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February 7, 2000

Storage-Hardware Upgrade Offers Dual Functionality
MTI Technology's Vivant system adds support for ethernet connectivity

By Martin J. Garvey

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ompanies that want to bridge the gap between network-attached storage systems and storage area network products may find the answer in an upgrade to MTI Technology Corp.'s Vivant hardware.

The storage vendor will reveal this week that its Vivant system, which already features interfaces for connecting to servers at high speeds over long distances using a separate Fibre Channel network, will also support Ethernet connectivity. This means that customers can have dual functionality--they can continue to operate the devices as part of a Fibre Channel storage area network and also employ them as nodes on a network-attached storage architecture.

New backup services built into the system include support for automated tape libraries using Legato management software, and replication services for local and remote data.

Meta Group analyst Sean Derrington says one drawback of network-attached storage products has been that there's no central repository from which backup activity could originate, but that's not an issue with using a Vivant system in that capacity because it also acts as a central storage device on the SAN. "It will give customers a way to accomplish services such as backup and recovery, configuration management, and high availability," Derrington says.

Greg Tagaris, director of operations at Web advertising service provider DoubleClick Inc. in New York, is interested in using Vivant on the company's storage area network and for accessing Unix and Windows NT files on the same device operating as a network-attached storage node. "We want to migrate data from some of our 20 NT servers to Sun Solaris for performance and scalability," Tagaris says, "so we'll need to maintain a lot of data in parallel environments."

Vivant systems will start at $173,000 for 218 Gbytes and go up to $1.5 million for 9.6 terabytes.

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