Smart Storage Technologies (SmartStor), a subsidiary of MB Technologies, has launched a Storage Area Network (SAN) laboratory, which, with equipment worth more than R20 million, highlights the company's investment in, and dedication to the local storage market.
"The SAN lab was established to take the risk out of trial-and-error storage solution purchases and allows customers to test live SAN technologies in a workshop environment and then decide on how to invest in storage," says Tony Life, executive director at SmartStor.
Apart from South Africa's first ADIC Scalar 10K enterprise tape library, which allows potential users to gain first-hand experience with its capacity-on-demand scalability, high availability architecture as well as with a full suite of integrated storage network management and connectivity capabilities, the lab also features a XIOtech MAGNITUDE architected SAN.
The first local disk virtualisation solution, the MAGNITUDE was designed from the ground up to incorporate all the components of a SAN, in one centralised, easy-to-manage and highly available configuration, also known as the "SAN in the box".
A RAID controller, eight-port fibre channel switch and logical volume management software are integrated in the MAGNITUDE, making it simple to implement multiple SAN components from a variety of vendors.
Says Life: "Maximising data, server and application availability is one of the major benefits offered by the MAGNITUDE, which combines the capacity and performance of individual disk drives into a pool of shared storage. It incorporates redundant, hot-swappable components and allows disks and servers to be added on the fly. In addition, its cluster-ready architecture provides a many-to-many failover capability."
SmartStor's SAN lab also incorporates software provided by Computer Associates and VERITAS, which provides the connectivity that helps drive the performance between the disk and tape solutions in this environment. "The software used in our lab is basically the glue which holds the hardware together," Life continues. "We want to show our customers that a SAN environment can be truly interoperable," he concludes.
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