The network that brings us Big Bird and the gang isn't in the TV business to make money. So public television station WNET-TV in New York doesn't have a lot of money to mess around with its servers and storage. Yet chief technology officer Ken Devine still expects the high speed and flexibility benefits he could get from an open storage network based on the fiber channel interconnect.

So Devine and WNET are turning to DataCore Software's SANsymphony for help managing all of the company's information, from video clips to financial records. SANsymphony will support the station's Apple Computer, Microsoft Windows NT, and Sun Solaris host servers.

SANsymphony is designed to ease the task of allocating storage, changing capacity, and doing backups. SANsymphony pricing starts at $10,000.

The TV station wants to expand from one stream of video to four or five streams, multiplying the 3.5 terabytes of data it manages now.

Devine says he won't buy any proprietary storage systems with intelligent controllers and software because he says those vendors would charge him 10 to 20 times what the disks themselves cost. "Cost, security, and management issues have been holding back that development," he says. "Our hope is to manage all that with SANsymphony, and DataCore lets us run the software on any bloody disks we want."

Yankee Group analyst William Hurley says that SANsymphony should also help WNET use the 25% to 35% of storage capacity that customers in general waste. "SANsymphony allows them to grab that unused capacity and pull it back into the pool," Hurley says. "It leads to reduction in [the total cost of operation] because they won't have to buy additional disks."