InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

August 28, 2000

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Xiotech Boosts Storage Scalability

Offerings let multiple servers access data remotely, allow easier system expansion

By Martin J. Garvey

More on storage:

Compaq And IBM Team To Improve Storage Networks (7/10/00) Closing The Storage Gap (7/3/00) Tele.com Storage Comes Out of the Closet (7/10/00)

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iotech Corp. last week began shipping Redi SAN Links and Redi SAN Links Replicator, software designed to give customers higher levels of scalability.

Redi SAN Links lets multiple servers attached to Xiotech's Magnitude storage system access data on remote systems. Xiotech customers had been limited to the data on one Magnitude system, but with the new software, they can connect to more than 500 terabytes of data storage, according to Xiotech. The software is priced at $20,000.

Redi SAN Links Replicator lets customers copy data from a local Magnitude system to a remote system so that almost no downtime is needed for backing up and recovering data. The software also allows online testing of data on remote Magnitude systems. It's priced at $40,000.

One customer testing the software is pleased with its benefits. "We can do remote mirroring, and it makes the entire storage area network very versatile," says Robert Kinney, a network developer and engineer at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

"You're limited only by the number of connections that you have."

Bill Bailey, a senior network engineer at Prohealth Care Inc., a health-care holding company in Waukesha, Wis., and a Magnitude user, says the Replicator could be useful for disaster recovery and should let him expand the system without shutting down. "It's completely virtual and there are no fixed decisions with drive capacity," he says. "Plus, the user interface is simple and accessible to the standard server administrator."

Xiotech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology Inc., is already a leading storage vendor for data virtualization. Virtualization is the ability to share, create, manage, and utilize all available space in a storage pool. Data stored on Magnitude is spread across all the drives on the systems. A single Magnitude can have 64 drives. With most systems, data is relegated to a single drive, and a single spindle works to retrieve it. With Magnitude, multiple spindles work to retrieve the data, boosting performance.

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