StorageTek Bets On Modrange Line

The company recently unveiled some products that dovetail nicely with its information life-cycle management strategy, aimed at managing data from creation to deletion.

MirrorStore, a data replication appliance for local and remote data replication and mirroring, allows for data snapshots that can be time-marked, said Peter Wu, vice president of engineering at StorageTek, Louisville, Colo. The product is suited for business continuity, disaster recovery, disk-to-disk backup and recovery, and centralized storage management, Wu said. MirrorStore starts at $32,000 and can be purchased on a pay-as-you-grow basis, he said.

"You can just take [MirrorStore] out of the box and plug it in," said Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, Hanover, Md. "There's no need to buy the software or integrate it, or worry about support for another server."

StorageTek also unveiled the BladeStore B250 and the BladeStore 200, two additions to its BladeStore line of storage appliances.

The B250 is slated to ship in early 2004 and offers five ATA hard drives on a single storage blade for a minimum of 1.25 Tbytes, said Pankaj Bhatia, director of strategy at StorageTek. Previously, the minimum was 6.25 Tbytes, so partners didn't have as much flexibility when working with smaller customers.

The 200 is due out in mid-November and offers a single Serial ATA (SATA) drive in a hot-swap configuration, which increases the granularity of the BladeStore's scalability for customers that want to start out smaller, Bhatia said.

The new BladeStore offerings target entry-level and midrange clients, and StorageTek plans to sell the offerings, as well as MirrorStore, through horizontal solution providers and partners working with fixed-content file storage, Bhatia said.

Joseph Fannin, CEO of Net Source, a solution provider based in Littleton, Colo., said SATA-based storage solutions currently comprise up to 65 percent of Net Source's installations. "EMC, Network Appliance and others are already investing a lot of money in the technology," Fannin said.