Tricord Perfects Industry's First "Clustered' Server Appliance - Tricord Systems' Lunar Flare NAS file serving storage device - Product Announcement

Computer Technology Review, March, 2001 by Mark Ferelli

Digital tried to do it as part of their Command Console product. The technology went to Compaq in the DEC acquisition, and that firm declined to go forward with the technology. It took Tricord Systems to pick up the ball and introduce a 'clustered' server appliance, Lunar Flare NAS.

I enjoyed a demonstration of the exceptionally easy to use software at the Server I/O conference in Monterey. Enabled by Tricord's Illumina aggregation software, customers can grow their storage by adding individual Lunar Flare NAS appliances to create a cluster, managed as a single resource. The demonstration clearly illustrated that clusters would be easy to grow, manage, and use. Conspicuous by its absence was downtime, user interruption, and administrative burdens.

The product is a general file serving storage device, easily deployed on a network and shared by all Windows users. A single node provides 135GB of raw storage. General availability for Lunar Flare NAS is planned for the second half of Q1, 2001.

In a prepared statement, Tricord's Greg Dahl said: "We are incredibly excited to introduce Lunar Flare NAS to the market. Our unique technology raises the bar for easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage network storage solutions. These features will address the single biggest challenge of storage management growth."

Smart Alternative To The Daisy Chain

With traditional storage solutions, administrators add more storage by adding disk storage to a file server, array, or NAS subsystem. But when that system reaches maximum capacity, they are forced to add another subsystem. That means downtime to configure the new system and reassign users and data. Tricord's Lunar Flare NAS appliance eliminates this intensive management and the associated downtime. Using Tricord's browser-based GUI, adding an appliance to a cluster takes moments and doesn't interrupt client access to data. The demonstration showed speed, reliability, and ease of use. Those who use clustering as part of their data strategy would do well to give Lunar Flare NAS a very, very close look.