InformationWeek

December 14, 1998

Most Important Products Of 98

Most Important Products Of 98:

Enterprise Application Integration Software

Teamware

Enterprise JavaBeans

SQL Server 7.0

Network-Attached Storage

Application Servers

NetWare 5

Customer-Management Applications

Midmarket ERP

Transaction Management

Runners-Up

Network-Attached Storage
All the excitement around Fibre Channel technology and storage area networks in 1998 neglected one glaring fact. Before SANs proliferate, almost all customers with storage infrastructures will have to tear out the SCSI interconnect that's in place now.

More important was network-attached storage. NAS will eventually benefit from the Fibre Channel interconnect and coexist with SANs, but it's already operating fine over the current infrastructure. NAS took off because it gives customers an alternative to the old data center model that makes storage captive to servers. Network-attached devices are snapped in where they are needed and remove work from servers and conventional storage devices.

Sometimes called toasters, they require much less programming and maintenance than general-purpose servers or storage systems. NAS is most often used to take over file serving from general-purpose servers, which are freed up to deal with applications and data. Moreover, these NAS devices will perform better than general-purpose storage systems for a specific job because they are dedicated to tasks, carrying a lot less overhead. Ultimately, end users benefit from the new infrastructure, because they get to their files quicker than they ever could before. Earlier NAS devices were fast but had limited storage capacity.

That changed in 1998. Two vendors dominate the NAS market and they represent two different spectrums in the IT marketplace. Auspex Systems Inc. originated the NAS market and has continued to provide power and reliability. However, Network Appliance Inc. came out of nowhere just three years ago to take over leadership in the field. The formula behind the Network Appliance success? Early on, it partnered with Microsoft to provide access in and out of Windows clients.

In 1998, Auspex introduced a NAS device that supports twice the number of disk drives in a single cabinet as its previous model, while also doubling the capacity of each drive to 18 Gbytes. The Auspex NetServer NS 8000/850, starting at $190,000, can provide more than 1 terabyte of storage space in one cabinet, and as much as 3.6 terabytes when fully configured with three cabinets. Though Auspex has increased capacity, it has decreased each cabinet's size, to 24 by 39 inches, and the vendor says the smaller footprint offers cost savings on floor space.

Network Appliance introduced the F700 line, which lets NAS customers manage multiple terabytes of data, keep data running continuously, and consolidate thousands of business and Internet users into a single network data directory.

The line includes the high-end F760 (starting at $79,950), which supports multiple terabytes of data; the F740 ($39,950) for the continuous availability of less than 1 terabyte of data; and the F720 ($19,950) for first-timers.

--Martin J. Garvey

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