Snap Appliance Upgrades Its Offerings

   Snap Appliance , which was acquired by Adaptec late last month, has announced three new hardware and software products that will be key offerings from Adaptec's new external storage division. The products are the Snap Server 18000, which is the company's fastest storage server ever and is targeted at large enterprises; an update to GuardianOS; and a new version of its Server-to-Server (S2S) Synchronization server replication software.
   The Snap Server 18000 is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server that scales from 2TB to 30TB in capacity. Dual Intel Xeon processors, Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives, and GuardianOS 3.1 power the server. The Snap Server 18000 delivers twice the performance of any other Snap server, according to the company. The product will be available by the end of the month and will start at $14,995 with 2TB of storage.
   Snap's upgrade to its flagship OS, GuardianOS 3.1, adds Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) support. An open protocol for enterprise-wide backup and recovery, NDMP has three configurations: Data Management Application (DMA), Tape Server, and Data Server. GuardianOS 3.1 supports all three configurations. The new OS will ship on all new Snap servers and is available as a free upgrade to customers who have GuardianOS 3.0.
   The new version of S2S takes advantage of GuardianOS 3.1's NDMP support to offer asynchronous, byte-level data replication, which allows data replication between Snap servers over WANs. The software will be updated by the end of the year to support replication to any Windows or UNIX server. The company is targeting the replication as an alternative to tape backup solutions. S2S is available now; licenses start at $699, depending on the Snap server used.