Efficiency For Networked Storage

Even in today's struggling economy, innovative technology shouldn't be dismissed if it can make the company more efficient, open up new business opportunities, and have little impact on the current infrastructure.

Newcomer DiskSites Inc. unveiled its W-NAS appliance last week. Customers can plug the W-NAS appliance in the middle of their wide area network, and it will interface with any file system attached to it. Administrators will be able to manage the capacity for files residing on servers or network-attached file servers from a W-NAS.

The appliance, priced at about $6,000, is a combination of IO-specific hardware and management software that's open enough to work with any standard file system, whether it's CIFS for Windows or NFS for Unix. If a server in New York, for example, is filled and performance has slowed to a halt, W-NAS will let an administrator steer users on the network to available capacity on a NAS device in another location, such as Philadelphia.

Enterprise Storage Group analyst Steve Kenniston says customers reluctant to take on an innovative Distributed File System, which resides inside W-NAS, should take a second look. Says Kenniston, "W-NAS can help IT people handle disparate storage they already have before they make any large storage purchases."