Storage:

iQstor Launches the Foundation Series of Storage Solutions

iQstor, a developer of storage networking technology, introduced its Foundation Series of Storage Solutions at Storage Networking World.

The R1800/J1800 Storage Appliance and iQ2000 High Availability Storage System provide enterprise-level features, performance, and reliability for the mid-tier market. By embedding expertise into the storage subsystem, iQstor optimizes storage administrator resources, increases productivity and reduces operating costs.

The iQstor storage solutions are targeted at the mid-tier market. Jason Lo, president and CEO of iQstor remarked, "The explosive growth of the Internet and networked business applications created an urgent need to store and manage mission critical data. Mid-tier operations face the same set of IT challenges as their larger counterparts and have the same storage requirements, but not often the same resources."

The Foundation Series balances storage functionality requirements with the mid-tier market's need for affordable initial acquisition costs, recurring management costs and ease of use.

iQstor demonstrated the Foundation Series Technology at Storage Networking World, Booth #G20.

A single source for enterprise-level functionality "Efficient storage growth, performance, data protection, and 'plug and play' simplicity are iQstor trademarks," said Lo. With the Foundation Series, iQstor offers a single source for enterprise-level functionality, in a scalable package. This provides, in one unified offering, the capabilities of many vendors' 'point' solutions, such as virtualization, snapshotting, replication, high availability, performance and remote support.

Availability and reliability

The Foundation Series ensures high availability by utilizing fully redundant, hot-swappable components. In addition, full environmental monitoring and remote support services complement the technology solution.

Ease of management

Through embedded intelligence, iQstor automates many of the processes that tax storage administrative resources, such as capacity planning and storage provisioning. Policy based "plug and play" features enable additional storage capacity to be easily integrated with minimal storage expertise and no disruption. The Foundation Series is available with a variety of Storage Services Software Options. These include:

• Storage Virtualization Services (SVS) -- This volume management based virtualization software consolidates physical disk drive capacity into a virtual storage pool. The benefits are significantly enhanced storage administrator productivity from managing logical instead of physical disks, and reduced management costs of storage hardware.
• Managed Snapshot Services (MSS) -- This provides multiple point in time views of storage volumes to enable zero window backup, application testing, data mining and operation fallback capabilities. MSS is instantaneous, persistent, writeable and user-command or time-triggered.
• Remote Replication Services (RRS) -- This function replicates and synchronizes data between local and remote storage volumes at 2Gbps for business continuity and data migration purposes. RRS is a fibre channel based, serverless migration facility supporting heterogeneous storage systems.
• Intelligent Capacity Management (ICM) -- This simplifies storage capacity planning and enables automated on-line volume expansion for continuous application and server availability. ICM offers file system reporting and policy based LUN expansion.
• Enhanced Caching Services (ECS) -- This file and block caching service enables performance enhancements through incorporation of additional volume packaged solid state memory. ECS can provision the memory globally or assign it to enhance specific volume performance.
• Data Networking Software and Backup Services (DBS) -- This compatibility-tested solution incorporates Veritas Net Backup Software, ATL tape systems, and Sun or Intel-based servers to provide non-disruptive backup and ensure business continuity. The iQstor Foundation Series initially supports Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows NT and Sun Solaris, with other operating environments to follow. All of the technology is owned by iQstor and is standards-based, enabling customers to benefit from greater ease of integration and improved cost efficiencies.

About iQstor Networks Inc

A privately held company, Newbury Park, CA-based iQstor launched in February 2002. The company's core management team possesses more than 50+ collective years storage industry expertise in engineering, product development, global management and marketing. The iQstor vision is to embed expertise into the storage subsystem that significantly reduces the workload of storage administrators in mid-tier environments. These automated tools can manage ever-increasing amounts of data as well as the different storage policies that each company maintains. The ultimate goal is storage that is intuitive to use and scales without disruption. For more information on iQstor, visit the company's web site at www.iqstor.com.

Contact iQstor Networks Inc, Donna Sava, 805-376-1010, dsava@iqstor.com.