Company looks to address more mainstream markets with new scalable storage lines. Company also inks marketing and co-development agreement with storage management software maker AppIQ.SGI today will begin to seek new customers for its storage division with new high-performance storage area network and network-attached storage products; as well as a new look for its storage marketing. In addition, the company said it will beef up its storage management capabilities with an OEM agreement with AppIQ Inc.
According to Ajay Anand, SGI director of storage marketing, InfiniteStorage will become the new "common umbrella brand" for SGIs storage products, which includes SAN, NAS and RAID systems. The new hardware packages announced are the InfiniteStorage NAS 2000, which can support capacities up to 112TB; and the InfiniteStorage SAN 2000 and the InfiniteStorage SAN 3000.
The InfiniteStorage line is scalable, allowing customers to move up the performance ladder by adding a switch, extra storage capacity, and software capabilities such as SGIs Data Migration Facility software and AppIQs management applications. The SAN architecture employs a separate meta-data server in addition to running the companys high-performance Clustered XFS journaling file system.
The InfiniteStorage products will incorporate an update to CXFS, which allows simultaneous shared access of files. CXFS supports file sizes up to 9 million terabytes and file systems holding up to 18 million terabytes, the company said. Announced today, Version 3.0 supports a variety of Unix client platforms, including AIX, IRIX, Linux and Solaris, as well as Windows NT and 2000; versions for Windows XP and Mac OS X will arrive later in the year.
The company will also announce the release of a Linux version of Data Migration Facility, now in Version 2.9. The product supports the movement of files between the SAN and near-line disk and tape devices.
With InfiniteStorage, the company signals its "intent to extend our reach into mainstream markets," Anand said. "Weve been selling storage into our core markets of high-performance computing and visualization, which have extreme data needs, both in the amount of data they need to manage and the performance they require [from storage]. Now the rest of the industry can benefit from our tested solutions as well."
While targeting its direct sales force towards SGIs traditional customers in the energy exploration, manufacturing, media creation, and scientific-technical markets, the company is seeking new OEM partnerships to advance its mainstream storage presence. The NAS 2000, SAN 2000 and SAN 3000 have base prices of $91,550, $112,000 and $180,000, respectively.
In addition, SGI and AppIQ announced co-development and marketing agreements for AppIQs storage utility management suite. According to Tom Rose, AppIQs vice president of marketing, the technology deal will increase SGIs focus on heterogeneous environments. And AppIQs products will be available through SGIs direct sales group and resellers.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
