StoreAge Builds on Virtualization

Storage administrators wanting virtualization now have another choice among the remaining independent vendors—StoreAge Networking Technologies Ltd.—as larger firms continue to stall in delivering the technology.

StoreAge last week announced an any-to-any IP mirroring option called MultiMirror for its Storage Virtualization Manager 4.2, said company President Mark Spowart, in Irvine, Calif. Virtualization offers the means to control different brands and types of storage in one pool. "We improved the security of the system. The PCI card, theres literally no access to it from outside," Spowart said, referring to how the appliance conducts out-of-band management through an appliance.

SVM scales to about 100 servers per appliance and will be able to manage multiple SANs (storage area networks) in an upgrade early next year, Spowart said. Version 4.2 is available now starting at $7,500 plus $715 per client.

Users can also run the software on a SAN switch, through a partnership with Brocade Communications Systems Inc., of San Jose, Calif. Similar deals with others such as Broomfield, Colo.s McData Corp. are on the road map for later this year, he said.

Other new features include Consistency Groups, for synchronizing volumes, and Last Block Changed, which helps to avoid bandwidth over- provisioning. There are also load balancing, path failover, and network discovery improvements, along with a redesigned user interface, officials said.

David Suess, IT project manager at Arizonas Phoenix Civic Plaza, has run SVM for two years, on a small-scale SAN with arrays from the Eurologic division of Adaptec Inc., in Milpitas, Calif. "The issue we ran into was trying to find the software to support NetWare," Suess said. "For us that was a critical requirement, and StoreAge was the only company we found at the time." Suess hasnt yet tested SVM 4.2, but his recent upgrade from 2.2 to 4.0 "went flawless," he said.

Regarding the new IP mirroring technology, "Its one thing to say we need to worry about it; its another thing to say weve got money to do it," but overall, StoreAge "delivered everything theyve promised," Suess said.