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StorageTek Advances Enterprise DS With StorageTek D280

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp), a storage services and solutions expert, has announced the immediate availability of the StorageTek D280, the latest offering in StorageTek's D-Series product family. With the introduction of the StorageTek D280, StorageTek is advancing its position in providing best-in-class storage devices, enhanced management capabilities and replication solutions across open systems environments.

"StorageTek's D280 continues to expand our disk-based storage solutions targeted toward customers in high I/O and bandwidth intensive environments without sacrificing flexibility and ease of management," said Tom Major, StorageTek vice president and general manager, Disk Business Unit. "The introduction of the D280 marks our third disk product offering this year and highlights our commitment to provide our customers with world-class disk solutions with the flexibility of protecting their initial storage investments. We're accomplishing all of this while creating the platform from which to simplify storage management and consolidate disk-based storage resources."

With the D280, enterprises gain a cost-effective, storage-based, integrated disk platform for disaster recovery/business continuity, storage consolidation, and high-performance computing. Designed for extremely high-performing and bandwidth intensive applications, the D280 allows users to efficiently and effectively consolidate their open systems storage by providing centrally managed, distributed storage pools tailored to specific high-performing business applications such as database, ERP, OLTP, email and Web serving. The D280 is the latest offering delivered through StorageTek's strategic alliance with LSI Logic Storage Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of LSI Logic Corporation, and a leading supplier of innovative storage solutions for the open enterprise.

"D280 has been getting the reputation of a solid, reliable, high performance modular storage system, especially in throughput-hungry environments," said Arun Taneja, senior analyst, The Enterprise Storage Group. "It should make a great addition to the product line."

The D280 is a high-performance, open-system disk solution that gives customers the ability to grow storage at their own pace. All D-Series disk solutions are easily field upgradeable, allowing customers to maintain their original drive investment. Tested for interoperability in storage area network (SAN) environments, the D280 works with major SAN hardware and software vendors' products and underscores StorageTek's commitment to offer customers long-term investment protection and world-class disk storage solutions. Key features include:

• Full Fibre Connectivity -- SAN-enabling Fibre Channel connectivity reduces the cost and complexity of management while gaining 2 Gigabit host connectivity and exceptional throughput to handle high I/O-per-second business class applications.
• Improved performance -- over twice the performance of the current D178 D-series offering, delivering up to 772 Mbps throughput and up to 32TB of storage, using 146GB drives (available in November) and 2GB of cache.
• Easy Storage Management -- with the D-series software suite, provides ability to manage both entry and Enterprise Disk Subsystem from a single management interface. Logical Unit Numbering (LUN) partitioning allows for maximum utilization of investment by providing ability to define multiple LUNs within each RAID group.
• Snapshot Copy and Remote Volume Mirroring -- SANtricity Storage Manager 8.3 provides centralized storage management and enables Snapshot Copy and Remote Volume Mirroring to provide IT administrators with a centralized management software platform to replicate critical data from one storage system to another. With Snapshot and RVM, customers gain a variety of logical, physical, local and remote replication choices to efficiently utilize and protect valuable data.

Pricing and Availability

The StorageTek D280 disk subsystem is available through a network of value added distributors, value added resellers and partners as well as direct through local StorageTek sales teams. StorageTek Global Professional Services provides a comprehensive methodology to deliver assessment, design, implementation and management services for StorageTek's disk subsystems and management software. Installation, training and support are available from StorageTek Global Professional Services and StorageTek-certified service partners. For more information, visit www.storagetek.com.

The D280 disk subsystem is available Oct. 7. Pricing starts at approximately $90,000 and includes SANtricity 8.3 software, the controller and 1 TB of capacity. Price is listed in U.S. dollars.

About StorageTek

StorageTek, a $2 billion worldwide company with headquarters in Louisville, Colorado, delivers a broad range of storage solutions for digitized data. StorageTek solutions are easy to manage and allow universal access to data across servers, media types and storage networks. StorageTek is an innovator and global leader in virtual storage solutions for tape automation, disk storage systems and storage networking and is a voting member of the SNIA. Because of StorageTek, customers can manage and leverage their digital assets as their businesses grow and can maximize IT productivity to ensure enterprise-class business continuity. For more information, see www.storagetek.com, or call 800-786-7835.

What StorageTek Partners Say About the D280:

Brocade Software

"Leading companies rely on Brocade and StorageTek to deliver the highest levels of performance and reliability for their mission-critical enterprise applications," said Jeffrey Brooks, Brocade Chief Marketing Officer. "The Brocade intelligent platform for networking storage, which StorageTek delivers to its customers worldwide, helps companies simplify the implementation of storage area networks, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. We are pleased to work closely with StorageTek, as it delivers the latest offering in StorageTek's D-Series product family."

CA

"To optimize the availability of mission-critical data, organizations need highly-scalable and flexible storage solutions that protect their existing storage investments," said Gary McGuire, senior vice president of marketing Computer Associates' BrightStor solutions. "The combination of CA's automated, high-performance BrightStor backup solutions with StorageTek's D280 provides clients with a reliable, cost effective platform for disaster recovery and business continuity."

FalconStor

"StorageTek is uniquely positioned to provide a compelling combination of 2Gbit capabilities with a modular storage subsystem in their new D280 offering," said Wayne Lam, FalconStor vice president. "Their pay-as-you-grow capability and other data services is complementary to FalconStor IPStor's storage services that deliver capacity optimization, high availability, backup/restore acceleration, and database-aware snapshoting for fast on-line recovery."

JNI Corporation

"StorageTek's new D280 addresses the need for scalable, high performance drives in enterprise environments," said Rick Sander, vice president and general manager, Fibre Channel, JNI Corporation. "Customers can scale their storage network in a cost-effective manner by scaling up with JNI HBAs and StorageTek D280's, enabling IT managers to 'pay as they grow,' lowering their total cost of ownership -- an ideal approach in today's cost-conscious environment."

LSI Logic Storage Systems

"We are excited to have StorageTek deliver the D280 storage system based on LSI Logic Storage Systems new 2 gigabit 5884 Fibre Channel storage controller," said Flavio Santoni, vice president of sales and marketing, LSI Logic Storage Systems. "The D280, combined with the D-Series Software Suite and integrated replication services, provides a powerful cost-effective solution to satisfy the growing demand for high performance modular storage solutions."

Qlogic Corp

"QLogic and StorageTek share a mutual goal of delivering high-performance, open-standard storage solutions that simplify life for customers networking their storage," said Joe Kimpler, director of business alliances, QLogic Corp. "The new StorageTek D280, is a scalable, enterprise-class storage solution that allows customers to control costs by adding capacity as their business needs warrant the additional investment. The StorageTek D280 is interoperable with SANs based on QLogic silicon, SANbox switches and SANblade HBAs, making it simple for customers to begin networking their storage today."

VERITAS

"StorageTek's expansion of their D-Series product family is a significant step forward in providing customers with scalable, high-performance disk solutions," said Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product and solutions marketing, VERITAS Software. "We are collaborating with StorageTek to integrate this new platform with VERITAS Foundation Suite HA, providing end users with simplified management of all their storage and maximizing availability of essential data."