Features - Storage Innovations:

DIGI-DATA READY TO TAKE MARKET BY STORM

Digi-Data Corporation announced the immediate availability of its new STORM Fibre Channel RAID storage systems. STORM delivers significant advancements in performance, scalability, availability, and manageability -- offering medium and large enterprises greater flexibility and control over their storage with significantly lower total cost of ownership.

STORM systems feature a modular design that improves scalability across every dimension, while nearly eliminating the traditional costs and complexity of deploying and managing enterprise RAID storage in SAN, NAS and DAS environments. According to Bill Tomeo, Digi-Data CEO, "Although there are a number of RAID storage systems on the market, few possess the versatility that resellers really need to compete in more situations and keep pace with changing customer needs for performance, reliability, and scalability. Perhaps more importantly, with our open systems architecture and embedded RAID manager, STORM is incredibly easy to deploy and manage."

One of the most compelling aspects of the STORM system is its configuration flexibility. Using an advanced modular design, STORM can be configured to optimize a wide variety of applications and environments. Dan Goodwin, director of systems architecture for Intelligent Solutions comments, "Because of its modular architecture, the greatest advantage STORM has over any other storage system is the ability to scale from cost-effective storage up to highly available storage within the same platform."

Whether direct attached to application servers or network attached to NAS servers or SAN switches, STORM offers more connectivity options to solve important technical and business issues such as eliminating host or disk bottlenecks, consolidating storage across heterogeneous servers, and improving data availability for critical applications. Martin Calderwood, executive vice president of Caen Engineering Inc, adds, "STORM not only boasts the fastest Fibre to Fibre RAID architecture, it is also the only one that has a full eight channels and an embedded RAID manager. This provides greater control and flexibility over the lifetime use of the system. It is a better investment for us and our customers."

The first two STORM RAID storage systems announced include the STORM Xtreme and the STORM Xact. Both systems include the STORM Fibre-Fibre RAID controller module, specially designed disk enclosure modules, industry standard Fibre Channel drives and the integrated RAID manager. STORM Xtreme is an enterprise-class system that can connect up to 7 hosts to single storage system or scale to over 120 TB. STORM Xact can centralize up to 5 hosts or scale up to 4.7 TB. Both systems feature 2 Gb Fibre Channel connectivity from disk to host, the flexibility to independently set up host and disk connections in any configuration to put bandwidth where it is needed, an embedded RAID manager with browser-based GUI, and new RAID levels to optimize the performance of more applications and environments.

Along with STORM's availability, Digi-Data concurrently announced its new Xpert Partner Program for Value Added Resellers and storage integrators. This program was introduced to support the new STORM line. According to Tomeo, "In the last 40 years, Digi-Data has sold over 55,000 storage and RAID products through resellers all around the world. With STORM, we plan to sell 100% of STORM systems through a select group of reseller partners, so we are actively recruiting resellers who are looking to differentiate themselves in the market with our innovative STORM family of products."

Tomeo concludes, "STORM products are unquestionably the most diverse products in their class for building Fibre channel RAID storage systems that range from the very large to the very fast -- and everything in between. From streaming media to on-line transaction processing to complex database operations to email and web content -- STORM delivers exceptional performance and reliability packaged in a way that makes it easier to attain and more affordable than anything else in its class."