Features - Storage Innovations:

CANDERA ANNOUNCES LOW PRICED ENTERPRISE-CLASS SATA APPLIANCE

Candera Inc, a company dedicated to simplifying the complexity of storage area networks (SANs), announced the availability of the new Candera ATA Appliance, which enables customers to deploy a new tier of high capacity, reliable and interoperable storage at a price point that is nearly 50 percent of other ATA solutions. Candera's appliance combines the enterprise-class SCE 510 network storage controller with low-cost serial ATA RAID drives, and allows customers to significantly expand their storage capacity, while also experiencing the benefits of a centrally managed, interoperable and reliable network storage controller.

"Today's IT executives are caught between conflicting objectives. Driven by tighter and tighter budget constraints and the tremendous continuing growth in information, they are facing the reality that current approaches to storage, such as 'one size fits all' solutions, are no longer acceptable," said Stephen Terlizzi, vice president of marketing and business development for Candera. "Our appliance enables customers to deploy a new tier of storage in seconds and avoid the management headaches associated with heterogeneous SANs, while also taking advantage of the high availability and reliability of our architecture to cost-effectively create an enterprise-class solution."

Analysts estimate that low-cost, capacity-oriented storage accounts for 10 percent of all petabytes shipped today, and will grow to 40 percent by 2007. Tiered storage enables organizations to better classify and protect their data. They can set policies that match information storage and access requirements to their business processes, deliver the right amount of cost-effective storage for the right tasks, and provide a consistent, central point of management for their storage infrastructure.

Organizations that have invested significantly in only very high-end hardware and software approaches in the past, are realizing the benefits of tiered storage. Unfortunately, just adding low-cost ATA storage is not enough since it increases the complexity of existing SANs and creates a management nightmare. Poor interoperability causes deployment issues and effectively eliminates any of the benefits associated with a tiered storage approach. The availability of an off-the-shelf, ready-to-deploy ATA appliance based on Candera's network storage controller architecture means that the industry finally has a low-cost, enterprise-class solution that delivers all of the benefits of tiered storage without the management headaches.

Candera will offer four standard appliance configurations, enabling customers to add 4TB, 8TB, 12TB or 16TB of storage capacity. Custom configurations capable of scaling to 180TB can also be built. Benefits of the new product include:

• High Reliability and Availability: Candera's appliance is the first to combine high reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features with low-cost ATA drives. The appliance features a fully redundant, active-active cluster architecture and high-capacity ATA RAID drives, allowing customers to significantly expand the storage capacity in their enterprise-class environments, at a fraction of the cost of other high-performance storage solutions.
• Nearly Half of the List Price of Other Enterprise-Class Storage Solutions: By taking advantage of commodity serial ATA RAID storage arrays, Candera has reduced the acquisition costs of deploying an enterprise-class solution by nearly half. It supports all hardware RAID levels from full mirroring to parity-protected RAID 5, allowing users to select the appropriate level of data protection for their system. The appliance also includes the easy-to-use Candera Storage Manager and automatic single-step provisioning as standard functionality.
• Deployment in Seconds: Candera's appliance offers automatic device discovery and single-step provisioning so that network administrators can quickly integrate the appliance into their existing SAN environment, and begin immediately setting storage policies. Automatic device discovery is enabled through superior interoperability with virtually any storage platform or operating system. ATA storage devices can be sliced and concatenated to satisfy the varying storage capacity demands of users throughout the organization.
• Grow Non-Disruptively into Fully-Functional SCE 510 Network Storage Controller: With a separate software license, Candera customers can upgrade their appliance to become a fully functional Candera SCE 510 network storage controller. Customers can place both legacy Fibre Channel storage and new ATA-based storage into a common virtual pool of storage for information life cycle management. "Data-in-place" import of legacy storage eliminates the need for a backup and restore of the data for migration.

The appliance features up to 4 GB of cache, provides eight 1 or 2 Gbps autosensing Fibre Channel ports and supports up to 48 host bus adapter (HBA) ports.