A midsummer storage dream

Are you enjoying summer? I am -- at least, I'm trying to, because the weather has been very unpredictable lately here in southeast Texas. By contrast, new storage products targeting small and large business alike have continued to hit the market and the news desk with predictable regularity. 

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One of the most innovative products recently offered to SMBs is ComplianceVault, a composite appliance from Intradyn that combines plenty of disk space and WORM tape drives for hands-off archiving and easy retrieval of e-mail messages.

The Intradyn appliance hosts a custom e-mail client that can automatically retrieve messages from IMAP and POP3 servers. From a browser-based application, administrators can easily set archiving criteria and quickly search for messages.

The two ComplianceVault models released in June offer 120GB or 250GB of online capacity and one Sony AIT (Advanced Intelligence Tape)-2 WORM tape, which should provide sufficient capacity for most stockbrokers, who are Intradyn's primary target. 

For the larger model, customers will have to fork over $8,000; the 120GB model comes in at about a grand less. But money should not be a big issue because target customers are likely to appreciate the read-only archiving capability offered by the Sony WORM tape, which should assure that stringent Securities and Exchange Commission dictates are met.

You are probably still wondering what the play hinted in this column's headline has to do with this column. Let me explain: Some new storage products -- such as the three mentioned in this column -- have long lived first in people's minds and in their dreams before hitting the market. As in Shakespeare's play, this can make it difficult for someone trying to separate reality from fiction. 

One example: Months ago, during a casual conversation with one of my contacts at Dell, we dreamed up an iSCSI target application that could make networked LUNs (logical unit numbers) from local drives, thereby easily transforming plain-vanilla Windows servers into SAN nodes.

Of course, IPStor has offered that capability for some time -- but with a broader scope. Purchasing the FalconStor product simply to give new life to storage on one or two obsolete servers would be overkill, sort of like buying the whole airline company to secure seats for a trip.

I remembered that previous conversation in May, when a new company, String Bean Software, showed up out of the blue with WinTarget, an application that does exactly what my Dell acquaintance and I were discussing: It turns any recent Windows machine into a SAN appliance.

You can probably understand that I simply had to try out WinTarget, which was easy because String Bean's Web site offers a free trial. I quickly installed WinTarget on a Windows 2000 server and didn't even have to reboot to begin creating networked LUNs from local volumes.

The free iSCSI initiator software from Microsoft is the logical client-side companion of WinTarget, which is not free but is still very affordable at $250 per server. If you're planning a SAN on a shoestring for training or just to test iSCSI before going live, give WinTarget a try. It could even stick permanently. 

Speaking of FalconStor, the company recently gave me a persuasive live demo of its newest product, iSCSI Storage Server, an extension to IPStor that adds block serving capabilities to appliances based on Windows Storage Server 2003.

What does this mean? In essence, using the FalconStor product, Windows-based NAS (network attached storage) appliances can serve both files and blocks. It's only fair to remember that this capability, often referred to as "unified storage" was initially offered by Network Appliance and recently embraced by vendors such as Snap Appliance. 

Being the perfectionists they are, FalconStor engineers surrounded the iSCSI Storage Server with some interesting options, such as the ability to create mirrors and snapshots -- the latter being supported by custom agents that ensure the referential integrity of major databases and e-mail systems.

You should be able to order iSCSI Storage Server as an option for new NAS purchases or as an add-on for existing appliances. Check with your local vendor for details because FalconStor sells this product only via partners.

In the meantime, keep those dreams coming -- sooner or later the storage market will probably turn them into real products. Perhaps a vendor-neutral SAN file system. … Ah, but that's a topic for another column.