Features - Storage Innovations:

ZAMBEEL ANNOUNCES GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF THE AZTERA SYSTEM

Aztera systems provide massive scalability in both capacity and performance, while maintaining a single-system management view. With a single system to manage at any scale, Aztera dramatically reduces the cost of growing and managing storage.

The Aztera system scales in capacity from 3 terabytes to more than 200 terabytes, with system performance scaling to 2 GB/sec. The Aztera system provides a pool of computing resources that can be allocated to adapt to the needs of an enterprise. Aztera's innovative Enterprise Storage Resource Provisioning (ESRP) capability lets IT administrators provision these resources to different applications, projects, or groups of users as needed. The system automatically allocates resources to adapt to these different needs, and administrators can reallocate system resources on the fly as required.

"A new storage architecture is required to overcome the scalability limitations of traditional NAS," said Robert Passmore, Storage Research Director, Gartner. "The next generation of NAS solutions should deliver highly scalable, highly available storage infrastructures that also offer the flexibility to reduce management overhead and improve the total cost of ownership."

"The Zambeel Aztera system dramatically reduces the cost of managing storage by giving enterprise customers a single view of their storage while enabling them to address multiple business units or customer requirements from a single system," said Darren Thomas, president and CEO of Zambeel. "Zambeel's new approach to enterprise-class storage provides unparalleled flexibility in a system that scales to hundreds of terabytes while maintaining the management ease of a single NAS appliance."

Zambeel Aztera: Adaptive Storage

The Aztera system introduces an entirely new storage architecture combined with breakthrough software that provides new levels of management control, resulting in a storage system that adapts to users' needs and eclipses traditional NAS solutions in flexibility and manageability. Aztera is based on a distributed hardware and file system architecture that scales to hundreds of terabytes while maintaining the manageability of a single system. At the heart of the hardware architecture is the Z-Fabric, a redundant Gigabit Ethernet switch network that serves as the system backplane. The Z-Fabric can scale to span across multiple physical cabinets, and Aztera always presents a singlesystem view for ease of management.

The Zambeel Fluid File System is Aztera's scalable, distributed file system that executes on Aztera's modular hardware architecture and provides new levels of file system flexibility. The Zambeel Fluid File System was designed from the ground up to provide massively scalable performance, throughput, and capacity. Overcoming the limitations of traditional file systems, the Zambeel Fluid File System is flexible enough to support file systems of any capacity and performance; file systems can even scale as large as the entire deployed system resources.

"People sometimes assume SANs are the only way to build enterprise-level storage infrastructures, but Zambeel's Aztera products prove that NAS designs can be just as effective," said Marc Farley, storage expert and author of Building Storage Networks. "Aztera is fast, flexible, scalable, robust and most importantly, it has a fully integrated suite of powerful management tools. By combining data and storage management in a single, super-scalable, integrated system, Aztera exerts the optimal management leverage for flattening the cost of owning, maintaining and growing storage."

The Zambeel Aztera enterprise-class network-attached storage system offers several innovative capabilities, including:

• 4D Scaling; Traditional NAS solutions scale in one dimension: capacity. Based on a distributed architecture, Zambeel Aztera systems scale in four dimensions: capacity, performance, file system performance and size, and number of domains. By allowing independent scaling of these system attributes, the Aztera system can scale to meet any need while optimizing the system configuration for the specific requirements of different applications.
• Enterprise Storage Resource Provisioning (ESRP); The Aztera system provides a pool of computing and storage resources that can be allocated to individual file system or domains and reallocated as needed. Since the system automatically allocates resources, without any system downtime, IT administrators can significantly ease the burden of managing storage and more effectively meet the needs of different applications, projects and user groups.
• Secure Domains; Aztera storage domains let enterprises securely consolidate file storage in a single system while providing the appropriate levels of security. An Aztera secure domain is a logical region of the Aztera system defined by an assigned amount of capacity and a specific performance level. Conceptually, a secure domain can be thought of as a "virtual NAS system" within an Aztera system. Through network-level security and authentication, domains can be securely separated from one another to ensure data privacy.
• Highest Availability; Aztera delivers high availability through the combination of its fully redundant, fault-tolerant hardware and software architecture, and its sophisticated availability software services. The system maintains pools of spare components to ensure resources are available in the event of a failure; these spares are used to automatically restore the systems' fault-tolerance. In addition, upgrades to storage capacity and performance can be accomplished without any system downtime.
• Single System Management: Aztera scales to hundreds of terabytes and hundreds of thousands of operations per second while maintaining a single system management view. To achieve this level of scale with traditional NAS solutions, multiple systems must be deployed and managed, leading to an onerous management burden and spiraling management costs. Since Aztera maintains a single system management view regardless of scale, storage management costs and total cost of ownership are dramatically reduced. "We think the most important trend for all IT moving forward is the concept of becoming 'utility enabled' -- or the ability for IT to become a true internal profit center," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Storage Group. "In order for that to happen, the world will need a true utility class storage infrastructure -- where costs and deliverables are not variable components. Zambeel is one of the first I've seen to recognize this trend and provide systems designed to do just that."

Availability

The Aztera storage system is available immediately. An entry Aztera system with 7.5 terabytes of raw capacity is priced starting at around $300,000 U.S. Aztera is available directly from Zambeel in the United States.

About Zambeel Inc

Founded in September 1999, Zambeel delivers enterprise-class network-attached storage solutions that are designed to adapt to customers' needs to maximize productivity while dramatically lowering the costs of managing storage. Zambeel Aztera storage systems provide the ability to provision pooled storage resources to serve multiple applications, projects, and user groups from a single, easy-to-manage system.

In addition, Aztera systems can automatically expand capacity or performance independently, while maintaining automated high availability. Headquartered in Fremont, CA, Zambeel was named one of UPSIDE Magazine's "Hot 100" in 2002 and one of Red Herring Magazine's "Ten to Watch" in 2001.

Zambeel has raised more than $65 million in venture financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Integral Capital Partners, Amerindo Investment Advisors, Aurora Technology Fund, Merrill Lynch and others. Board members and advisors include Vinod Khosla of KPCB and Richard Kramlich of NEA. For more information, visit: www.zambeel.com.