Features - Storage Innovations:

MAXXAN UNVEILS NAS GATEWAYS BUILT ON WINDOWS STORAGE SERVER

MaXXan Systems Inc, the leading company to ship intelligent storage networking solutions, announced its enterprise-class NAS gateway solutions built on Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. The new Storage Gateway systems offer a high-performance, high-availability platform for NAS/SAN consolidation and are based on MaXXan's powerful SANe (Storage Application Network Engine) architecture that provides a strong ROI by integrating applications into scalable storage networks.

The SG210m, the industry's first application card using Windows Storage Server 2003, can be integrated in MaXXan's MXV320 Intelligent Application Switch. Customers can also deploy MaXXan's SG110m standalone NAS Gateway into their existing SAN infrastructure and later upgrade to the MaXXan MXV320 switch as their storage needs grow. Both SG110m and SG210m combine file-serving software for the Windows environment, customer-proven optimized I/O engine architecture, the MaXXan Operating Shell (MOS) and its centralized network management software.

"We are pleased to work with MaXXan to deliver its Windows-based NAS application card for the MXV320 Intelligent Application Switch, built on Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003," said Charles Stevens, corporate vice president of the Enterprise Storage Division at Microsoft Corp. "With the combination of MaXXan's storage system and management applications and Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003, enterprise customers will benefit from a high-performance, highly scalable NAS gateway designed for their existing storage environments."

The SG210m integrated in the MXV Intelligent Application Switch is best suited for data center environments such as telecommunications, financial services, oil and gas, healthcare, energy and other industries that require enterprise-class availability and performance to support thousands of users. The SG110m is a standalone NAS gateway for deployment in departments or remote offices.

"MaXXan's philosophy is to work with an elite group of software partners to deliver best-of-breed storage applications to enable a new generation of intelligent storage networks that address critical customer problems," said James Yu, MaXXan's vice president of business development. "MaXXan's NAS gateways with pre-integrated Windows Storage Server 2003 enable customers to improve ROI by increasing utilization of existing Fibre Channel SAN storage. Consolidating NAS files onto SAN-based storage can significantly reduce storage TCO by enabling centralized management of all storage assets."

MaXXan simplifies the installation process for customers by delivering NAS gateways that are fully pre-installed with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 along with MaXXan's exclusive GUI-based network management software and MOS. The MaXXan Operating Shell enables advanced enterprise-class availability and management functionality, and provides easy system software upgrades, remote monitoring, SNMP support and several high availability functions. Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 makes NAS management simple by taking advantage of existing Active Directory policies to centrally manage using Group Policy, Kerberos Authentication and Encrypted File System. Windows Storage Server 2003 supports Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) or point-in-time copies and high-availability eight-node configurations for fail-over using Microsoft Cluster Service.