Features - Storage Innovations:

MARANTI NETWORKS LAUNCHES CoreSTOR PRODUCT LINE

Maranti Networks, a leader in providing adaptive storage infrastructure solutions, announced availability of the Maranti CoreSTOR product line, consisting of the Maranti CoreSTOR 2000 (16 port) and CoreSTOR 3000 (128 Port) Adaptive Storage Services Platforms, CoreSTOR Storage Services suite and Maranti STORIAN Manager. As the industry's first fully integrated, network storage services controller, the Maranti CoreSTOR system enables rapid deployment of heterogeneous storage infrastructures, delivering centrally managed, high-performance storage services from any storage device to any server in the network. Maranti's CoreSTOR system manages service levels based on the business value of the data, significantly increasing application availability while reducing total cost of ownership.

Enterprise-Class Storage Services

Based on a patent-pending, fully distributed in-line, cut-through processing architecture, Maranti CoreSTOR platforms deliver low-latency, high-speed I/O performance through each of the port-based storage processing engines. Maranti's innovations provide the industry's most scalable, high-performance storage services solution, delivering mirroring and replication across heterogeneous arrays. By processing storage services at each port in the data path, Maranti's CoreSTOR architecture eliminates performance bottlenecks and provides over six million virtualized I/O operations per second (VIOPS) across a fully configured CoreSTOR 3000 chassis. To ensure availability, the CoreSTOR platforms are built on a fault-tolerant architecture with internal redundancy and active-active failover that eliminates any single point of failure. Maranti CoreSTOR platforms support both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity, seamlessly integrating storage services and management across both protocols.

The Maranti CoreSTOR System enables enterprise customers to manage multi-vendor, tiered storage architectures, delivering cost-effective business continuance, information life cycle management, non-disruptive data migration, and data mobility solutions across heterogeneous server and storage systems. Maranti's network-based storage services significantly reduce storage infrastructure and software capital spending, while STORIAN Manager offers Maranti customers policy-based provisioning and storage asset management from a centralized console, significantly reducing storage management operational expenses.

CoreSTOR Receives Solid Validation

"We were looking for a remote disaster recovery solution using low-cost storage for our business critical applications that gave us the ability to create consistent data images for quick application recovery," said Gerry Graczyk, vice president of a large financial company that has been beta testing the Maranti CoreSTOR product. "Maranti's product delivers network-based data mobility and allows us to achieve this objective without impacting our core application performance."

"Rorke Data has seen incredible end-user response to Maranti products. Maranti's value proposition enables wide acceptance of our Galaxyi Serial ATA RAID and SAN solutions, and is a great match for both our digital content-centric vertical market customers as well as corporate users that must adhere to a range of regulatory compliance rules that impact data storage," said Joe Rorke, vice president of marketing at Rorke Data. "We are very excited about partnering with Maranti to deliver cost effective storage solutions with significant performance, scalability and availability advantages over other competing solutions."

"This is the most intelligent storage service controller we have seen on the market to date. With processors at every port, the Maranti solution can evaluate a packet as it arrives and automatically apply storage services on a packet by packet basis," said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "Maranti's CoreSTOR architecture also provides a level of performance that will be difficult for vendors with blade based technologies to compete with."

Simplified Service Level Management

The Maranti CoreSTOR system uniquely delivers application-aware Storage Quality of Service (SQoS), which enables administrators to define policy-based service-levels that are specific to each application profile being provisioned across the storage infrastructure. Each SQoS policy defines specific performance and availability requirements that are enforced within the CoreSTOR fast-path. Maranti's patent pending end-to-end flow control architecture extends this QoS enforcement even through connected layer 2 Fibre Channel fabrics.

"Through extensive work with end-users, we found that storage administrators need solutions that can be leveraged across all of their existing storage systems, without the performance bottlenecks introduced by appliance-based technology," said Kuldeep Sandhu, president, CEO and co-founder of Maranti Networks. "The advantage for customers using the Maranti CoreSTOR system is that they can manage a comprehensive set of storage services at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions without performance or scalability bottlenecks."

The Maranti CoreSTOR System:

• Maranti CoreSTOR 3000 -- a high-availability, 128-port, multi-protocol adaptive storage service platform with storage service processing at each port, targeted at enterprise data center deployments.
• Maranti CoreSTOR 2000 -- a high-availability, 16-port, multi-protocol adaptive storage service platform with storage service processing at each port, that can easily be integrated into remote office or regional data center infrastructures.
• Maranti CoreSTOR Storage Services -- Licensable software that delivers network based storage services such as mirroring, replication, SnapVolumes and volume copy across heterogeneous storage arrays.
• Maranti STORIAN Manager -- a powerful, scalable, centralized storage management interface that simplifies management of complex storage environments.

Maranti's standards-based architecture provides investment protection while enabling enterprise customers to leverage the benefits of network-based storage services. Comprehensive testing at Maranti labs, in addition to partner facilities, ensures interoperability with existing storage infrastructure (OS's, HBAs, Fibre Channel switches and storage subsystems).