Digital's StorageWorks RAID Array 7000 and 10000 subsystems are the newest members of a growing group of Digital systems certified as Cluster/RAID devices by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Lab. The StorageWorks subsystems passed stringent hardware compatibility tests and can now be combined with other Microsoft-approved devices to create Microsoft Cluster Server configurations for high availability as part of Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition.
Digital is the only vendor to offer Windows NT customers a scalable, multivendor storage architecture that ensures high availability, high capacity, and high performance from the desktop to the data center with StorageWorks solutions. Digital's StorageWorks occupies the number 2 position in terms of storage sold in Windows NT computing environments, second only to Compaq, according to International Data Corporation's 1997 Disk Subsystems Year in Review report.
"Clustering has major implications for Windows NT storage," says Julian Simpkins, Storage Products Manager at Digital Equipment Corporation SA. "Clustering is an architecture invented by Digital and achieves high availability with Windows NT by joining two servers together. In the event of the failure of one server, the remaining server automatically picks up the workload of the one which has failed. In the past, Windows NT servers handled their own storage either through internal storage or directly attached external storage arrays. When a server went down, users couldn't continue to access the information. With clustering, this is no longer the case."
Other significant achievements for Digital in developing storage for Windows NT environments are as follows:
- The company has begun shipments of its entry-level RAID Array 3000 storage subsystem for the Windows NT operating system, rounding out its product family.
- Digital and Microsoft created the largest Windows NT server node in the world with the Terra-Server application, demonstrated at Microsoft Scalability Day this past May. It contains a terabyte of aerial images from the U. S. Geologic Survey and the Russian Space Agency. The data is stored using the Windows NT operating system, SQL Server software, Digital's Digital Server 7300 and Digital Server 7100 systems, and StorageWorks RAID Array solutions and tape backup products.
- Oracle Corporation built and tested a terabyte-sized Oracle database on the Windows NT platform using Digital's StorageWorks RAID Array solutions. With StorageWorks controllers, Oracle was able to define more than one terabyte of storage by combining the physical drives into just nine virtual drives.
- Digital's StorageWorks solutions can manage massive volumes of Windows NT data with enterprise-class storage management tools. Digital's StorageWorks Command Console, a Windows NT-based monitoring and configuration tool, can manage up to 1.2 petabytes of data distributed across an enterprise from a single Windows NT workstation. Digital's Networker Save and Restore software and automated tape libraries provide safe backup and recovery for up to 1.6 terabytes of data.
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