TrueSAN's Paladin Scales Storage to New Heights - TreuSAN's Paladin Storage Network System

ENT, Nov 8, 2000 by Ted Williams

Data storage needs are expected to skyrocket, making scalability and availability the buzzwords du jour for the makers of storage products. Officials at TrueSAN Networks believe they have something that will lay claim to a lot of that buzz.

TrueSAN's Paladin Storage Network System was unveiled recently at the Fibre Channel Technologies Conference and Expo in San Jose, Calif. A key feature of the product is its MetaFabric architecture, an embedded modular fabric system that delivers up to 128 Gbps of nonblocking bandwidth and up to 50 TB of capacity and 32 GB of cache on one box.

Paladin's base price is $88,000 for a 200-GB storage module with 512 MB of cache at 2 Gbps. Individual modules as large as 800 GB are available as the system scales up. The modules can be added on the fly without any downtime.

"It's clear for very large systems, a new architecture has become necessary," says Tom Isakovich, president and CEO of TrueSAN. "Current enterprise storage systems that use a monolithic bus-based storage controller are inherently confined and can only be stretched so far. We've developed a new class of Internet storage networking solutions that redefine data availability."

Paladin contains TrueSAN's SANengine, the company's intelligent storage management appliance that delivers both block and file services, thus making it accommodating to both NAS and SAN structures. It also provides Web-based management GUI to permit remote access. Connectivity options include Fibre Channel, ATM, and wavelength division multiplexing optical networking, making it compliant with virtually any platform.

"It makes a lot of sense really," says Steve Widen, an industry analyst at IDC. "With the intelligence it has that enables it to accommodate both Windows and Unix systems, it seems like a viable option, especially as we anticipate more and more movement from a NAS to a SAN infrastructure around the industry. That's easily done with this architecture."

Even with all its compatibility features, it's the scalability that will really make customers take notice. Isakovich says Paladin has five times the bandwidth and two and a half times the total capacity of its closest competitors.

"We think we're really well positioned, considering how storage needs are exploding across the enterprise," Isakovich says. He believes Paladin's flexibility to meet future storage requirements and its cost effectiveness compared with existing high-end storage products give TrueSAN a real advantage.

Widen agrees.

"When you think that storage needs m e-commerce alone doubles in capacity month by month, you get an idea of how phenomenal the growth is," 'Widen says. "Certainly, this is one way to go about addressing it."