Features - Storage Innovations:

CANDERA SCE 510 FULFILLS PROMISE OF HETEROGENEOUS SANS

Candera Inc, a company dedicated to simplifying the complexity of storage area networks (SANs), announced the availability of the Candera SCE 510 Cluster, the industry's first enterprise-class network storage controller (NSC) that moves intelligence normally found in large, monolithic storage arrays into the network.

Based on the patent-pending Candera UStar architecture, the Candera SCE 510 Cluster is purpose-built to enable data centers to centralize all of their islands of SAN storage into a single, heterogeneous SAN with one common management interface. This greatly simplifies management, lowers costs, improves service levels and enhances the productivity of data center storage administrators. The SCE 510 Cluster is the first to bring full active-active high availability for continuous access to data; and full reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features to network-based storage management. The cluster also provides exceptional error tracing and handling in high load processing environments, and superior interoperability through intelligent object-based device characterization.

"Advanced, enterprise-class storage controller functionality used to be embedded only inside expensive, monolithic and proprietary systems," said S. Sundaresh, president and CEO of Candera. "Candera is the first company to place that functionality into the network where it can be used to manage all the storage within the SAN. The availability of this revolutionary technology marks a major transition in SAN architectures to an open, interoperable and centrally managed storage infrastructure."

Today's separate, homogeneous islands of SAN storage are a nightmare to manage, due to interoperability problems between vendors, the need for vendor-specific tools, and the difficulty in allocating and managing the capacity across these islands. Although a number of alternatives have been proposed to solve these problems by moving the intelligence into the network to manage storage, none have achieved the high reliability, availability, scalability, and interoperability required to be truly appropriate for mission-critical data centers.

Candera's solution is already receiving broad acceptance from a variety of industries including financial services, healthcare and managed services, as well as government organizations. The company began testing beta versions of the SCE 510 Cluster with numerous Fortune 500 companies in January 2003. Today, Candera has more than 50 customers in various stages of the sales pipeline.

"The pent-up demand for a true, enterprise-class, network-based storage solution is overwhelming," said Stephen Terlizzi, vice president of marketing and business development for Candera. "Our early success shows that we are truly breaking new ground in this emerging market. Finally, companies have access to a storage solution that simplifies SAN management and administration, while at the same time delivering unprecedented performance and the ability to leverage their investment in the existing SAN infrastructure."

Key Features And Benefits Of The Candera SCE 510 Cluster:

• Purpose-Built, Enterprise-Class Hardware -- The Candera SCE 510 Cluster includes two hardware nodes that are configured in an active-active configuration for high availability and failover. This active-active configuration was previously available with only the highest-end monolithic storage arrays. With Candera network storage controllers, enterprises can now enjoy the same high availability at a much lower cost.

Moreover, because the Candera solution is the only solution today that places custom hardware intelligence behind every port, rather than centralizing the processing on a blade, any error conditions that may occur are contained only within that one port. As a result, the architecture avoids the error storms that are likely to occur with the blade architectures currently being proposed for intelligent switches, and can offer much higher reliability than competitive architectures.

Key features in the hardware include automated storage discovery with rich object-based device characterization, 16 Fibre Channel ports per cluster that are autosensing to 1 or 2 Gb per second, dual hot swappable components with failover capability for high availability, and a 10/100 Ethernet connection for central management through the Candera Storage Manager.

• Central Point of Management -- The Candera Storage Manager is a Java-based GUI which runs on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, or Linux workstations. Multiple copies of the Candera Storage Manager can be installed and used with the purchase of one or more SCE 510 Clusters, allowing multiple storage administrators to share or delegate the task of managing a large, common, heterogeneous SAN storage pool. Moreover, this management can be done over standard Ethernet networks, providing the ability to remotely manage the storage.

The storage administrator can perform the following operations through the Candera Storage Manager:

• Single-Step Automated and/or Manual Provisioning -- Provision storage automatically in a single-step based on user-defined storage policies, or allocate and de-allocate storage manually (drag and drop). Administrators can provision storage in a matter of seconds, as opposed to hours.
• Slicing and Concatenating -- Slice and span logical unit numbers (LUNs) across homogeneous or heterogeneous storage devices.
• Topology Mapping -- Dynamic diagram displaying all logical data paths between SAN components (from hosts to physical LUNs, including SCE 510 Cluster nodes) and showing the state of the path (up/down).
• Reporting and Statistics -- Generate reports on demand, summarizing how the entire storage pool is being allocated. Monitor I/O performance on selected LUNs and on SCE 510 Cluster ports through display and dynamic graphics.
• Fault Management -- Monitor and detect alarms when internal or external problems are detected with assisted root cause analysis that trigger automatic email notifications.
• Access Control -- Configure and control the access to the storage management functions through default administrative role (Admin, Advanced, Basic, and Observer).
• Superior Interoperability -- Candera has developed a variety of patent-pending features and invested significantly in interoperability testing to ensure seamless integration into any storage environment. Sophisticated object-oriented device characterization ensures that devices can be supported quickly. In addition, the company has created its own laboratory environment with over $4 million worth of equipment. Using a rigorous testing process, the company is able to test extreme corner cases and verify that the SCE 510 Cluster is interoperable with products from every major server, switch and storage vendor.