Stonefly announces next-generation storage consolidator

Computerworld - Stonefly Networks Inc. this week unveiled its latest IP Storage router, which virtualizes capacity on a heterogeneous storage-area network (SAN) and serves it up from pool to application servers and replicates data to business continuity and disaster recovery sites.
The Storage Concentrator i3000 combines Advanced Technology Attached RAID storage with storage provisioning engines and uses an Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol router/bridge for synchronous replications over metropolitan-area networks or asynchronous data replication over unlimited distances using an Ethernet network.
The router features an Intel Corp. Xeon 3-GHz processor, with three times the throughput of previous models, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for active load balancing of I/O traffic.
Ken Walters, senior director of enterprise platforms at Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Va., currently uses two of Stonefly's i2000 model storage consolidators to pool storage on his SAN, which is supported by an IBM Shark storage array. But Walters wants to create a business continuity and disaster recovery architecture using the new i3000.
Walters said he hopes to purchase an i3000 router by the end of this year and replicate his mission-critical data to a remote site where he can store the data on a relatively inexpensive ATA array. "I've been dying to do replication to a remote site," he said. "I wasn't keen on buying two Sharks to do it.
"I can get a lot of cheap storage out there and use the asynchronous replication," he said. "And anything that gives me more power is good. These new boxes are about three times the CPU processing power."
Mike Fisch, an analyst at The Clipper Group Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., said the low cost of a single system, about $14,000, makes the Stonefly router a good fit for small and medium-size businesses that already have a SAN and want to add IP storage capability to it. The router could be used to bring low-end servers into a storage network that otherwise wouldn't warrant the cost of additional switches and network cards.
Fisch said Stonefly's latest router, which includes the local and remote data mirroring features, puts it into a new class. "These are important features, especially if you want to use it for more mission-critical applications," he said.
The i3000 also provides up to six I/O ports, which allows storage administrators to mix and match almost any combination of iSCSI, SCSI or Fibre Channel ports to customize their IP SANs to meet IT requirements.
The Storage Concentrator i3000 starts at $13,995 retail for a single-unit configuration and $19,995 for a 1TB cluster-pairconfiguration, which performs fail-over capabilities.