Under the umbrella of business continuity solutions, Compaq Computer Corp. last month announced new offerings and enhancements for its network attached storage line to meet storage demands of small businesses right up to the enterprise.
Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Compaq Canada released its StorageWorks NAS B3000 and NAS S1000 solutions along with the new StorageWorks Network Storage Router M24002, the StorageWorks ESL9595 back-up and restore solution and the DLT1 1280 SuperLoader tape back-up solution.
The NAS B3000, Compaq’s focus offering enables connectivity to a storage area network (SAN) environment with the ability to transmit data at both a file and block level, which Compaq added fits in with its enterprise network storage architecture (ENSA) strategy.
“Underneath that architecture, one of the technologies we have deployed is what is called the Universal Network Storage,” said Toby Reid, product manager, enterprise storage solutions for Compaq Canada. “What that basically means is that SAN fabrics can speak with NAS devices and the SAN fabric can be used through that connectivity to provide high availability for all types of data, be it file or block. The B3000 incorporates a piece of our strategy: the NAS/SAN fusion.”
Compaq’s new M2402 network storage router enables existing SCSI-based tape library users to connect the solution to a Fibre Channel SAN environment. The M2402 offers support for server-less back-up, 1GB and 2GB Fibre Channel and Web-based remote management. As well, back-up speeds to SCSI libraries can be increased by up to 90 per cent. Reid noted that the 1GB and 2GB functionality gives customers a migration path as the industry begins to shift to 2GB as the new standard.
Compaq’s ESL9595SL, Reid said, is the company’s highest-end tape library and comes with 595 tape cartridges. The product also brings enterprise-level capacity and SDLT drives in a compact footprint, for direct SCSI and SAN environments.
“The SDLT tape library technology in Compaq’s perspective, is the latest and greatest,” Reid said. “At this point the SDLT allows tape back-up solutions that natively (uncompressed) would provide 110GB, and compressed will provide 220GB capacity.”
According to Compaq, the new products offer a one-stop storage answer to business continuity issues that organizations are facing.
“Companies are no longer looking to vendors like Compaq to supply disaster recovery solutions,” said Toby Reid, product manager, enterprise storage solutions for Compaq. “Companies can’t afford to have a disaster.”
And IDC Canada Ltd. concurred. Alan Freedman, research manager for infrastructure hardware in Toronto said that disaster recovery is just one piece of business continuity.
“By taking a wider view of the storage requirements and the business requirements, you are really integrating more services and more products and making sure that the end user is always able to access their data and remain a viable business,” Freedman said. “Compaq is definitely a major player in storage. They have been working on improving their attach rates in external storage. They are trying to break out from just being a ‘captive’ storage player where they sell into their own accounts, and are working toward multi-vendor strategies to be more of a player against companies like EMC and HDS.”
Compaq’s storage offerings are available now. For further details and pricing, visit the company’s Canadian Web site at www.compaq.ca.
