Procom To Roll Out Network-Attached Storage Devices

Procom Technology Inc. next week will begin shipping theNetForce 2000 and NetForce 2200 network-attached storagedevices. These new systems -- along with the NetForce 2500and 2600 network-attached storage (NAS) products, due nextquarter -- are designed for ease of administration and use,offering a setup procedure that Procom says takes justminutes to complete. The higher-end 2500 and 2600 systemswill also provide continuous data availability.

The 2000, in a 180-Gbyte configuration, is priced at$35,000. The 2200 will store as much as 900 Gbytes of data,for $148,000. All the new units have proprietary softwarethat lets them support very large files via a journalingfile system, which also captures data at the time of a crashand can later reconstruct it. Because the 2500 and 2600units will be equipped with dual controllers that failoverto each other in less than three seconds, customers gainhigh-availability benefits, too. The 2500 stores 900 Gbytesfor between $100,000 and $180,000. The 2600, with a 1.8-terabyte capacity, is priced at $201,000 to $360,000.

Like other NAS devices, the new NetForce storage servers canconnect to existing system infrastructures anywhere on thenetwork, and support multiple protocols for access toWindows NT or Unix files. NAS systems can also performbetter than general-purpose servers because they areoptimized for data input and output.