Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

SANRAD, ALACRITECH PROVIDE HIGH-PERFORMANCE iSCSI SAN TO UAB

SANRAD Inc, a leader in developing and delivering intelligent iSCSI SAN solutions, and Alacritech Inc, an innovator of data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, announced that the University of Alabama-Birmingham is gaining tremendous benefits from its high performance iSCSI Storage Area Network utilizing leading technology from the two companies. SANRAD's V-Switch and Alacritech's TCP/IP Offload Engine Network Interface Cards (TNICs) provide a highly reliable, scalable solution to enable the top research university to easily consolidate storage and reduce on-going costs and complexity to achieve maximum ROI from its IP-based SAN.

Sterling Griffin, IT manager for the Department of Pathology at UAB, needed to consolidate his storage into a SAN and have the ability to provision the total SAN capacity into unique and secured volumes. He was confident once he tested SANRAD's V-Switch that an iSCSI SAN would effectively replace the direct-attached storage systems for the more than 14 servers in his department.

"The main benefit with the SANRAD V-Switch is that we could select any storage system we desired and share it within a SAN among all our servers," said Griffin. "SANRAD's V-Switch connected to servers running the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator, in conjunction with Alacritech's Gigabit TNIC, provides a very cost-effective IP SAN solution. SANRAD's V-Switch allows us to reuse our existing DAS storage on this new SAN and support our growing capacity requirements with inexpensive SCSI/IDE storage systems. V-Switch virtualization was also critical, as we needed to create very large volumes across these storage systems for our many file servers which support over 500 students and staff at the School of Medicine. The installation was easy, as the switches and TOE cards work seamlessly with our existing SCSI storage systems and standard IP LAN connections."

Griffin looked at Fibre Channel SAN storage systems but the prices exceeded his budget. Aside from being cost-prohibitive, he was concerned about the lack of industry standards in Fibre Channel products.

"They might say FC is not proprietary, but anyone who's ever worked with it knows it is proprietary," said Griffin. In addition, competing IP storage vendors he investigated also used proprietary technologies, which alarmed UAB. "I would not evaluate anything that is not using standard iSCSI. We wanted to start with a standard that had wide industry acceptance. Alacritech's use of the standard Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator made the solution even more attractive. Our future plans for the V-Switch IP SAN include adding SQL, Exchange, Web and backup servers along with implementation of the DRP features."

"The University of Alabama implemented an affordable, reliable and high-performance SAN solution that met their data availability and budgetary needs," said Zophar Santé, vice president of Market Development at SANRAD. "Alacritech's innovative SLIC Technology combined with the intelligent functionality of the V-Switch ensures that they derive the full performance potential possible from their iSCSI SANs while ensuring continuous access to mission-critical data using SANRAD active/active multi-pathing, data replication and volume management features."

"IP SANs based on SANRAD's feature-rich V-Switch and Alacritech's high performance Accelerators enable organizations of all sizes to cost effectively migrate from direct-attached storage to IP-based SAN environments," said Joe Gervais, director of Product Marketing for Alacritech Inc. "Together, we're providing a highly reliable, scalable solution that allows customers like the University of Alabama to easily consolidate storage and significantly reduce ongoing costs and complexity to make shared block storage viable for today's tighter IT budgets."

About Alacritech's Acceleration Technology

As systems and servers move increasing amounts of network data, new solutions are needed to solve both efficiency and throughput challenges. Alacritech Accelerators are a complete line of Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet TNIC products based on SLIC Technology, Alacritech's patented Data Path Offload architecture. Alacritech's SLIC Technology supplements the TCP software control plane with distributed hardware data planes to maximize data movement through Ethernet-based networks. This revolutionary architecture is designed to maximize server and storage performance and efficiency. All Alacritech products offer industry-standard failover and link aggregation.

About Alacritech Inc

Alacritech Inc is the world's leading supplier of TCP Offload Engine solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems. Alacritech's complete line of Accelerators is based on the company's patented SLIC Technology to optimize data delivery in servers, network-attached storage and iSCSI storage devices. SLIC Technology, the basis of industry-accepted TOE solutions, ships in storage and server products worldwide. Alacritech is a privately held company based in San Jose, Calif. For more information about Alacritech and its products, please visit the company's Web site at www.alacritech.com.