Veritas intros direct file access for Windows 2000

The local subsidiary of VERITAS Software has announced SANPoint Direct file access, the first in a series of file access solutions planned for heterogeneous SAN environments and a solution that exploits the performance and scalability of Windows 2000 storage area network (SAN) environments.

Nick van Noordwyk, regional director, Middle East and Africa, at VERITAS Software, says the product efficiently bypasses the bottlenecks associated with retrieving server data over local area networks (LANs) by allowing multiple servers to directly access data across the SAN. "This not only increases read/write performance, but it extends the scalability of web hosting and e-business operations by providing multiple servers simultaneous access to information.

"SANPoint Direct is well suited to SAN environments serving data- and storage-intensive operations, such as web farms, multimedia editing and publishing environments - applications that can`t afford to sacrifice file access performance for the sake of an efficient, consolidated storage solution," he continues.

The new VERITAS product outperforms traditional LAN-based solutions by executing data transfer operations directly between the application hosts and SAN-connected storage. Windows 2000 network administrators may now consolidate their storage on the SAN without fear of performance degradation when accessing data. It complements this performance with scalability: by reducing the load on the server generated by each client and enabling the server to service a larger number of clients.

"SANPoint Direct will give Windows 2000 shops a boost in I/O performance by eliminating the need for the LAN as a storage transport," said Steve Duplessie, Sr. Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "Being able to share files at fibre channel speeds can only help these users."

VERITAS SANPoint Direct file access runs on top of the Windows NT file system and supports all Microsoft and industry standard protocols, allowing it to operate in any Windows 2000 environment without requiring custom design or application changes. It also supports Microsoft Cluster Server, which helps ensure the continuous availability of Windows 2000 data.