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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: riposte who wrote (10242)	8/2/2002 10:28:53 AM
From: riposte	Respond to of 10934

Storage goes modular Good series on storage over @ InfoWorld... Storage goes modular Scott Tyler Shafer Before the economy soured, the storage industry was doing well. In fact, things had never been better. Storage vendors were making money hand over fist by selling high-capacity storage systems to enterprises that were preparing for the cascade of data the Internet promised to produce. But to the vendors' dismay, potential customers fell off the face of the earth or began to reduce their staffs or budgets, and the formerly unquenchable demand for more storage capacity seemed to be quenched. Storage vendors would have to switch gears to meet the new requirements of enterprises: inexpensiveness, flexibility, and support for a variety of applications. Instead of pushing expensive high-end systems, the focus is now moving toward designing and marketing flexible storage systems that offer functions similar to those of high-end systems but at a lower price. The emerging class of midrange products is often referred to as "modular storage." Designed with the cost-conscious customer in mind, modular storage offers a buy-as-you-go solution. Compared to the monolithic big boxes with up to 70TB of capacity, modular storage systems start at about 2TB and can scale up to 20TB. Enterprise customers are interested in these systems not only for their budget-friendly price tags, but also as an alternative to deploying another monolith. "We had a window of opportunity to upgrade or replace our storage and we decided we were ready to centralize [it]," says Bill Caproni, director of technology and information systems at Russ Berrie & Co., a stuffed-animal manufacturer located in Oakland, N.J. Caproni explains that the company of 1,500 employees wanted to get all 3.5TB of its storage networked, creating a storage foundation that could be added to as additional storage needs emerge. "We wanted to do storage area networking, so we went back to EMC and purchased a Clariion," Caproni adds. "The SAN model fits well for us. Our goals were to be able to do SAN-based backup with our Oracle databases," Caproni says, noting that prior to the Clariion the company was taking their databases offline to do backup -- and that was no longer a viable process. [REMAINING TEXT DELETED] FULL ARTICLE @ infoworld.com