Storgate and Promise bring cost-effective and reliable storage to SMEs

Storgate Africa, sole local distributor for Promise Technology, has announced the availability of the V-Trak M-Class range of storage enclosures, bringing lower total cost of ownership, increased overall storage performance and best-in-class reliability features to the SME and midrange business market.

"Available in six models, the M-Class range offers customers unrivalled flexibility in the form of addressable storage space and different storage interfaces," explains Lyndon Blignaut, product manager at Storgate.

"The solutions are available in 8, 12 and 15-drive increments, including support for the upcoming SATA 2 drive standard, which guarantees customers extreme performance, right throughout the enclosures` backbone and external interfaces," he says.

Compliance to the SATA 2 standard also ensures that customers are provided with sufficient headroom to make use of their existing SATA drives and upgrade to the SATA 2 standard when these new hard drives hit the market.

"All SATA 2 features including 3GB/s speed, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), staggered spin-up, and drive hot swap support are available on all models in the M-Class range," Blignaut explains.

In terms of connectivity, Promise has covered all the bases, right from direct attached functionality through to the SAN and NAS standards in use today.

"Three of the M-Class units offer the ability to either directly attach storage volumes to a conventional server or connect storage volumes to an existing SAN, by utilising dual 2GB fibre channel host ports. The other three units in the range make use of dual 1GB/s iSCSI ports, should customers prefer to go this route in terms of their storage needs," Blignaut continues.

"Naturally, Promise has included support for numerous RAID levels and bundled specialised management software with its new offering of M-Class solutions. This not only ensures that data is kept safe, but also that volumes can be easily managed, monitored, scaled and reconfigured on the fly."

According to Blignaut, these reliability features offer vital functionality like Predictive Data Migration; LUN masking, mapping and carving; and Promise` s Media Patrol and PerfectRAID tools. The arrays also sport a host of sophisticated RAID array features including multiple logical drive support, online capacity expansion and RAID level migration, non-volatile error logging, advanced SCSI command support and enhanced SMART support.

"The M-Class range comes with Microsoft` s stamp of approval in the form of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition certification for 8-node clusters, indicating that it should integrate with virtually all customers` existing infrastructure."

"The combined solid functionality, flexibility, performance and reliability prevalent in the new M-Class range of solutions, truly provides an ideal answer for cost-sensitive businesses that can`t afford to sacrifice high availability," he concludes.