Features - Storage Innovations:

CROSSROADS FAMILY EXTENDS SAN BENEFITS TO STRANDED IP SERVERS

Crossroads Systems Inc, a global provider for storage networking solutions, announced the Crossroads Network Storage Controller (NSC) product family for extension of storage area network (SAN) benefits to departments and workgroups currently without access to the enterprise data center.

Crossroads NSC will enable enterprise data centers to deliver enhanced data protection management to departments and workgroups by allocating access to highly scalable SAN storage along with automatic failover and advanced storage management features to include storage pooling, volume provisioning, snapshot and advanced data replication. These advanced NSC capabilities will promote centralized management at the data center level while enabling individual departments and workgroups to retain autonomy of local storage management.

"The NSC will provide a very cost effective solution to expanding centralized storage management to the edge of the network," said Randy Kerns, senior partner with The Evaluator Group. "The data center benefits from enhanced data protection for the organization while departments and workgroups benefit from the advantages of having SAN access."

"Crossroads introduction of the NSC product family strongly positions our company for future growth in the emerging market for iSCSI solutions," said Rob Sims, Crossroads president and chief executive officer. "As an appliance, the NSC's scalable architecture will provide highly reliable operation and performance at a lower solution cost, while also offering customers an increased level of availability over similar host or array based solutions."

The NSC's highly scalable architecture and versatile software features are ideally suited to help customers meet new regulatory requirements for information and process integrity, retention and controlled access of data -- as needed for compliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002 and the Health Insurance Portability Act (HIPPA).

"Crossroads NSC will allow customers that are used to taking advantage of the best practices available with a Fibre Channel SAN to extend that level of functionality to IP-attached servers inside or outside of the data center," said Bill Chambers, president and CEO of LeftHand Networks. "Crossroads' leadership in storage routing combines nicely with LeftHand's networked storage expertise to move storage management into the network fabric."

The initial release for the NSC product family is planned to provide Fibre Channel to iSCSI provisioning of SAN resources in multi-vendor environments. Key features and benefits are planned to include:

• Centralized Management with storage pooling, volume provisioning, manual snapshots and CHAP authentication.
• High Scalability with multi-node virtualization clustering, provisioning and multi-controller load balancing.
• Data Protection with remote IP copy, multi-site snapshot and remote data replication.
• Programmable Snapshots with schedule capability for single or multiple volume snapshots.
• Microsoft Cluster Server (MCS)/Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) Agents supporting MCS and VCS host-based software.
• VSS Management Agents supporting 3rd party applications using Microsoft's virtual shadow copy and virtual disk services.