Three of the industry's top storage vendors have announced new products aimed at supporting enterprise applications and high-end systems.
Network Appliance earlier this month debuted two multiprocessor storage appliances, the NetApp F880 and F880c. The appliances, priced starting at $US135,000 and $335,000, respectively, are designed to store data for large databases, enterprise resource planning, corporatewide home directory consolidation and other mission-critical applications. The F880 filer scales from 50GB to 9TB of data capacity, and the F880c offers a clustering configuration that scales to 18TB of data storage space.
The machines, which are available now, give companies with enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange the ability to create online backups so that in case of an outage, a user "can get back to a working [version] of Exchange in seconds," said NetApp spokesman Ray Villaneuve.
Meanwhile, Sony Electronics Storage Solutions division made its first foray into the network-attached storage device (NAS) space with its FSV-E1 file server. The product will begin shipping at an estimated retail price of $1,300 through distributors, value-added resellers and systems integrators next month.
Sony also introduced what company officials claim is the industry's first advanced intelligent tape (AIT) library in a carousel configuration. Touting 800GB of native capacity and 2TB of compressed capacity, the library will be generally available at the end of the month for about $9,000.
For its part, Quantum/ATL introduced two new enterprise-class tape libraries. The P4000 and P7000 are Quantum's next-generation automated tape libraries based on its P3000 and P2000 tape library architectures. The P7000 and P4000 will accommodate DLT8000, Super DLT tape drives or LTO Ultrium tape drives.
Both units offer native Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet connections, said Kevin Daly, president of Quantum/ATL.
Both libraries represent the highest density currently available in enterprise tape libraries on the market today, according to Steve Duplessie, an analyst at market research firm Enterprise Storage Group.
The P7000 can scale to 64 drives and touts up to 2,500 slots for more than 500TB capacity using Super DLT tape drives and a 7TB-per-hour performance rate with LTO Ultrium drives.
The P4000 is configured with up to 10 tape drives and 322 cartridges, 70TB capacity and a transfer rate of one gigabit per hour. The P4000 can scale to the same configuration and capacity as the P7000.
The P7000 is currently available at a list price of around $90,000. The P4000 will be available beginning next week, starting at $65,000.
