Storage:

Imperial Technology Announces the SANaccelerator

Imperial Technology, the company accelerating application performance, announced the availability of the SANaccelerator, the first data acceleration device specifically designed to improve application performance in Storage Area Networks (SANs).

"Fibre Channel is the standard for SAN connections, but even with 2 Gbps speeds, transaction processing applications still encounter performance bottlenecks in the SAN that are storage-related," said Robert David, CEO and president of Imperial Technology. "The SAN bottleneck is not the network, it is the inherent limitations of rotating disk drives. The SANaccelerator responds to this problem by creating a performance pool that is allocated to changing application requirements in the SAN which affect performance."

"When the SANaccelerator is connected to a SAN, it becomes a dynamic performance resource for selectively improving application performance when and where it is needed," says Michael Fisch, Senior Analyst, The Clipper Group Inc in a Navigator bulletin dated April 3, 2002 and titled Imperial Technology's Solid State Disk - Satisfying the Need For Speed in a SAN ( www.SANaccelerator.com/PDFs/ClipperGroup.pdf ). "Storage performance may seem to be an arcane topic at first glance, but when properly understood in the context of modern business, it is exceedingly important. Enterprises are concerned about application performance because it directly affects their bottom line."

"The emergence of the SAN virtualization layer and virtualization products will be an important enabler for SSDs," reports IDC Analysts Massaki Moriyama and Robert Gray in their December 2001 Bulletin entitled Solid State Disks: The Right Products for Boosting Performance in Tough Times - Product and Market Analysis, 2001. They conclude "SSDs will be the smart choice for deployment for increasing numbers of end users. New transaction-oriented system deployments would be well served by architecting in performance-measurement tools and SSD technology from the beginning. In many cases, substantial savings may occur from reduced server and storage array requirements."

The SANaccelerator connects directly to Fibre Channel SANs and is designed to deliver shared capacity to multiple applications and multiple servers in the same way as consolidated disk storage. The SANaccelerator value proposition is therefore similar to a shared disk array, in that shared resources are more cost-effective than dedicated resources and administering a centralized asset is more efficient than decentralized resources.

"Plug and play operation," Cooper Cowart, vice president marketing, Chaparral Network Storage, said of the SANaccelerator. "At Storage Networking World last week, we added the SANaccelerator device to the Interoperability SAN on the fly and it was on-line and available to all the servers in less than 5 minutes. Instant performance and seamless integration provide unique customer benefits in the SAN."

The SANaccelerator leverages the traditional benefits of Solid State Disk technology from typical single-server, single-application environments to potentially every server and every application in the SAN. The multi-port capability of the SANaccelerator lends itself to the highly available nature of enterprise SANs by connecting to two independent 1 or 2 Gbps fabric switches or directors for up to 400MB/s bandwidth and path redundancy. Built-in utilities allow the system administrator to partition the SANaccelerator into volumes assigned to different ports, different servers, and ultimately, different application needs. A 3.5" tall SANaccelerator scales from a modest 6GB capacity to 36GB in manageable and cost effective increments.

The Clipper Group's Michael Fisch sums up the Imperial SANaccelerator with, "It will likely become a proactive SAN component that addresses the need for speed. Enterprises that currently have or plan to acquire a SAN should consider including SANaccelerator systems as a flexible, on-demand performance resource."

The SANaccelerator is available immediately. A fully configured system ready to be installed into a SAN is available for less than $60,000. More information is available online at www.SANaccelerator.com.

About Imperial Technology Inc

Headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., Imperial Technology has over a decade of experience designing and manufacturing high-performance storage systems that shatter I/O bottlenecks to supercharge traditional storage. Imperialšs products are installed on Sun, HP, Compaq/Digital, IBM and Unisys systems. They integrate and install seamlessly in environments that run Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, Veritas and EMC products. Imperial Technology can be reached at 800-451-0666 or online at www.imperialtech.com.