Silicon Graphics Announces Real-World Storage Area Network Installations
Company Solving Massive Data Availability and Storage Challenges
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI) today announced delivery of real-world heterogeneous Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions that are currently being implemented in business-critical environments. Real-life experience in building SANs for digital media applications translates into a time-to-market advantage for those customers who also want to achieve enterprise SAN benefits such as storage consolidation, centralized storage management and data availability. Digital FilmWorks, a current digital media SAN customer installation with image-intensive applications, is realizing the business benefits of SANs.
"While many other vendors have made SAN announcements, most of these are simply roadmap statements with a few point products," said John "Beau" Vrolyk, senior vice president, Computer Systems Business Unit, Silicon Graphics. "Silicon Graphics is already moving through the early adopter stage and is now deploying follow-on technologies to support the full enterprise feature set. Coupled with the technology rollout, Silicon Graphics continues to build supporting services, including professional services, integration partners, interoperability testing, training and support required for the total SAN solution."
The company is developing enterprise SAN solutions based on its experience with digital media SANs, its success in deploying data warehousing and decision support solutions, and its heritage in high-performance, scalable ccNUMA servers. This combination creates industry-leading storage solutions which focus on consolidation, centralized management, high data availability, LAN-free backup and overall lower total cost of ownership.
"Dataquest believes that there are several stages to general adoption of Storage Area Networks, the first being guaranteed compatibility with all other connected devices and the final being increased data sharing. Media servers offer a complementary architecture to Storage Area Networks, in that both technologies require file sharing, data streaming, and storage management expertise. Companies that integrate media server elements will enhance the mainstream adoption of Storage Area Networks," stated Thomas Lahive, senior analyst with Dataquest.
To date, the industry segments with the most immediate need for SAN solutions mirror Silicon Graphics' core customers, including oil and gas, entertainment, government and scientific imaging, data warehousing, pharmaceutical, and pre-press. Within these market segments, digital media applications in particular have been generating the demand for SAN solutions. These applications are driven by time-to-market demand for heterogeneous file sharing, which cannot be satisfied in traditional client/server implementations. Digital media customers are beginning to implement Silicon Graphics solutions for the reduced total cost of ownership and increased data availability features required of an enterprise SAN.
"Film image data is the lifeblood of high-end post production. Ensuring data availability and integrity is essential to business survival," said Steve Russell, marketing manager, film imaging products for Philips DVS. "Our applications demand flexibility, so ways to consolidate storage, reduce storage management overhead, and ensure that vital film image data is safeguarded are critical. Our customers look to Silicon Graphics and its partners to provide leading technologies such as Fibre Channel-based switched fabrics to address the requirements of digital media and enterprise SANs."
Pricing and Availability
Silicon Graphics will offer a complete Fibre Channel fabric infrastructure for an up to sixteen device configuration starting at $56,000 U.S list in the first quarter of 1999. Silicon Graphics will offer the system, host bus adapter, switch or hub, Fibre Channel RAID/JBOD, tape solutions, High Availability software, storage management software, and Silicon Graphics' professional services. All of these components and others are also available from Silicon Graphics' partners today.
SOURCE Silicon Graphics, Inc.
CO: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
ST: California
IN: CPR
SU: PDT
12/14/98 07:04 EST prnewswire.com |
