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The fact that
about 80% of companies that fall within the target market for
network-attached storage (NAS) solutions are Windows-based, opens up a
significant market opportunity for Maxtor's Windows-powered storage
solutions, according to Mike Cassidy, business development manager at
Rectron, SA's official Maxtor distributor.
"Having Windows at
the core of our operating system means we are not emulating it, which
is what Linux players, for example, need to do," he says.
"This means
systems integrators and VARs operating in the NAS arena can integrate
Maxtor solutions smoothly and their users can immediately realise the
robustness, interoperability and manageability offered by a Windows
powered solution."
Last year,
Microsoft selected Maxtor, an early innovator in network attached
storage servers, as its Windows Embedded Partner of the Year in the
OEM category.
Maxtor MaxAttach
NAS 6000 is Maxtor's latest Windows Powered enterprise-class server.
The storage server leverages Maxtor's ATA hard drives and the
Microsoft Windows 2000 platform with the Server Appliance Kit to
create a true plug-and-play offering.
Maxtor MaxAttach
NAS 6000 scales from 1.9TB to 5.7TB, integrates seamlessly with
Microsoft Active Directory for easy storage management and increased
data security, and includes high-end features such as Maxtor's
Persistent Storage Manager "snapshot", enabling users to roll back in
time to earlier versions of documents in the event of accidental
deletion or corruption.
The snapshot
software allows for up to 250 different point-in-time images
(snapshots) of the data, and provides the ability for users or
administrators to browse through folders of the snapshots to directly
access lost or outdated files for immediate use or recovery. Also,
data can be archived to tape from the snapped image, which eliminates
issues of file availability during backup.
Cassidy maintains
that while NAS is considerably cheaper to buy than a storage area
network (SAN), he sees both technologies co-existing in the same
environment, but serving different purposes.
"NAS costs about
R250 000 per terabyte, whereas SAN can be around R1 million per
terabyte. So, from a cost perspective, there is no comparison, but
where a SAN would be deployed to support the storage needs of a
mission critical environment where access to data needs to be
instantaneous, a Maxtor NAS solution would typically be used in less
critical environments where it might take minutes rather than seconds
to retrieve the data."
One of those
applications finding an increasing market in SA is managing the
explosive growth of e-mail volumes in the enterprise. MaxAttach
automatically offloads e-mail data from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus
Domino e-mail servers to MaxAttach storage servers, providing
end-users with more storage capacity to save messages and attachments.
It also improves
overall e-mail server performance, reduces backup time and virtually
eliminates the need for mailbox or message size restrictions. Users
maintain transparent access to archived messages and attachments,
without any performance degradation.
MaxAttach can also
be used to enable companies to seamlessly expand their storage
capacity by allowing multiple storage servers to be combined into one
large data repository. This creates a highly scalable storage
environment that helps IT administrators improve data management
efficiency.
"The low cost of
Maxtor NAS storage also makes it a viable alternative to tape library
archiving especially when tape's poor reliability, performance and
restore times are considered," concludes Cassidy. |
