STORAGE

LOUISVILLE, Colo., -- StorageTek, the storage and solutions expert, announced today that it is accelerating the release of enhancements to BladeStore during the second and third quarters. Enhancements include the addition of replication and mirroring to the existing BladeStore implementations and will allow customers to put both the industry leading D-Series arrays into the same configuration as the BladeStore. This will give customers both a performance and cost benefit in implementing both types of storage into their environment. "We know we have a great market opportunity in the ATA disk-based storage arena," said Tom Major, vice president and general manager, Disk Business Unit. Today, BladeStore delivers enterprise-class serial ATA performance with proven and available parallel ATA drives. Customers are able to realize the benefits that serial ATA is expected to deliver in the future. When the company announced its entry into the ATA market, Gartner Dataquest said, "With BladeStore StorageTek has brought to market one of the more innovative storage products in recent times," and Enterprise Storage Group said, "BladeStore seems to be well positioned to become a foundation product for StorageTek as it builds these solutions." The company said the enhancements would allow both the BladeStore ATA storage and D-Series performance Fibre Channel storage to use one controller module simultaneously, thus creating a single, high-performance and high-capacity online storage solution. This will be first realized through implementations of StorageTek's Application Storage Manager software suite, and will allow StorageTek customers to realize the benefits of using the right disk and tape solution for their environment. Current BladeStore customers will have the opportunity to upgrade their current products to have access to the D-Series enterprise-class options for mirroring and replication. These options will help them manage their enterprise in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Major pointed out that BladeStore fits nicely into the company's strategic approach to storage, called Information Lifecycle Management. "It is important to understand that not all data is equal, and, therefore, customers need multiple options for storing, protecting and replicating data," he said. "BladeStore and its forthcoming enhancements will provide those options to customers." StorageTek's innovative Intelligent BladeStore Architecture delivers the ability to store large quantities of data in a small footprint at a greatly reduced cost. It combines low-cost ATA disk drives for data storage, and the performance and reliability of an enterprise class fibre-channel disk system.