ADIC to Upgrade Storage Mgmt. Tool

StorNext 2.1 will add new application support and quality-of-service enhancements.

Tape systems vendor Advanced Digital Information Corp. is expanding its push into storage management software beginning later this month.

The Redmond, Wash., company on Sept. 30 will launch StorNext 2.1, with new application support and quality-of-service enhancements.

"Weve added user quotas, weve added some additional abilities for the application to … actually reserve bandwidth," said Paul Rutherford, vice president of software technology at ADIC. "We added some additional locking. We added support for additional libraries in the backend."

A typical configuration, managing 50 terabytes with five clients, costs about $150,000, he said.

The products are solid, though theyre not making any market impact, said a Wall Street observer, who asked not to be identified.

"Theyve been pretty aggressively trying to position that company for some time away from being pigeon-holed in the tape vendor arena," he said.

But ADICs potential success will depend more on business decisions than engineering, the source said.

"They have a good sales and marketing team," he said, "and theyre tying to go in places where they dont compete against Veritas [Software Corp.]."

Beyond the announcement later this month, ADIC will launch StorNext 2.2 later this year, and StorNext 3.0 will debut sometime next year, Rutherford said.

Version 2.2 will add support for Hewlett-Packard Co.s HP-UX operating system; 2.1 works on Microsoft Corp.s Windows, Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris, Linux, Silicon Graphics Inc.s IRIX and IBMs AIX.

For 3.0, "the next major thing will probably be integration of more protection," Rutherford said. "We are working with partners now to come up with other applications that will actually use that system."

He declined to elaborate. However, that will involve making the StorNext file system itself available for resale, Rutherford said.

Challenges ADIC still needs to solve are iSCSI support and scalability for the Common Internet File System and Network File System environments, if those eventually reach desktop users, he said.

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