Crossroads introduces its new storage router, Exabyte has a new Fibre Channel tape drive, and five companies pick up much needed major venture capital.

by ISP-Planet Staff [May 31, 2002]

The Crosssroads 6000 Storage Router hit the market this week featuring one Fibre Channel port and two SCSI ports, enabling network administrators to integrate SCSI products into Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs). This makes for an interesting value proposition in entry-level 2 GB storage routers designed departmental SANs.

Crossroads Visual Manager (CVM)

The key benefit is its ability to provide LAN-free backup and restore functions. This moves the bulk of data backup and recovery traffic away from the LAN and into the SAN. Removing the LAN bottleneck ensures that SCSI devices can operate at full speed. The unit ships complete with Crossroads Visual Manager and management GUI (left). The list price of the Crossroads 6000 Storage Router is $12,095.

Boulder, Colorado-based Exabyte Corp. unveiled its latest tape backup product this week. The newest addition to the company's Fibre Channel library family of products is the 221L LTO Ultrium tape library, complete with a native Fibre Channel interface. The 221L-FC occupies only 5U of rack space, manages up to 4.2 TB of data, and can reach transfer rates of 216 GB per hour.

In related news, Exabyte obtained a $25 million line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley Bancshares. Exabyte plans to use the financing to support general corporate needs.

Storage solutions innovator Adaptec, Inc. has constructed a SCSI cable designed to deliver 320 Mbps data transfer rates. As the product name implies, the Ultra320 SCSI provides a key speed increase, because it is capable of delivering a Terabyte of data in just under one hour (about 52.08 minutes, assuming perfect throughput and no problems, errors, or inefficiencies). A 1.5 meter cable retails for $110 and is available direct from Adaptec but is not listed on most price sheets yet.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has made much ado of its release of Solaris 9 this month. VERITAS Software Corp. was quick to announce that its flagship storage software solution, the VERITAS Foundation Suite, supports the latest update to Sun's UNIX-based operating environment.

Capital investments surge
Spinnaker Networks, Inc. picked up $31 million in second round financing last week. The Pittsburgh-based company plans to develop distributed storage systems to resolve scalability issues for enterprise-class organizations. The company has not yet released a product, but its distributed storage software products, when released, may enable large companies to build robust storage networks from older, slower hardware.

Storage resource management (SRM) software maker TeraCloud Corp. received $5.5 million in first round funding this month. The Bellevue, Washington-based company has numerous storage solutions on the market under its former name, Trilogy Software, which was founded in 1991. The company changed its name to TeraCloud in June 2001. TeraCloud intends to utilize the funding to expand its sales, marketing, and development teams in the near-term.

Silicon Valley-based Confluence Networks received $28.3 million in second round financing this week, bringing its total funding to approximately $45 million. The company plans to use the newly raised capital to fund the completion of customer trials, ongoing product development, and an eventual product launch.

Dot Hill, a company that builds storage boxes, designs storage software, and also provides storage services, announced that it has entered into a multi-year product purchase agreement with Sun Microsystems. Under the terms of the agreement, the Carlsbad, California-based data storage solutions provider will produce certain private label products for Sun. As part of the relationship, Sun could purchase up to 5 percent of Dot Hill.

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