Storage

April 7, 2005
Intransa StorAR enables scalable DR with existing infrastructure

NEW DELHI -- Intransa recently announced the availability of StorAR software, an asynchronous-based replication technology and solution that provides a cost-effective and scalable disaster recovery (DR) solution. StorAR is an add-on to Intransa's existing software for the IntraStorT IP product family. The new DR capability allows the entire Intransa family of IP SANs to replicate data from one storage controller to another -- locally and remotely -- to satisfy business recovery time and point objectives, critical measurements in an organisation's tolerance to site-wide outages, human error or data corruption and other disasters that put business-critical data at risk.

StorAR is available as a value-added feature in Intransa's patented StorControl' software, which allows users to create and manage volumes on Intransa's IP SANs seamlessly. The StorAR solution allows administrators to match the importance of a data set to the business with the appropriate level of recoverability, reducing costs and leveraging resources more efficiently. Using StorAR, each volume on the IP SAN can be classified as per its value, and assigned an appropriate level of replication. In addition, Intransa unveiled support for new high-capacity 400-gigabyte serial ATA drives in its newest firmware enhancement.

Intransa's StorAR works seamlessly across all Intransa's IntraStor product family, and provides asynchronous replication services from a central location to any remote location that has IP connectivity-site. It is based on the industry-standard iSCSI protocol, and overcomes replication distance limitations through the use of existing IP infrastructure. The StorAR extends organisation's DR plans to that of a global nature, and also minimises deployment and management costs as the data/WAN links to remote sites exists. In addition, it interfaces to WAN acceleration devices, allows users to access replicated data at remote locations from anywhere without requiring network reconfiguration, allows organizations to build a replication and DR solution that balances performance against DR risk as well as simplifies replication and DR planning.

Peter Wang, chief technology officer and founder, Intransa, said: "Our new StorAR DR software enabled us to deliver a unique value - near real time replication across any Intransa storage systems in the network. Since the Intransa architecture natively supports standard ethernet, users are free to access data residing virtually anywhere in the corporate network, without any reconfiguration. Replication is really a means to an end, and the new StorAR capability enables DR for organisations of all sizes, especially for those that are not interested in investing in brand new networking infrastructure to be able to fully recover from a site outage or event that threatens the availability of their data."

Mark Buckley, general manager, Genesis Imaging, added: "Intransa's StorAR product is key for many of our customers whose current DR solution has limited the performance of both their network and applications. Using the Intransa StorAR solution, they now can throttle the traffic over the wide area network to optimize the performance of the network. Intransa's IntraStor architecture handles the replication CPU cycles instead of pushing that load to application servers, saving our customers thousands of dollars by making replication automatic within the SAN environment and allowing IT professionals to deploy replicated server solutions in record time."

Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, commented: "IP SANs are entering a new phase and have now become a serious alternative to FC SANs. The economics of implementing an iSCSI SAN are just too compelling to ignore. If we take that one step further using remote replication in an IP SAN is also significantly more cost effective than in a FC SAN. The chance of disasters occurring from blackouts, fire, natural disasters, viruses, and terrorism are more real than ever. Customers typically have held back from implementing DR because of the cost. The total solution from Intransa gives customers an affordable way to store and protect their data in the event of equipment, site or regional disaster."

Contact:
Intransa
Tel: +91-80-5121-6439
chandra@intransa.com
www.intransa.com