Features - Storage Innovations:

AKARA ENABLES INDUSTRY-1ST FICON OVER SONET SOLUTION FOR IBM

Akara, a leading provider of Storage over SONET extension solutions for business continuance and disaster recovery, announced that it has successfully completed interoperability testing between Akara's OUSP 2000 Product Family and IBM's TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (codename Shark) eXtended Remote Copy (XRC) solution under IBM's TotalStorage Proven program. The Akara OUSP is the first storage over SONET extension device that enables enterprises to extend FICON XRC over distances up to and beyond 1,000 kilometers over any SONET/SDH, DWDM or dark fiber network.

The Akara solution has successfully completed interoperability testing with an ESS XRC solution and is the first and only FICON over SONET technology available to cost-effectively address the backup and recovery requirements of enterprises that need to deploy storage connectivity over distances beyond 150 and up to thousands of kilometers over a Wide Area Network (WAN) to meet business continuance goals. With Akara's OUSP, enterprises with ESS installations and IBM's fiber connection (FICON) connectivity can address their needs for backup and recovery over thousands of kilometers by mirroring data from the application or local site to the recovery or secondary site using IBM's distance-independent XRC remote copy solution over the WAN.

By using the Akara OUSP to extend FICON XRC, customers get a significantly more cost effective, manageable, and scalable extension solution than previous alternatives for extending ESCON. Customers using the ESS and Akara can enjoy many additional operational benefits by going with a FICON based solution. The implementation of FICON relieves constraints that previously limited customers' ability to grow their configurations. Easier management capabilities are also enabled because FICON configurations can be implemented with one-fourth the number of channels required for ESCON configurations.

"With the increased visibility of Akara's solutions to the IBM Business Partner and sales representative community, Akara can have greater visibility with customers and look towards smoother, reliable implementations. This can lead to reduced sales cycles and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction," said Kathleen Smith, vice president, Emerging Business Opportunites for IBM Systems Group.

Akara's OUSP product family provides native support for Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet on a single platform onto any SONET/SDH (DS3/OC-3/12/48, STM-1/4/16), DWDM or dark fiber network. The addition of integrated data compression, combined with the ability to dynamically share MAN/WAN bandwidth between multiple applications allows for up to 90% more efficient use of WAN bandwidth and can reduce operational costs by as much as 60%. Other key features contributing to the flexibility and success of the OUSP include the device's software tunable port capability, which enables an enterprise to assign different protocols to different ports, ie. ESCON to FICON, and configure the number of OUSP ports from 2 to 8 meeting the enterprises diverse and growing storage networking needs

"IT executives are seeking cost-effective solutions with management simplicity to meet their storage and business continuance requirements," said Ed Ogonek, Akara's CEO. "With enterprises deploying IBM's data center technology and migrating from ESCON to FICON to meet growing capacity and performance requirements, the need for a FICON over SONET solution to cost- effectively support their storage over extended distance requirements was clear. This technology, the first and only of its kind, provides IBM customers with the product modularity and scalability and with the product life-cycle resiliency that they are demanding. The ability to deploy XRC over FICON in extended distance implementations provides both IBM and Akara with a multitude a new business opportunities and underpins Akara's commitment to partnering with storage industry leaders such as IBM to meet our customers' business requirements."