Industry giants such as EMC and HP have jumped aboard storage OEM
ATTO Technology’s newest release that ATTO says is the first Fibre
Channel connectivity solution that enables workstations in
heterogeneous operating environments to connect directly to
enterprise-class storage systems.
The release comes at a time when IT organizations in target industries,
such as media and entertainment, are starting to loosen up their tight
grip on IT budgets after more than a year of recession.
Available with the ATTO’s single-, dual- and quad-channel 8G bps Fibre
Channel HBAs, and already qualified for a number of storage vendors,
including EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp, MultiPath Director offers
load-balancing and automatic path failover capabilities that were
previously available only at the server level.
That means it is well suited for media and entertainment SAN environments, says ATTO’s Tom Kolniak, director of Products.
"By providing it, we can now guarantee access to storage in the event
something goes wrong, i.e., a bad cable or port," he tells Channel
Insider. It gives workstation users access to enterprise-class storage,
he says.
In addition to the media and entertainment industries, this solution
should be attractive to real-time users doing high-end collaboration,
he adds. He expects the storage vendors to start shipping MultiPath
Director to their channels within the next 30 days.
Also expected to be available within the next 30 days is ATTO’s third
generation ExpressSAS SAS/SATA RAID Adapters, based on 6 Gbps SAS
technology. Available in four port configurations, 8 internal, 8
external, 4 internal/4 external and 16 internal, and support SAS, SATA
and solid-state drives (SSDs), these adapters will introduce
CacheAssure, a battery less NV (non-volatile) RAM cache solution.
Kolniak says the maintenance-free, flash-based data protection module
prevents data loss in the event of a power failure.
Unlike battery solutions which typically offer 72 hours of protection,
take up to eight hours to recharge, have a shelf-life of two years and
must be carefully disposed of, CacheAssure is a lifetime solution, can
be recharged in two minutes and has no environmental impacts.
"Anybody concerned about losing critical assets should be interested in this," he says.
The company will be displaying MultiPath Director at the 2010 NAB Show
next week in Las Vegas, along with its latest offerings, including the
FastStream SC SAS/SATA RAID Storage Controller with 8G bps Fibre
Channel connectivity to SAS/SATA storage, Celerity 8G bps Fibre Channel
Host Bus Adapters, FibreConnect 8G bps Fibre Channel Switches and
ExpressSAS SAS/SATA RAID adapters. Kolniak says the show represents a
great opportunity to showcase its products "designed to meet the
high-performance streaming demands of users in the media entertainment
industry."
Like most other market segments, the media entertainment industry had
been putting purchasing decisions on hold and trying to get by with
what they had, says Kolniak. But that’s changed recently. "We’re now
starting to see people making purchasing decisions. We’re now going
through a refresh cycle… things are definitely picking up."