Acer addresses the need for storage management with ipstor

While the cost per megabyte for storage is declining at a rate of 35% to 40% per annum, business requirements for fault-tolerance, high availability, disaster recovery and online backup have significantly increased the costs of managing storage.

That`s according to Hilton Haefele, server product manager at Acer in South Africa who says an explosion in demand for storage capacity - due to the growth of e-business - has led many companies to spend vast amounts of funds on storage solutions."

Industry analyst group, Dataquest, predicts that desktop storage will reach 14 GB by 2003. Meanwhile, in corporate data centres world-wide RAID capacity deployment will grow to 1,3 million TB by the same year.

But, says Haefele, organisations need to consider the costs of managing storage.

"As companies become more reliant on stored data, so the need for uninterrupted availability of data and fast complete recovery is needed.

"It`s estimated that the ratio of management costs vs. acquisition costs for storage has increased to 8:1. This means that for every R1 spent on the acquisition of a storage solution, a further R8 is spent on management," Haefele explains.

Now Acer has launched IPStor, a software solution that provides an IP-based network storage infrastructure using off-the-shelf components such as Gigabit Ethernet, SCSI and Fibre Channel storage interfaces. Because it is hardware independent, IPStor directly supports standard storage interfaces without converter boxes.

IPStor uses the global connectivity and availability of IP to consolidate diverse storage resources. This allows storage services to be performed from any end-point without distance restrictions.

The software solution ensures consolidated and virtualised storage via IP, enabling seamless large scale IP-based storage networks that are reliable, manageable, high-performing and secure. It also provides a full suite of storage services including mirroring, replication, snapshot, zero-impact backup and restore.

"IPStor addresses the high cost of storage management by utilising existing storage network infrastructure and IT staff know-how to maximise return on investment," Haefele concludes.