No sooner said......
Ascent Storage 5 Optical Storage Manager
From Kofax Now SupportS DVD-RAM
April 6, 1999
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE) via
Individual Inc. -- Kofax Image Products
(Nasdaq:KOFX) Monday announced Ascent
Storage 5, a new DVD-RAM-enabled version
of the company's optical jukebox manager.
Ascent Storage offers Windows NT drive
letter emulation while retaining the power to
efficiently retrieve, manage and process up
to millions of document images.
Ascent Storage 5 installs in minutes and
requires no programming to install or use.
Once installed, an optical jukebox that
contains as much as 32 terabytes appears as
just another drive letter on an NT network --
or an icon on an end-user's desktop.
Ascent Storage 5 now supports the new
Satellite and Galaxy families of DVD-RAM
jukeboxes from NSM. The Satellite
accommodates 60 to 135 DVD discs and the
Galaxy supports 410 to 620, for a total
capacity ranging from 150 GB to over 1.6
terabytes, with performance similar to that
of an MO jukebox.
"We're delighted that Kofax has collaborated
with NSM to make Ascent Storage 5 available
at the launch of our high-capacity Satellite
and Galaxy jukebox families," said NSM
President David Ooley. "Ascent Storage 5 will
ensure that Satellite and Galaxy customers
will have a storage management choice that
offers the highest levels of proven
performance, ease-of-use and data
integrity."
"DVD-RAM promises to deliver the best of the
CD and MO worlds. Like CD, it uses an
inexpensive, standard medium that is quickly
replacing CD in both desktop and production
environments," said Kofax Vice President of
Marketing Kevin Drum. "However, DVD-RAM
also provides several benefits found in MO
products that make it an excellent choice for
imaging and document management
environments."
DVD-RAM disks store 2.6 GB each, over four
times as much as the 650 MB stored on a CD
platter. This means more data under the
head at one time, less disk swapping, and
reduced jukebox thrashing.
DVD-RAM is also infinitely rewritable. Unlike
CD-R, which is designed to be premastered in
a single continuous operation, files can be
written to DVD-RAM disks whenever they are
available. This is a critical performance
feature in real-time environments such as
document imaging, where you are scanning
pages and storing them immediately.
Finally, DVD-RAM promises performance
similar to that of MO. Seek times are lower
than CD, transfer rates are higher, and
overall file retrieval performance is nearly as
good as the best MO jukeboxes.
Ascent Storage 5 can be customized with a
variety of built-in functions that accelerate
file retrieval, file processing and
administration of optical jukeboxes. It has
been developed specifically for document
management, including administration, full
optical backup, offline-volume tracking and
faster retrieval for document management
applications.
Event Handlers Retain Performance and
Customizability
Custom event handlers enable Ascent
Storage to retain the power to grow with the
application. Simple Visual Basic(R) code may
be written to respond to any system event
-- from retrieving a whole folder to fast
magnetic storage when a specific file is
requested to paging a system administrator
when an off-line platter requires loading.
Scalable Performance
Ascent Storage 5's efficient database
architecture avoids the performance
degradation that occurs with some storage
managers when they are required to handle
several million documents. Ascent Storage
uses an architecture optimized for document
imaging storage rather than an off-the-shelf
database that bogs down as application size
increases. |
