Week In Storage: New Ways To Connect To Data

Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) unveiled its first iSCSI connectivity option for its Scalar family of tape libraries.

Jeff Eckard, product marketing manager at ADIC, said there are two ways to upgrade the 24-cartridge Scalar 24 and the 96-cartridge Scalar 100 libraries to iSCSI.

In the first way, an iSCSI controller is installed in a new or existing library and connected to the customer's existing LAN. While it does not offer maximum performance and security, it is a quick, low-cost way to upgrade libraries to work with multiple hosts, Eckard said.

The second way requires, besides the iSCSI controller, the addition of a new Ethernet switch and the installation of extra network interface cards or ports on the server. This improves security and performance by taking the backup traffic off the company's LAN, Eckard said.

The iSCSI connectivity option will be available in February, Eckard said. A Scalar 24 with iSCSI and one LTO tape drive starts at $17,434, while a similarly configured Scalar 100 starts at $22,680. They are available through Ingram Micro and Tech Data. The company has no direct sales business, Eckard said.

Meanwhile, Adaptec this week introduced its first iSCSI target devices. The new appliances include four SATA hard drives totaling 1 Tbyte in capacity and connect to a small or midsize business's LAN as a low-cost SAN option, said Jason Blosil, product manager for iSCSI at Adaptec. "They're great for companies moving from direct-attached storage to SAN environments," he said. Price is about $10,000.

The company also introduced two new SATA PCI RAID controllers. The controllers include eight-port and 16-port models and complement the company's existing two-port and four-port models, said Robert Cox, product marketing manager. The eight-port controller, price at $590, is available now, while the $895, 16-port model is expected to be available in March, he said.

All the new Adaptec products are available through Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Synnex, Bell Microproducts and Arrow Electronics.

IBM this week introduced the TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500, its first enterprise-class NAS gateway. The Gateway 500 is based on its POWER family of microprocessors, the same CPUs that go in the company's pSeries servers, said David Vaughn, product manager for the company's NAS products.

NAS gateways let data be stored in a file format like on any NAS appliance. However, unlike the NAS appliance, which has its own integrated storage capacity, the data is actually stored on SAN arrays in block format. This allows a company's data to be consolidated on fewer devices for ease in management.

IBM has had a midrange NAS gateway for some time, but customers were looking for increases in performance, reliability and availability, Vaughn said.

The Gateway 500 can address up to 224 Tbytes of data, compared to a maximum of 22 Tbytes with IBM's existing Gateway 300 product, said Vaughn. It currently supports storing the data on IBM's Shark and FAStT storage arrays, as well a on certain models of Hitachi Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard arrays, he said.

On the software side, Computer Associates International, Islandia, N.Y., released version 11 of its BrightStor ARCserve Backup software for Windows. It follows the release of version 9 about a year ago. There was no version 10, said Steven Menges, director of BrightStor product marketing. "We took the functionality intended for versions 10 and 11 and put them all in version 11," he said.

New in Version 11 is technology that leverages Microsoft Windows Server 2003's Volume ShadowCopy Service (VSS), which allows point-in-time copy capabilities to be integrated between the operating system and applications, said Menges.

Also new in Version 11 are several new features for Microsoft Exchange environments. For instance, the application allows a single copy of an e-mail attachment sent to multiple recipients to be stored, instead of storing one copy of the attachment for each recipient, Menges said. The new version also allows the e-mail database to be backed up in its entirety or at the mailbox level. Restores can now be done based on a query as well, he said.

For computing environments in general, ARCserve 11 also bundles CA's eTrust security software, said Menges.