The buzz at several storage shows, a slew of new storage products hit the market, and fresh funding for storage firms adds up to optimism about the storage sector.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [April 11, 2002]

It's that time of the year again when you can't possible attend every expo, seminar, or forum that catches your attention. The storage sector proves it is just like other technology hotspots of the past as it proves to be the darling of the conference industry this year.

One of the more notable gatherings was the Storewidth 2002 conference. Billed as a "gathering of geeks who matter," chief geek of this tribe is George Gilder, who explained how he sees the storage phenomenon as being related to issues like peering agreements, webhosting services, and content delivery network deployments.

In addition to the Storewidth 2002 expo, "where infinite bandwidth converges with storage" in Laguna Niguel, Calif. last month, here's the buzz from several other storage-related events.

Zambeel's new enterprise storage system.

While introducing the storage system, Darren Thomas, Zambeel president and chief executive officer, said CTOs are acutely aware of the management burden associated with today’s storage architectures.

"Zambeel's storage architecture provides the flexibility required to consolidate storage in a single, easy-to-manage system that can meet the unique needs of different groups of users within an enterprise, leading to a dramatically lower cost of ownership," he said.

Unfortunately, pricing guidance is not available at this time because the Zambeel system is currently in beta testing. The product will be available in the second quarter of 2002.

Broadcast hubbub
With the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conducting its annual hoe-down, many TV and radio storage stories hit the news wires. The broadcast industry is fighting its own anti-re-monopolization battle, one that's analogous to the fight of ISPs against Regional Bell consolidation and re-monopolization, in opposing the merger of EchoStar and DirecTV. Should the two entities merge, a single company would control most of the satellite TV market.

Edward O. Fritts, NAB president and chief executive officer, said the called others to join the group's fight against the merger.

"NAB will vigorously defend the territorial integrity of all free, local television stations, and we fully expect the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the EchoStar appeal," Fritts said.

Meanwhile, in the floor show, Gadzoox Networks demonstrated a SAN system for broadcasting High Definition Television (HDTV) over its Slingshot 4210 switch. The 1U sized 2 Gbps Fibre Channel switch is priced at just under $1,000 per port.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. also introduced new gear at NAB 2002. SGI demonstrated its new server for Video on Demand (VoD) services. The SGI Media Server will be available in June, starting at $57,000 list. It has key VoD features and can connect with Fibre Channel, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and ATM OC-3 networks.

Maxtor was on hand to showcase its Atlas 10K III SCSI hard disk. The 18 GB Ultra SCSI 160 disk running at 10000 RPM is only 3.5 inches in size and retails for about $240, while the 73 GB version sells for $890.

Last but definitely not lease, Storage Networking World occupied the Mariott Desert Springs Resort in Palm Desert, Calif., where American Megatrends, Inc. showcased a variety of storage solutions, including its StorTrends RTG and StorTrends RTG LE. "RTG" stands for "Ready to go" and the solutions are offered in a variety of configurations.

Money, money, money
Platypus Technology, a maker of solid-state storage systems, raised $7 million in second-round financing to improve products and launch sales and marketing initiatives. Platypus' equipment reduces bottlenecks caused by hard drives, allowing mission critical files to run from silicon, rather than from rotating platters. The company was founded in Australia but is currently based in New Hampshire.

NeoScale Systems, Inc., provider of enterprise storage security solutions for the network storage market, received more than $13 million in first round venture funding. Although founded almost tow years ago, the company essentially emerged from stealth mode on April 2, with funding for its first product called NeoScale CryptoStor FC, currently in beta. The product is a hardware device that handles encryption and rule processing at wire speed.

Princeton Softech, provider of active archiving technologies, received $21 million to fund its spin off from the parent company, Computer Horizons.

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