Network Appliance has announced the first of an enterprise-class
filer line for centralised, online back-up for data from multiple
remote site locations.
The NearStore R100 file server is the first of a line of NearStore
family of products announced in December. The R100 scales from
12TBytes to 96TBytes and works with almost a dozen vendor back-up
software products.
Jamie Gruener, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said Network
Appliance is hitting a sweet spot with storage managers with the
release of its first product focused squarely on data migration and
back-up.
"What they're doing is offering a consolidated backup appliance,"
he said. "The idea behind it is to ease people's back-up issues as
far as how to do back-ups and where does that data reside. It has
fairly unique positioning."
Gruener also said the R100's base price of $240,000 (£169,000),
which works out to two cents per megabyte, is very competitive.
NearStore products will work with other vendors' storage servers
and with variations of the Unix operating system and Windows NT.
In concert with the NearStore R100's release, Network Appliance
introduced several back-up and restore software products including
SnapMirror, which allows managers to mirror selected
mission-critical data sets stored within a single volume for
disaster recovery; SnapVault, which enables snapshots from multiple
storage appliances to be placed on a central repository, such as
the NearStore; and SnapRestore for file recovery from previously
created copies.
"Today backup is normally done via a bunch of smallish tape
libraries. That's hard to administer because in regional offices
there's little or no IT support. With NearStore 100, all data can
be backed up in seconds to minutes versus hours to days," said Ray
Villeneuve, vice-president of marketing at Network Appliance.
The NearStore product line will work with backup software from
Advanced Digital Information, Computer Associates International,
Legato Systems, Quantum/ATL, Spectra Logic, Storage Technology and
Veritas Software.
"NearStore is well suited for storing redundant copies of data
because of its large capacity, network connectivity and
interoperability with popular back-up and replication software
packages," said Michael Fisch, an analyst at The Clipper Group.