"We must simplify the procedure of using multiple servers with their own disk drives and own backup solutions," says Dave Losh, a computer specialist for NASS, in Washington. In early October, NASS will replace six Dell Pentium 90 servers with two higher-end Dell PowerEdge 6300 servers and install a Xiotech Magnitude Centralized Storage System with a digital linear tape library from Storage Technology Corp. in place of 12 storage devices. "And we'll double our capacity," says Losh, to 360 Gbytes at a cost of $140,000. NASS chose Magnitude over a Dell PowerVault storage system because Xiotech supports Novell NetWare's standard for file and print operations.

Losh says he likes the flexibility of Magnitude, which is able to match multiple drives with multiple data pools as needed, add drives on-the-fly, and mirror disks within a single frame for redundancy.

David Hill, a senior analyst at Aberdeen Group, says Xiotech is an up-and-comer in the emerging storage area network industry. "If some larger companies could start all over again, they'd go with the product Xiotech has," he says. "Magnitude has the software, the manageability, and the technical architecture to keep systems up with high availability." Hill says Xiotech's key technology is storage virtualization, which lets administrators carve up storage into flexible pools of data.