"Best of the Best" products of 2003 will make 2004 a better year! - Certance's CP 3100 - Dantz's EMC Symmetrix DMX series

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2004

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FireFly offers much greater performance and economy than some leading tape installations, and provides on-demand, high-speed data transmission similar to online RAID. A more "green" solution, FireFly only requires about the same power as eight 120W light bulbs. The system also manages the reliability of the data based on Predictive Analysis of physical disk failure by monitoring the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) status of the drive over time.

In networked storage environments, FireFly advantages include: scalability, economy and performance. A point-to-point connection, SATA allows multiple drive ports to be aggregated into a single controller, meaning capacity-hungry environments can quickly and easily respond to their changing storage requirements giving organizations greater control over scalability, as well as over cost by simply adding another drive. With a minimum capacity of 4TB and the ability to scale up to 48TB in a single cabinet, and as many as 10 cabinets can be clustered together for up to 480TB of data storage. Pricing starts at $7,000 per TB.

www.asaca.com

Today, the cost- per-gigabyte of disk is no longer much higher than the cost of professional-quality tape media. This makes disk economically viable for many kinds of secondary storage. A wider range of enterprises, both large and small, are seeking to integrate disk into a comprehensive backup, recovery and archiving strategy. Most businesses realize that disk alone is not enough--for both long-term retention and disaster recovery planning, it is still necessary to use tape. However, the technical expertise to assemble a heterogeneous backup solution is still outside the reach of many small-to-medium business (SMB) customers.

In response to customer demand, Breece Hill introduced the Information Storage and Retrieval Architecture (iStoRA), combining disk, tape, network connectivity, and management software into a physically integrated appliance-style platform for disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backup. The first product in the series, the iStoRA 4000, shipped in December 2003. Within its 4u-high enclosure, the appliance provides six SATA disks, a 1x10 tape autoloader, and a server motherboard with Gig-E connectivity. It ships pre-loaded and pre-configured with policy-based management software to govern backups and the migration of data between disk and tape. Within minutes of deployment, the iStoRA 4000 is ready for network-based backups to disk or tape.

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Besides the seamless integration of disk, tape and software, the most innovative aspect of iStoRA is a truly plug-and-play approach to automated backup--making it ideal for SMBs, who face limitations in IT resources and technical sophistication. With iStoRA, a sound data protection and retention strategy is, for the first time, within reach for any size organization.

www.breecehill.com

Computer Access Technology Corporation (CATC) added two new innovative features to their successful SASTracer protocol analyzer product line. The SASTracer is the industry's first analyzer supporting both 4-wide analysis features and bilingual Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA)) capability.