Features - Storage Innovations:

CANDERA UNVEILS UNIVERSAL STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

Candera Inc unveiled a new technology that will alter for the better the landscape of enterprise Storage Area Networks (SANs). The Candera universal storage architecture, Candera U*Star, enables data centers wrestling with the complexity and rising cost of managing heterogeneous storage infrastructure to regain control over their SAN-based storage, reduce capital and operating costs, increase business responsiveness, and provide better service to their customers. In addition to addressing those immediate data center pain points, Candera U*Star provides a strategic foundation for evolving toward the delivery of "utility" storage services to data center customers.

The Candera U*Star architecture, the subject of 24 in-process patents, is an innovative design that injects higher intelligence into existing "dumb" SANs. Until now, storage management intelligence has been at the end points of the network -- in servers or storage devices. As storage networks become larger and more heterogeneous, yesterday's "plumbing only" SANs yield unwieldy management challenges, limiting the ability of the data center to be responsive to changing business requirements. As validated by Fortune 500 customers, partners, and industry analysts, the unique Candera U*Star approach -- which provides authentic interoperability with any storage, any switch, any server -- is the industry's first enterprise-grade network storage controller technology.

Validated By Customers and Industry Experts

"Candera gives us much greater control of and visibility into all of our storage resources, and it does it in a reliable, purpose-built hardware and software platform that is appropriate for data center deployment," said a senior storage architect at a Global 100 company that is beta testing the Candera network storage controller. "We think the Candera U*Star technology will allow us to do much more with less from one central point of management. Managing storage as a network utility, we are able to create highly available, stable, and scalable storage infrastructure that will evolve with us as our data volumes and storage platforms grow."

"Candera is onto something important," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "Storage managers continue to look for ways to simplify provisioning and the Candera U*Star architecture is well positioned to address this wide-spread storage management problem."

Storage Management Moves Into the Network

The fruits of three years' labor by storage, networking, and storage management experts, the Candera U*Star architecture was designed for a network-centric world of storage management. Before Candera U*Star, management of SAN-attached storage was plagued by the complexity of managing different types of devices from different vendors. By placing a robust cluster of specialized hardware/software systems directly into existing SANs -- without replacing any existing equipment -- Candera U*Star provides:

Central Point of Management -- Storage administrators can substantially reduce complexity, increase productivity, and better utilize resources by using a Candera network storage controller to manage heterogeneous storage devices in a virtual pool as a common resource for all servers. Data centers are able to realize all the benefits of a tiered, heterogeneous storage environment, without suffering on a daily basis from heterogeneity-induced complexity.

Single-Step Storage Provisioning -- Provisioning storage from any vendor's array to any type of server, through any vendor's fabric, can now be achieved in seconds instead of hours or days. Candera's automated policies dynamically allocate storage in a way that meets the data center's requirements for optimizing asset utilization, data availability, performance and cost.

Any Storage, Any Switch, Any Server -- With Candera U*Star, no storage resource is left behind. Candera lets administrators seamlessly integrate into existing heterogeneous environments with plug-and-go ease. Investments in storage and switch devices are protected and the installed systems can be used and managed better and more cost-effectively.

The Candera U*Star architecture makes it possible to manage the quality of storage service (QoSS) delivered to servers, enabling a shift in storage management from an operations model with many proprietary islands to a storage utility model for centralized management.

"We have looked at a variety of next-generation storage management technologies in the market. After evaluating alternatives against the customer pains we see in data centers every day, we feel that the unique Candera U*Star architecture is positioned to cure persistent storage management pains," said Mike Cush, CTO of Adexis, a leading national SAN infrastructure reseller. "The Candera U*Star architecture provides the technology that enables storage managers to positively change the fundamental way in which they manage their heterogeneous storage environment."

Foundation of the Candera U*Star Technology

True heterogeneous interoperability has been a dream for years in the storage industry. Now Candera's customers can achieve it, with Candera U*Star support for:

• Disk subsystems from EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others
• Servers running Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows
• Clustering software from Microsoft, Veritas, and Sun
• Fibre channel switches from Brocade, McData, QLogic, and Cisco
• HBAs from all major manufacturers

This level of interoperability lets customers protect their investments while adding new functionality and equipment with plug-and-play ease. Achieving this high degree of interoperability is made possible by a patent-pending parameterized device characterization approach and robust testing in Candera's multi-million dollar interoperability lab.

Candera's storage virtualization software simplifies the management of heterogeneous storage by unifying management of pooled storage resources. Storage virtualization creates logical volumes from physical disks, enabling volumes to be created across multiple heterogeneous physical devices in a way that gives data center storage architects and administrators independence from the complexities of dealing with the idiosyncrasies of proprietary storage arrays.

Automated discovery and rich characterization of devices on the network allow the Candera network storage controller to identify and classify each device by its capabilities. Characterization enables smarter volume management and the creation of storage profiles, enabling end users to manage tiered storage resources quickly and painlessly.

Intelligent policy engines integrated into the Candera network storage controller take advantage of the device characterization information to match customer-defined storage profiles to the specific needs of a given application or tier of storage service.

Purpose-built hardware and software are at the heart of the Candera U*Star design philosophy. In the Candera U*Star architecture, commands and data are reliably processed in hardware and specialized microcode, providing scalability and enhanced performance. Alternative approaches fall short of data center requirements. In one alternative approach, new SAN switching technology from an independent hardware vendor (IHV) is combined with software from an independent software vendor (ISV). Other products apply PC- or server-oriented hardware and software to the special requirements of network-resident storage management. The Candera solution, in contrast, applies purpose-built hardware and software in a specialized, enterprise-grade "appliance" that is easier to implement, allows freedom to choose any switch, and provides outstanding performance, reliability, availability, and scalability.

Reliability, availability and scalability are achieved through various innovations in the patented Candera U*Star architecture. Localized error handling increases overall reliability and helps deliver better performance and a more highly available solution. Processing SCSI commands in hardware gives the Candera network storage controller both enterprise-class performance and scalability. Candera's clustered high availability (HA) configurations feature no single point of failure for high availability. Operation can continue without any user intervention or loss of data should a failure occur.

"Candera lets users and storage administrators who have been overwhelmed by the exponential growth and complexity of storage take back control of their storage resources," said S. "Sundi" Sundaresh, Candera's president and CEO. "At a time when every cost must be closely justified, our network storage controller has proven to reduce total cost of ownership while dramatically increasing the utilization of existing storage assets. The ease of deploying and using Candera also provides relief to overburdened IT staff that must do more without growth in headcount."