Promise Technology Unveils Automated Storage Appliance

Promise Technology, which has been operating under the radar-but is well known within the industry-as the OEM storage for Apple's Xserve systems, on July 6 launched a line of branded storage appliances for small and midsize enterprise customers.

The company's main enterprise product, VTrak, has been expanded to include the new VTrak S3000, which features a list of enterprise-level storage services. These include thin provisioning, application-aware snapshots (up to 250), volume copy, volume virtualization, remote replication, WAN optimization, built-in encryption and SSD (solid-state drive) caching.

In the past, company has relied on third-party providers for all those storage services. Now they are all available on demand with the hardware, Ray Bahar, Promise's vice president of Americas sales and marketing, told eWEEK.

"Our channel partners were pushing hard for us to offer our own services and support, so they could have that 'one throat to choke,' " Bahar said. "We're glad now to supply all these services for them in this one device."

The VTrak S3000, which features a fully redundant configuration, is based on open standards. It can connect directly to Promise's other RAID arrays or can be configured for disk arrays from other vendors in heterogeneous environments.

The S3000 also includes storage consolidation and virtualization for Fibre Channel or iSCSI SANs (storage area networks); disaster recovery through snapshots, mirroring and replication; and failover functionality.

The S3000 offers many connectivity options. It comes with two 10G-bps iSCSI interfaces and three host interface configuration options: four 1G-bps iSCSI connections, two or four 8-Gbps Fibre Channel connections, or two 10G-bps iSCSI host interfaces.

On the rear end, it sports a choice of a whopping 16 6G-bps SAS connections or two or four 8G-bps Fibre Channel connections.

VTrak S3000 works with all major operating systems, including HP-UX, Oracle Solaris, Linux and Windows, Bahar said. It will be available in the Americas beginning in August. Pricing for a 32TB configuration starts at $40,000.