Features - Financial Plays Of The Week:

nStor SIGNS STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIP WITH InoStor

nStor Corp and InoStor Corp announced a strategic technology partnership to incorporate InoStor's advanced data protection capabilities into nStor's storage solutions. As part of the partnership, nStor will initially embed InoStor's RAIDn technology into its NexStor 4700S SATA series to deliver economical yet powerful data availability, reliability and capacity for meeting the growing requirements of storage-intensive applications.

With InoStor's innovative RAIDn technology, nStor can provide enterprise-class functionality, including high-density, multi-drive protection and built-in scalability more affordably and much easier than typical high-end RAID systems. The addition of nStor's StorView storage management software streamlines deployment and management of the integrated storage platform.

As the market for disk drives expands there is increasing demand to provide an added level of protection to ensuring the data is continuously available. As drive capacities grow, so does the time required to rebuild the data and restore data protection. This expands the window of vulnerability where critical data is at risk during the rebuild process. RAIDn significantly reduces this vulnerability by maintaining data integrity.

According to Lisa Hart, nStor's executive vice president of marketing and alliances, InoStor's patented RAIDn technology complements nStor's NexStor 4700 SATA family to bring cost-effective, continuous data protection and advanced storage management to small-to-medium-sized businesses. "Together, nStor and InoStor are lowering both technology and cost barriers by enabling companies of all sizes to benefit from sophisticated high-availability features without sacrificing ease of use or flexibility," she said. "We are extremely pleased to leverage our collective strengths and offer a full-featured, economical storage solution that meets a wide variety of business demands."

nStor's NexStor systems currently are deployed across a broad spectrum of video, investment banking, healthcare and defense applications. Introduced in Oct. 2004, InoStor's RAIDn is a software library with a set of patented algorithms that efficiently implement a parity scheme across an array of disk drives to protect the most rigorous data environments against random, multiple drive failures.

"The market imperative for multi-drive redundancy is apparent with vendors scrambling to provide so-called RAID 6 two-drive protection," said David Licosati, InoStor's vice president of business development. "RAIDn goes well beyond RAID 6 providing not only efficient two-drive protection but multi-drive protection against data loss for two, three or more drives. nStor's NextStor 4700 SATA family has the feature functions set that positions it as an industry leader."