - in SSD jargon
MLC in enterprise SSDs

NAS
News page
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ORGs

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Perspectives - on the SSD market
Petabyte SSD roadmap
Power loss - sudden in SSDs
Power, Speed & Strength in SSD brands
Price of SSDs - where does the money go?

Rackmount SSDs
RAID systems (incl RAIC RAISE etc)
RAM cache ratios in flash SSDs
RAM memory chips
RAM SSDs
RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs
Reliability factors in SSD design

SAN - FC
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Testing SSDs
Top 20 SSD companies
Transitions in the SSD market
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USB SSDs
User value propositions for buying SSDs

VC funds in storage
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Wear leveling
What's an SSD?
What's the best way to design a flash SSD?

Zero RPM SSDs killed 20K hard drives

more articles on StorageSearch.com

the Survivor's Guide to Enterprise SSDs - a list of do's and don'ts

the Business Case for SSD ASAPs - (Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage) - also includes directory of articles re auto-tiering and caching

what do enterprise SSD users want? - and why aren't vendors asking.

how fast can your SSD run backwards? - 11 Key a/Symmetries in SSD design

The big market impact of SSD dark matter - some of the very biggest direct customer opportunities for SSDs aren't the big name computer and storage oems.

Where are we now with SSD software? - (And how did we get into this mess?)

adaptive R/W flash care management IP (including DSP) for SSDs - what is it? and who does it? This will be a disruptive transition.

enterprise SSDs - exploring the limits of the market in your head - is about enterprise SSD futurology.

Can you tell me the best way to SSD Street? - I'm like the Old Woman of the SSD Village who talks to everyone that passes through. No wonder I have a unique perspective. It would be strange if I didn't.

comparing the SSD market today to earlier tech disruptions - applying a sense of perspective to what's happening now with SSDs

The NAS-4300 series is equipped with 8 IDE drive bays, as well as two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, capable of supporting load balancing and network failure. The NAS-4300S offers an additional 16 x 10/100 auto-sensing switch ports, making it one of the most all-round network storage products on the market with also one of the lowest TCOs.

...

Data can be protected using RAID levels 0, 1 and 5, with the IDE drives being hot swappable in case of a drive failure. Additionally the NAS-4300 series offers three hot swappable ATX power supplies, and has an RS-232 port for UPS management to ensure absolute minimal down time. In addition to the RAID functionality, the NAS-4300 and NAS-4300S are also equipped with an Ultra SCSI 160 port, so that the units can be directly connected to tape backup drive, ensuring additional data protection.

Like all NAS products from IEI, the user-friendly software developed in-house - is incredibly simple to use, and available in an array of languages. IEI has also added several features to the new version of firmware including a journaling file system and even faster hard drive check and format. It is NFS version 3 compatible, making it able to work with extremely large file sizes, with 2GB upwards no longer an issue, and users are able to access the previously saved version of the file thanks to a snapshot feature.

Available through IEI's extensive network of distribution channels globally, and also on show at the forthcoming CeBIT exhibition in Hannover, the NAS-4300 provides a reliable, high-power, high-capacity storage solution at a very aggressive price.

FalconStor Expands IPStor Framework

MELVILLE, N.Y. - February 25, 2003 - FalconStor Software. today announced full support for the new iSCSI standard ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

FalconStor's recently announced IPStor version 4.0, scheduled to be released in Q2 2003, will meet the IETF-ratified iSCSI standard. FalconStor is currently working with channel and OEM partners to conduct beta deployments of iSCSI storage area networks with customers across a wide spectrum of industries including legal, manufacturing, education and government.

"FalconStor envisioned iSCSI as an important part of a company's storage infrastructure, and we implemented significant interoperability testing and certifications with our partners prior to the standardization to ensure that our customers had a running start and a robust choice of iSCSI configurations to choose from," said Jon Greene, FalconStor director of product marketing. "FalconStor will continue to work with our OEM and channel partners to deliver solutions that leverage today's standards and future protocols as a cost-effective SAN solution for mid-size companies and larger enterprises."

Nibble on speicherguide.de

Editor:- February 25, 2003 - a new German storage portal called speicherguide.de is running a translated version of a recent article from STORAGEsearch.com today.

For our German speaking readers, speicherguide.de may be worth a visit because many of the news stories also have locally generated content.

See also:- storage portals, Sun VARs in Germany

HP Launches iSCSI Router

PALO ALTO, Calif - February 24, 2003 - HP today introduced the StorageWorks SR2122 iSCSI storage router which provides a cost-efficient entry point to IP storage by extending the benefits of existing SANs to isolated, "stranded" servers through IP networks.

Based on the new standard iSCSI protocol, the device integrates TCP/IP and Fibre Channel connectivity in a single unit. The HP iSCSI storage router provides block-level, location-independent data storage and retrieval. Enterprises can deploy the product to consolidate storage resources, centralize backup, improve disk utilization, shorten storage implementation and simplify storage management.

Available immediately, the HP StorageWorks SR2122 is a multi-protocol storage router with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, for connectivity to standard TCP/IP networks, and 2-gigabit Fibre Channel interfaces for connectivity to a SAN. Fully qualified and tested by HP standards, the device offers iSCSI connectivity for X86 servers, including HP ProLiant BL series blade servers, as well as HP StorageWorks HSG80 products, the HP StorageWorks Modular SAN Array 1000, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays and all major enterprise backup solutions. Estimated U.S. list pricing is $9,995.

Nishan Systems New Channel Partner Program

San Jose, CA - February 24, 2003 - Nishan Systems today announced its new Nishan Partner Program and the expansion of its channel sales initiative worldwide.

The Nishan Partner Program facilitates sales and support of Nishan products by providing highly effective sales and marketing tools, pre-sales and technical training, and rapid response sales, marketing and technical assistance from Nishan. Nishan's innovative architecture opens new market opportunities for channel partners in such areas as data replication over long distances, SAN Internetworking, data center IP SANs and iSCSI host attachment. Because Nishan products are qualified with all major storage platforms, Nishan channel partners now have a single source for IP connectivity for a wide variety of interoperable SAN solutions.

BakBone Earns IBM TotalStorage Proven

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - February 24, 2003 - BakBone Software today announced that its flagship product NetVault backup and recovery software, has successfully completed interoperability testing utilizing the IBM TotalStorage Proven program with IBM's NAS, Tape, FAStT and Enterprise Storage Server (codename Shark).

"At IBM, we work with companies such as BakBone Software to help provide our customers with proven, interoperable storage solutions. BakBone's extensive testing on our storage products through the TotalStorage Proven Program enables us to provide interoperable storage solutions that can reduce deployment time and improve customer satisfaction," said Kathleen Smith, vice president of Emerging Business Markets, IBM Systems Group.

ADIC Manages More Than 1 Petabyte of Data for NASA

Redmond, Washington - February 24, 2003 - At NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), storage management software from ADIC is now giving scientists around-the-clock access to more than 1.8 petabytes of important information about the Earth's environment.

ADIC's AMASS® for UNIX is storage management software that transforms libraries, typically considered "off-line" storage, into truly online direct-access mass storage- enabling users, administrators, and applications to effortlessly archive terabytes or petabytes of data. AMASS presents an automated optical, tape, or DVD library as one device and one mount point, through a standard UNIX file system interface consisting of directories and files. Users or applications can save or access files residing on libraries in the same way they would with disk devices. AMASS manages disk cache, maintains metadata online in highly available server clusters, and scales to manage an effectively unlimited number of files.

Every day the EOSDIS system receives 3 terabytes of new data from its five satellites and distributes 2 terabytes of data to researchers around the world. The data is managed through a combination of disk storage, used primarily as caching, and several high capacity automated tape systems in four separate data centers. ADIC's AMASS is the software that ties the whole system together and enables both EOSDIS staff and users to access it effectively. To the users who access the data through the EOSDIS Web site - and these range from high school students to international climatologists - data appears as though it were stored in a single database.

"EOSDIS views the data it collects as a national treasure that can't afford to be lost," said Bill Yaman, ADIC Vice President, Software. "At ADIC, we are extremely proud to be part of an effort that is helping scientists gain important insight into how the earth is changing. By the end of the current decade, EOSDIS will have as much as 10 petabytes of data stored, and I have complete confidence in the ability of ADIC's robust storage management software to continue to provide access to any of that information at any time."

Imperial Announces Terabyte Class SSD

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - February 24, 2003 - Imperial Technology today announced its MegaRam-10000, its newest solid state accelerator, featuring up to one terabyte of solid state storage capacity with 1 million IOPS performance.

"Several years ago, the thought of deploying a Terabyte of solid state storage was incomprehensible but so was having a Petabyte of rotating storage - yet today, enterprises have both" said Robert David, CEO and President, Imperial Technology. "It's really just a matter of increased scale. The relative proportions haven't changed nor have the compelling business reasons for deploying zero latency storage solutions like the MegaRam-10000."

The MegaRam-10000 sets a new standard for a multi-location and enterprise-wide storage resource. Geared for the most transaction-intensive and mission critical environments, the MegaRam-10000's massively scalable architecture is targeted to grid computing, life science and biomedical research, large-scale engineering, and time-sensitive geophysical applications as well as traditional OLTP environments and HPC applications where capturing metadata real-time is critical.

The MegaRam-10000 responds to a growing awareness by transaction-oriented enterprises that relying upon traditional cached arrays to meet transaction levels is increasingly costly when utilization and management costs are taken into account.

"Significant decreases in memory chips have allowed Imperial to lower the selling price of solid state storage by up to 90% compared to three years ago - a phenomenal decrease," said Marlin Kovaleski, Vice President Sales, Imperial Technology. "It's now practical to put an entire database in solid state memory."

The MegaRam-10000 is available immediately starting at $350,000. A fully configured 1TB subsystem with 48 fibre channel ports lists at $2 million.

Editor's comments:- in the last year or so, high end server users, particularly in the 64 bit Sun market, have been frustrated by performance bottlenecks which were not forseen when they originally committed to those architectures.

Most serious has been the lack of network I/O performance in which the lower clock rates of 64 bit processors (typically half those of their 32 bit counterparts) have damped the overall system capability. The recent ratification of the iSCSI network standard, will ease that factor because manufacturers will now be able to commit TCP/IP offload acceleration algorithms into hardware. But the performance gap between mass storage systems based on disk arrays, and the needs of high end users has still been a major chasm. Imperial's new MegaRam-10000 crosses that chasm for the class of users who absolutely need the fastest performance. The market for this type of product will, I suspect, be much larger than most people think.

32 Mbit Flash Gets 1,000 Times Faster Chip Erase

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - February 24, 2003 - SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.) today introduced the SST39VF320, the 32 Mbit extension of its successful Multi-Purpose Flash (MPF™) product family.

The SST39VF320 is based on SST's 0.18-micron self-aligned SuperFlash process technology. With chip erase times 1,000 times faster than conventional flash, SST's customers can erase their flash devices during manufacturing in 40 milliseconds instead of the one or more minutes typical with most flash alternatives. This can save customers time and money, and remove bottlenecks in manufacturing. As for in-system programming, individual sectors can be erased 50 to 100 times faster than conventional flash, thereby reducing power consumption and providing a better end user experience.

The SST39VF320 is ideal for applications such as digital cameras, DVD players, DVD recorders, PDAs, MP3 players, digital TVs, printers, DSL equipments and networking devices. SST has been sampling the SST39VF320 since Q4 2002. Production is planned for early Q3 2003.

today's storage news

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