Vendors Plan a Week to Watch

A slew of vendors plan to unveil products this week, many at the Storage World Conference (SWC) starting tomorrow in Long Beach, California.

Brocade plans to announce a major OEM deal with Nortel built around wide area file services (WAFS) tomorrow. At the heart of the deal is WAFS technology developed by Tacit Networks, a long-standing Brocade partner, which is now part of Packeteer. (See Brocade, Packeteer Team Up.) The software will be featured in a new BCS 3000 device from Nortel, which is aimed at firms looking to connect their data centers and branch offices.

"[Major corporations] were talking to us about the challenges they faced in the area of data center consolidation and branch office integration," explains Phil Edholm, Nortel's enterprise CTO, adding that the device can be used for WAN optimization and acceleration as well as backup.

In addition to WAFS, the BCS 3000 comes with a storage networking module devised by Nortel for Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and Ficon connectivity. The BCS 3000 is deployed behind a router in a branch office and it offers a bandwidth manager enabling users to allocate bandwidth to specific applications.

Voice and application switching features could also find their way onto the platform. According to Al Lounsbury, Nortel's senior manager for BCS 3000 product marketing: "We are currently evaluating how the product will evolve."Pricing for the 1.5-unit-high appliance with storage networking features will fall between $13,000 and $40,000, depending on the configuration. WAFS functionality will cost between $8,500 and $17,000 more, depending on the number of users, plus $50 per seat.

The device, which will be unveiled tomorrow, will be generally available sometime in July or August, according to Lounsbury.

The news is part of a slew of recent activity in the WAFS space that shows no sign of slowing down. It follows a flurry of acquisitions and Riverbed's headline-grabbing IPO plans. (See Riverbed Makes It Official, Sources: Riverbed Reaches for IPO, Packeteer Picks Tacit, and Cisco Acts on Actona.)

FalconStor will unveil a new de-duplication product called Single Instance Repository (SIR). (See FalconStor Plots De-Dupe Debut.) The software, which works with FalconStor's VTL and disk-to-disk backup offerings, will be available in the third quarter of this year, priced from around $20,000. "It will be opened up to other vendors' VTL technologies and disk-to-disk backup solutions before the end of the year," says Don Mead, the firm's vice president of marketing.

Also in the VTL space, Quantum will announce enhancements to its DX3000 and DX5000 appliances. The vendor will boost the DX3000's maximum capacity from 5.6 Tbytes to 7 Tbytes. The DX5000's maximum capacity will go up from 14.4 Tbytes to 18 Tbytes. Both devices will now offer Linear Tape Open (LTO) emulation, in addition to existing Digital Linear Tape (DLT) capabilities.Pricing for the upgraded DX3000 and DX5000, which will be available within the next month, starts at around $10,000 and $25,000, respectively.

Another vendor tweaking its products this week is software vendor Yosemite Technologies, which will unveil enhancements to its backup offerings. The vendor's Backup Standard software will now offer 8 Tbytes of disk capacity, upgradeable to 16 Tbytes. The older version of the product offered between 500 Gbytes and 3.5 Tbytes.

Pricing for the Backup Standard software, aimed at SMBs with fewer than 20 servers, starts at $650.

Networking startup iVivity unveiled new technology and a partnership with virtualization software vendor StoreAge today. (See IVivity Shows Off.) The two firms unveiled a switch-style piece of hardware called the Intelligent Services Module (ISM) that slots into the switch bay of an IBM BladeCenter blade server chassis. The idea here is that users can use the new ISM as a form of "gateway" to connect compute blades to external storage, according to Martin Mainini, iVivity's director of marketing. (See FC SAN Revenue Up and Future SANs Stir Debate.)

"We're the protocol conversion and connection for the 14 compute blades to external Fibre Channel SAN storage," Mainini explains. "We can virtualize the external SAN and create virtualized storage for the 14 blades." Pricing for the device, which is available for evaluation, is yet to be released.Other vendors demoing their wares at SWC include file management startup Attune, which will showcase its first product offering, the recently launched Maestro File Manager FM5500, a NAS virtualization device. (See Attune Shows Off Virtualization.)

DataDirect Networks will show its new 480-Tbyte S2A9500 storage device, and ANStor 64, a spin-off of vendor Cutting Edge, will debut a 64-bit NAS and iSCSI operating system.

Startup Abrevity unveiled a new reseller program today, and security specialist Data Domain took the wraps off a new partnership with Datalink. (See Abrevity Intros Reseller Program, and Data Domain, DataLink Partner.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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