Compaq's SAN market dominance confirmed by Gartner Dataquest reporting that its earned 48.5 percent market share. Plus, new companies, new equipment, more interoperability studies, and a slew of trade shows in this eventful month.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 29, 2001]

With TECHXNY (formerly PC EXPO) as well as N+I Tokyo and several other trade and industry shows occurring at the same time of the year, the announcements and developments make the storage sector appear to be thriving.

VC investments
Boston.internet.com reported that local firm Storability raised $30 million in VC funding. Additionally:

• StorageWay raised $42 million in new equity investment.
• Broadband Storage received $16 million in Series A investment.
• LeftHand Networks continued its first funding round, adding $3 million for a total of $12 million so far.
• PetaSwitch Solutions, developer of multi-terabit switch fabric services for networking applications, obtained $4 million Series A funding.
• Latis Networks, Inc., an operating service provider, has closed a $21.4 million Series A financing round led by SOFTBANK Venture Capital.

Telseon's Gigabit Ethernet metropolitan network performed well in a test. After a baseline test with two Nishan IPS 3000 switches directly connected, Telseon provided a Gigabit Ethernet metro network between the two SANs. When Telseon's network was used, there was only a 1.2 percent latency when compared to the baseline test.

Raidtec and Exabyte announced the successful completion of compatibility testing of Raidtec's SNAZ R6 and nEngine with Exabyte Corporation's M2 tape drive technology, allowing Raidtec to include a high-speed integrated back-up device in their NAS server appliance.

IBM announced its entry into the Network Attached Storage arena (weren't they there already?) with the TotalStorage series of products and new tape libraries. The IBM NAS 200 and NAS 300 products come pre-loaded with software, including Tivoli Storage Manager. IBM's press release compared its new products to the single node and dual node Network Appliance 740. The company also announced the IBM 300G, a "NAS to SAN bridge."

RAID and hard drives
Adaptec, Inc. debuted two RAID devices, the four-channel Adaptec RAID 3410S and the two-channel Adaptec RAID 3210S. Priced in the $5,000-$10,000 range, these Ultra160 SCSI products delivery PCI bus speeds up to 528MB/sec. (See Performance Benchmarks for additional details.)

Advanced Computer & Network Corporation (AC&NC) also introduced a pair of RAID products—the JetStor III U160 RAID (UltraSCSI) with up to 1440 GB capacity and the JetStor III FC/U160 RAID (Fibre Channel). Initial JetStor III U160 RAID demonstrations will be presented at USENIX 2001 in Boston on later this week.

Seagate came out with two USB external hard drives, the DiskStor 20 (STH6201U-R) with up to 20 Gbytes of storage and the DiskStor 40 (STH6401U-R) with up to 40 Gbytes. In addition to these products for the Americas, there are models with special power accessories available for Europe and Asia Pacific. U.S. list prices are $269 for the DiskStor 20 and $349 for the DiskStor 40.

Seagate is also ready to formally introduce its Cheetah X15 series of hard drives with average seek times of 3.7 ms and 3.6 ms, unfortunately pricing is not available at this time.

Winchester Systems announced the FlashDisk OpenRAID Ultra160 series. A unit with eight 7,200-rpm disk drives of 181.4 GB each that stores 1.45 TB is priced at $50,897 for a dual-port model and $53,640 for a quad-port model. A unit with twelve 10,000-rpm disk drives of 73.4 GB each to store 880.8 GB and is priced at $41,103 for a dual port model and $43,846 for a quad-port model. Delivery is two to three weeks.

Maxtor Corporation launched its DiamondMax D540X, a 40 GB per platter drive, and the DiamondMax D536X, at 100 GB. These drives are in volume production, and qualifications by major PC OEMs are nearly complete, but pricing was not available at this time.

Other offerings TECHNOLAND announced the TL-cPCI 3600, a 3U CompactPCI CPU board built with the Intel 440BX AGP set. It is available immediately for VARs starting at $1,170.00. It comes with 10/100 Ethernet, Flash BIOS, DiskOnChip socket with flash memory up to 144MB or higher, two serial ports, one parallel port, and two USB ports. Intel is running a special offer of two Intel PRO/1000 T Server Adapters for $219 (the price of one). The adapters are designed to provide gigabit speeds over CAT 5 copper cable. Deployment scenarios provide gigabit over copper for short hauls, supplemented by gigabit over fiber for longer distances.

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