Several new storage products hit the market, equipment vendors report big deals and promising alliances, and the storage sector's fertile funding feast continues as venture capitalists provide additional funding to two key firms.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [March 28, 2002]

Several new storage products hit the market this week as equipment vendors accelerate to upgrade products at a dizzying rate of innovation.

StorageTek introduced two new products born of old alliances. In collaboration with LSI Logic, StorageTek released the co-branded 10-disk or 14-disk storage array capable of holding up to 5.4 TB of data. StorageTek also released a co-branded data backup and restore solution with Network Appliance that employs StorageTek tape drives and NetApp's NearStore R100.

Exabyte's AutoPak 1x10 shipped on March 19, 2002. The product, a 2U tape autoloader, holds 10 tapes, with a native capacity of 33 GB each (66 GB compressed) for a total usable capacity of 660 GB. It has a 10.6 GB per hour data transfer rate, and retails for $2,995 plus $147 for a rack mount kit.

Big deals
Storage equipment vendors have had some exciting successes recently, from big ticket sales to proven deployments of products brought to market by intriguing alliances.

Sun Microsystems sold two Sun Fire 6800 servers to EarthLink to power a new Sun SAN, a StorEdge 9960 in a deal worth over $1 million at regular retail prices.

Tapping into the hottest information technology sector at the moment, Spectra Logic inked a reseller agreement with Northrup Grumman IT. Northrup Grumman IT is the second largest information technology provider to the U.S. government. The IT division is a part of Northrup Grumman, whose diverse product linup includes the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), naval submarines, optical networking products, and medical electronics products.

McData claims that a massive SAN that it has just deployed enabled Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to manage over 46 TB of medical data and save the health maintenance group $120,000 in the first month of operation alone.

Big wheels
The storage area remains attractive to venture capitalists who are funding many new, innovative SAN solutions. Among them, Radiance Technologies' new product, dubbed TrueDelivery software, stands out. The application is designed to optimize and provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for large digital files. The company's first strategic partner is TiVo, the digital television recorder company. Radiance also announced that it secured $13.4 million in second round funding.

Radiance has several patents pending, including one that should be of interest to the storage industry. Radiance's Content-Smart Selective Caching technology is designed to minimize storage costs by caching content only where necessary, rather than all along an arbitrary network edge.

Agile Storage completed a second round of funding, raising $26 million in 90 days. The company hopes to start beta trials of its product, a SAN/NAS management system, over the summer.

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