Out of paradise comes positive proof that storage-in-practice is alive and well. Pihana Pacific adds its own brand of storage service offerings to its carrier class data centers. Meanwhile, new products abound and great deals start to hit the SAN scene.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 2, 2001]

Out of the Asia Pacific region, based in beautiful Hawaii, comes Pihana Pacific, a purveyor of carrier-class carrier-neutral data center space aimed at Asian businesses seeking a U.S. presence and vice versa. Each of the company's data centers have an internal network access point as well as fire suppression, power generators, and all the other fault-tolerant frills for top-notch performance.

The company has data centers in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and Seoul, and plans to open in Taiwan soon. Most Pihana data centers have about 50,000 square feet of space. Singapore is home to its Global Network Operations Center (GNOC)

The company is adding a Pihana-branded storage offering in its data centers in Asia. Said Cardi Prinzi, vice president of sales and marketing for North America, "in the United States, a company like Equinix would have several storage companies offering storage services under their own brand names, but it's not like that in Asia." So Pihana has partnered with one of those companies, StorageNetworks (NASDAQ: STOR) to offer their STORfusion services in Pihana data centers.

Among the many perks designed for carrier-class customers, the STORfusion product provides Pihana with StorageNetworks' propriety software and hardware integration platform, training, and monitoring of service.

The company is not offering backup and restore across national boundaries in Asia, because trans-national bandwidth is still very expensive. Instead, a backup across town or in a nearby city is sufficient. "We'll use local access methods to incorporate cold, warm, and hot data backup into our storage platform," he says. Customers will pay different prices for, say, once-per-day (cold), once-per-hour (warm), or real-time (hot) data backup.

Prinzi says that his company's advantage is the ability to offer all of Asia Pacific (APAC) on one network. "Our 99.999 percent service level agreement is a big selling point, but even more than that, all markets vary in the standard quality of services. We can deliver all of Asia on one SLA. That, plus our carrier neutral status, is how we define our community of interest (above left)."

This just in

Redback Networks introduced a new router, the SmartEdge 800. Although pricing is not yet available, detailed product specs were. The router supports new protocols such as MPLS, and even draft protocols called MBGP and MSDP. It uses two line cards (one each for inbound and outbound) plus two route processing modules (one is redundant backup). The route processing modules have 768 MB of primary storage, a flash memory card, and run off a Power PC 750 processor. The units are currently in trials with 15 service providers.

While Western Digital introduced WD Caviar 120 GB ultra 100 ATA drives running at 7,200 RPM, the company's online store offered a better deal: the previous generation of 100 GB drives, known as WD75EB at a discount, $379 for one, or, in bulk, 20 for $1,460. Folks, too many product releases can be a bad thing, instantly making the previous generation cheap.

RealScale Technologies, a French manufacturer of server blades, had several announcements. The company ran a streaming media test using Windows Media Server and showed that its i-Cluster chassis can serve over 1,000 simultaneous users. In addition, the company announced that its servers now support Red Hat Linux 7.2, and that its servers were the first to be delivered with Citrix MetaFrame XP.

The i-Cluster series runs on Intel processors (by default, Pentium IIIs at 566 MHz), has redundant power supplies, comes with one CompactFlash card with 512 MB of RAM, and up to two hard disks with 30 GB of storage. The chassis crams 12 server blades into a single 2U package. Each blade has two Fast Ethernet ports. The company says that each chassis requires only four cables (for power and LAN).

From Taiwan comes a laptop whose manufacturer claims it's the most powerful ever. The Naturetech 777S uses an UltraSPARC IIe 64-bit 500 MHz processor with a 20GB or 66GB hard disk. This portable workstation comes with SUN Solaris 8 pre-installed, and at least 256 MB of RAM. According to the SUN Microsystems Web site, the computer comes with a 15-inch high resolution,1024x768 LCD display supporting up to 16 million colors. It is priced at $7,998.

And finally, IBM improved many of its storage offerings, adding space or throughput without raising prices. In a tough economy, Big Blue is counting on maintaining its market share by offering more, for less. We expect other manufacturers in SAN space to follow IBM's lead. Be on the lookout for some great year-end deals.

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