New Compaq Enterprise Storage Offerings

Compaq’s Storage Product Division has announced new software and hardware offerings in the Storage Area Network (SAN) arena. The software announcements include Compaq’s Enterprise Volume Manager (EVM) and Data Replication Manager (DRM). Hardware offerings support these new software products. Compaq has also announced a new Storage Resource Management (SRM) initiative. EVM lets SANs instantly replicate data at a volume level. The software works with Oracle and SQL Server databases and has a wizard interface that makes creating backup jobs easy. Other vendor offerings in the SAN arena perform only snapshots, incremental backups, or cloning, which mirrors the data while it’s online. For example, EMC’s TimeFinder software performs cloning, said Mark Lewis, vice president of Compaq’s Enterprise Software Group for Storage.For hardware, EVM will work with the RAID Array 8000 and the Enterprise Storage Array (ESA) 12000. The RAID Array 8000 runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000 (Win2K) systems and will run on the Compaq Tru64 and Sun Solaris OSs in the first quarter of 2000. The ESA 12000 also runs on Linux, Hewlett-Packard (HP)-UX, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics (SGI) IRIX, SCO UNIX, and Novell NetWare.Compaq’s DRM, which will work in a SAN environment, can take an NT cluster and extend it across large distances using tunneling technology. Essentially, you can create a worldwide SAN solution using asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and a telephone company (telco) line connected to an OC3 (4-port, 155Mbps physical interface module) or OC12 (1-port, 622Mbps physical interface module). This technology is beneficial for enterprises that manage disparate data centers.According to Lewis, Compaq has a $6 billion business in storage technology, making the company the world’s largest vendor of storage directly attached to servers. Compaq’s main storage facilities are in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and in Massachusetts. For more information, see “Compaq Delivers Enterprise Features with its Open Storage Area Networks”. On December 6, Compaq also announced its SRM initiative. The company has made a $20 million investment in HighGround Systems to develop a capacity-planning tool. This tool lets an enterprise manage both assets and performance for its storage devices. Windows 2000 Server (Win2K Server) uses some of HighGround’s technology for Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), which moves infrequently accessed information offline from disk to tape and retrieves it when needed."This partnership with HighGround fortifies Compaq's leadership in enterprise storage," said Howard Elias, vice president and general manager, Storage Products Division, Compaq. "As a critical component of our Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) solutions, HighGround's SRM technology enables customers to manage and optimize their business-critical storage resources from any location in the network." For more information, see “Compaq and HighGround Join Forces to Provide Leading Open SAN Management Solutions”.