Features - Storage Innovations:

INTRANSA ROLLS OUT IP7000 SERIES

Intransa announced the launch of the Intransa IP7000 series IP storage area network (SAN) solutions to support the demands of the large scale enterprise. The Intransa IP7500 is the first offering in the revolutionary new line of enterprise-class storage products built upon Intransa's IntraStor modular storage architecture and StorControl software. With the introduction of this product, enterprises now have a complementary alternative to Fibre Channel for their on-line and near-line secondary storage needs as part of their overall tiered storage architecture.

"The Intransa IP7500 provides yet another reason for any enterprise to consider moving to iSCSI based storage," says William Terrill, senior analyst at the Burton Group. "IP SANs can now provide the performance, reliability, and scalability that was previously only available from Fibre Channel solutions. The IP7500 is enterprise ready for a fraction of the cost of equivalent Fibre Channel offerings. Not only does the enterprise save on the initial purchase of the storage, but by using the existing internal Ethernet and TCP/IP expertise the long term support and operational expenses are also dramatically lower."

Designed from the ground up to leverage a company's existing Ethernet infrastructure, the IP7500 uses the power of TCP/IP networking and the advantages of standard ATA disk drives -- making it a clear alternative to proprietary Fibre Channel solutions. The IP7500 is a complete solution that makes installation simple. The system is preconfigured to accept 20 redundant Gig-E connections (40 without) and has a UPS and a management console for resiliency and ease of management. The Intransa IP7500 is ideally suited for business critical online applications including digital media, video surveillance, data warehousing/data mining, and near-line storage. Industries using these applications include government agencies, and rapidly growing medium to large scale businesses.

Intransa's IP SAN products are ideally suited for the digital media industry demanding high-performance storage solutions to meet the growing requirements for project and archiving space. Early adopters of the IP7500 in the digital media space include Nielsen Media and Skyway Aircraft. Nielsen Media, a global leader in providing various kinds of data analysis is looking at the IP7500 to meet its demands for extensive data warehousing and data mining needs.

"SkyWay Aircraft is leading the next-wave of avionics communication for the industry, said John Jebens, CIO of SkyWay. "It is imperative to have a robust storage system that can support our in-flight aircraft communication systems. Intransa's IP-based SAN solutions provide a storage platform that is complementary to our existing infrastructure and can meet the data-intensive requirements as we bring advanced communication services from anti-terrorism support, real time in-flight surveillance and monitoring, to enhanced communication and entertainment services for commercial and private aircraft throughout the United States."

In addition, Macnica Networks, a major channel partner of networking and storage products in Japan is driving extensive early adaptor programs in the Japanese market with strategic OEM partners and major system integrators using the IP7500. Huawei-3COM has also procured the IP7500 for OEM efforts to provide storage solutions for secondary on-line and near-line business needs.

Additional benefits of the IP7500 include:

• Simplified product configuration: The IP7500 is a pre-configured full-rack system, with 24 TB of capacity, UPS, software preloaded, management station and with capability for future expansion. This configuration provides for a true "plug-and-play" capability.

• StorControl software: Centralized management interface consolidates resources into a single virtualized pool of storage -- ensuring continuous data availability and data protection with scalable modular architecture.

• High availability and redundancy: The IP7500 delivers N-way active-active failover with redundant front-end and back-end switching that eliminates single points of failure.

• Easy capacity expansion: The IP7500 comes with 24TB and is expandable to 32TB in the same rack with the addition of modular building-block disk enclosures. The fully integrated solution also forms the rack-level building block for large scale enterprise IP SAN applications with hundreds of terabytes.

The Intransa IP7500 provides a compelling ROI by allowing enterprises to easily install a complete and flexible 24TB IP SAN that can be grown and managed easily as the business requirements change. The system is used as a "building block" for unlimited storage pool size, which can be established by seamless clustering of IP7500 racks.

"We are seeing strong demands for large configuration IP SANs for the second tier online data storage requirements," said Peter Wang, CTO and founder of Intransa. "Intransa's native IP SAN solutions provide a standards-based, easily scalable alternative to expensive and complex Fibre Channel storage technologies, to meet the fast growing secondary data storage needs of SMB's, mid-tier and enterprise organizations."

About Intransa

Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and with office worldwide Intransa is an innovator of enterprise-class, intelligent IP storage solutions that radically reduce the complexity of deploying scalable network storage. Based on advanced technology that leverages the cost and performance advantage of Ethernet and the ubiquity of IP networks, Intransa's products are enabling a new generation of information storage, delivery, and management over IP networks. Founded in Sept. 2000, Intransa has secured $74 million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Sofinnova Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, US Venture Partners, and a major pension fund. For more information, visit www.intransa.com.