Network Appliance has upgraded parts of its software and hardware
lines in its continuing efforts to show the cost and management
benefits of networked storage.
Most companies are moving away from the direct attached storage
models, where information is kept on a storage unit and can only be
accessed by a few servers. Advances in networking technologies have
made it possible to open up data sitting on storage boxes to a much
wider number of servers and users, typically through storage area
network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) environments.
Network Appliance has centred its storage offerings on NAS products
that can operate on other networks, such as existing Ethernet-based
networks. Yahoo has adopted Network Appliance products almost
exclusively and manages its entire 550Tbytes of storage around the
world with just 12 people, said Dan Warmenhoven, chief executive
officer of Network Appliance, in a recent interview.
Network Appliance has upgraded one of the key pieces of software
allowing companies to centrally manage storage, by releasing
version 1.1 of its DataFabric Manager software. With this release,
the company has added support for Sun Microsystems Solaris 2.8 Unix
operating system. The product will be available in October.
The company also introduced its first multiprocessor storage
appliances designed to work with large databases or complex
corporate applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP)
software. The F880 can handle up to 6Tbytes of data, and the F880c
can scale up to 12Tbytes. As the company upgrades other parts of
its software line it expects the larger unit to be able to manage
18Tbytes of data. The products start at $135,000 (£92,000).
Network Appliance has also added tools to its NetCache software,
making the new version of the product available this quarter. The
NetCache 5.2 software helps companies make content such as
streaming media more easily available to the end user by caching
the information on storage units near the user instead of always
feeding the data from a central point. If a user in Australia, for
example, pulled a corporate training video from a server in the US,
other Australian workers could access the content from a caching
appliance close by instead of from the server in the US, improving
transfer speeds and lowering bandwidth costs for the company.
Support for Apple's QuickTime media has also been added to
NetCache, which already supports Microsoft Windows Media and
RealMedia from RealNetworks. A Global Request Manager (GRM) option
should help direct content so that the end user always receives
cached content from the closest available hardware.
Network Appliance said its SnapManager software would be available
for Microsoft Exchange 2000 by the fourth quarter, starting at
$4,000. The SnapManager product automates data back-up, storage and
recovery tasks.
With the release of its new hardware in particular, Network
Appliance hopes to cast off its image as a provider of small
storage units able to handle only a couple of specific tasks.
"We have an image in the marketplace that is mostly a historical
legacy," Warmenhoven said. "Some people have this notion that an
appliance is small. Sure, it was not that long ago that the largest
system we sold was 1.5Tbytes, but these days we scale up to
18Tbytes."
Warmenhoven also shrugged off talk about traditional server vendors
creeping into the storage space. Companies such as Sun Microsystems
will try to keep the bond between its storage products and servers
tight and will remain hesitant to provide broad support for
hardware from other vendors, he said.
By fitting into existing Internet Protocol networks and supporting
a variety of operating systems and hardware, Network Appliance
claims it can capture a larger share of the storage market moving
forward.