Features - Storage Innovations:

PROCOM TECHNOLOGY ANNOUNCES NetFORCE OS 4.2

Procom Technology has announced an enhanced operating system that improves the manageability, performance and reliability of the company's NetFORCE line of network attached storage (NAS) filers. With enhancements that include Bi-Directional and Many-to-One Mirroring, support for NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) Version 3, improved cluster failover, HBA multi-pathing, and improved scalability, NetFORCE OS 4.2 enables the popular NAS filers to provide more cost-effective business continuance and storage solutions.

The new Bi-Directional and Many-to-One Mirroring functions improve the capabilities of the Procom's ProMirror disaster recovery software option, whose near-realtime SAM (Safe Asynchronous Mirroring) architecture ensures that data from the source filer is continuously reflected onto the target filer for true 7x24x365 business continuance.

Bi-Directional mirroring improves performance by providing local access of critical information while replicating it to an alternate site, avoiding wide-area network latency.

Many-to-One Mirroring enables NetFORCE filers located at multiple sites to synchronize data with a single NetFORCE filer. This is ideal for organizations with multiple field offices that need to consolidate data to a central location, such as corporate headquarters, to ensure data coherency and protection. Cost savings are enhanced since dissimilar NetFORCE filers may be utilized.

NDMP Version 3 support furthers Procom's ongoing commitment to the standard. It allows faster backups and enables NetFORCE integration into more backup solutions for greater data protection.

Filer cluster failover has been improved by 70%, providing the fastest failover in the industry because each filer is cognizant of all LUNs assigned to the cluster. This eases management and enhances reliability to ensure uninterrupted data access.

Host bus adapter (HBA) multi-pathing and load balancing provide increased availability and performance, resulting in end-to-end data path reliability, faster read/write of files, and greater productivity.

System performance has increased by 30%, due to kernel optimization. The TCP/IP protocol stack now supports greater bandwidth and offers improved buffering for greater replication performance. Moreover, OS 4.2 supports Intel's latest 1.4-gigahertz Tualatin processors and allows NetFORCE filers to increase RAM capacity to 4 gigabytes.

Scalability improvements include increasing the maximum LUN size from 1 to 7.75 terabytes, with the maximum volume size supported remaining an industry-leading 16 terabytes; this permits the sharing of large volumes of data with application servers and leverages NDMP backup capabilities. In addition, individual LUNs can now comprise up to 31 partitions up from the previous limit of four and the operating system now supports as many as four pairs of RAID controllers, for the higher performance and capacity required in such markets as biotech, medical imaging and streaming media.

"This major release reflects our ongoing commitment to provide a growing range of leading-edge software offerings that enable business continuance for our NetFORCE customers," said Jack Bonne, Procom's executive vice president of worldwide operations.

Procom is offering OS 4.2 free to existing customers and will ship the enhanced operating system on all NetFORCE NAS filers beginning this month. Any NetFORCE filer with at least 512 megabytes of RAM and a 64-megabyte flash disk may be upgraded to OS 4.2.

About Procom Technology

The value leader in NAS filers, Procom Technology has been designing and producing enterprise-class storage solutions for Fortune 2000 companies since 1987. The company has an installed base of more than 1,500 NetFORCE units and 25,000 installations of DataFORCE, Procom's previous flagship product line. Procom is headquartered in Irvine, CA, and maintains a global presence with offices in 10 countries. More information is available by telephone at 800-800-8600, toll free; e-mail at info@procom.com; or on the Web at www.procom.com.