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Continuing its quest to provide a wide range of IP storage-area network products, Intransa has introduced the IP7500, a product the company bills as an alternative to Fibre Channel for online and near-line secondary storage needs.
The Intransa IP7500, the first of several planned products in a new line of storage products from the San Jose, Calif.-based company, is a preconfigured full-rack system that can accept 20 redundant Gigabit Ethernet connections. The product also has an uninterruptible power supply, preloaded software, and a management console. The IP7500 delivers N-way active-active failover with redundant front-end and back-end switching, increasing availability and redundancy, and can expand from 24TB to 32TB in the same rack by adding modular disk enclosures.
The IP7500 also comes with Intransas StorControl software, billed as a centralized management interface that consolidates resources into a single virtualized pool of storage.
These features create a plug-and-play environment that Chief Technology Officer Peter Wang says is easily scalable and less expensive and complex than Fibre Channel Storage technologies.
That assertion makes sense given the fact that iSCSI is inherently lower cost and easier to manage because there are no Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters or SAN switches to acquire and support, said Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at the ESG Lab of Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass.
By combining the power of TCP/IP networking and a standard ATA disk drive, Intransa may be on to something, Asaro said. ESG estimates that today, there are more than 2,000 production installations for iSCSI SANs, and the number continues to grow. In large part, thats because some are using iSCSI/ATA-based storage for departmental applications such as e-mail while others have replaced Fibre Channel SANs with iSCSI for all of their storage networking needs.
With the 7000 series, Intransa continues to make its mark in the industry, which also includes competitors EqualLogic Inc., LeftHand Networks Inc., FalconStor Software and SANRAD Ltd.
“Intransa has been gaining market traction and customer wins while pushing the iSCSI agenda of lower cost and ease of use, first through its 3000 series, then through the 5000 and 7000 series,” Asaro said. “They are working from the idea that using the more popular, lower-cost Ethernet technology in combination with the IP protocol allows for lower cost and easier deployment and management of storage.”
According to the company, the IP7500 is designed for use with such business-critical online applications as digital media, video surveillance, data warehousing/data mining, and near-line storage. Government and medium-to-large businesses are target markets for the product.