Ciprico Inc. (Nasdaq:CPCI) and Advanced Digital Information Corporation (Nasdaq:ADIC) today announced a strategic and technical agreement to include ADIC's CentraVision Storage Area Network (SAN) file sharing software with Ciprico's comprehensive digital SAN solution package. Under terms of the agreement, Ciprico will integrate ADIC's CentraVision software into its SAN solutions, and the two companies will continue joint technology and market development activities to help bring the benefits of SANs to a wider network marketplace. The agreement means that Ciprico now offers one of the first comprehensive SAN solutions for the visual industry, helping visual-computing professionals save time and increase productivity by working collaboratively with shared data over high-bandwidth Fibre Channel SANs.
The digital visual market, with its large files and needs for collaborative workflow, is one of the first industries being transformed by Fibre Channel SAN technology. With conventional solutions, large files are transferred repeatedly over slower networks or moved from workstation to workstation manually on tape. "The norm has been serial workflow and clogged LANs," explains Ciprico Vice President of Marketing and Business Development Bill Hartman. "But Ciprico's SAN solution with ADIC's CentraVision changes all that. Now, users can access shared data from centralized disk arrays as quickly and as easily as they access local files. And with our new solution, this resource sharing is cross-platform, giving users true, heterogeneous file-sharing for high-speed parallel workflow and vastly increased productivity."
"Ciprico is one of the pioneers in development of direct attached and network storage products," commented ADIC Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Bill Britts," and their SAN solutions package provides a complete solution for a market where the overwhelming benefits of collaborative workflow are driving businesses to embrace new technology. Ciprico's strength as a partner for ADIC, however, stems not only from their technology, but also from their proven capacity to provide a full solution that really delivers shared storage with full Fibre Channel performance. Ciprico provides a complete package, from planning and integration to performance optimization and on-going support."
"We evaluated other file systems, but selected CentraVision for our SAN solution because of the strength of its technology," commented Hartman. "CentraVision is an advanced file-sharing system that supports large files and large data sets well, provides true file-level sharing, and that works today with systems that mix UNIX and Windows NT hosts. It provides an excellent foundation for our SAN application. Just as important, ADIC has shown itself to be a vigorous and active advocate for the adoption of SAN technology both in its hardware and software development."
With the realization of Fibre Channel's extended performance and connectivity options, SANs have clearly become the next generation model for efficient, file-level sharing of data among multiple, heterogeneous workstations. Industry analysts are estimating the SAN marketplace to grow to more than $10 billion by the year 2002. |
