Chaparral Technologies and Retrieve Form a Strategic Alliance to Implement Storage Area Network Solutions.Monterey, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 13, 1998--MARKET FUSION CONFERENCE--Retrieve, Inc. today announced a strategic alliance with Chaparral Technologies, Inc., to develop advanced Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions for some of the most pressing problems facing IT managers and network administrators. Chaparral Technologies, with its high performance and cost effective Fibre Channel Storage Routers, and Retrieve, with its data sharing The ability to share the same data resource with multiple applications or users. It implies that the data are stored in one or more servers in the network and that there is some software locking mechanism that prevents the same set of data from being changed by two people at the same time. architecture, will collaborate to provide "SAN on a board". The Retrieve Pacemaker software seamlessly integrates with existing platform (UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). and NT) servers as well as peripheral devices such as disk arrays, tape drives, and tape libraries to provide the intelligence and control functions for effective true data sharing and dynamic storage sharing in a heterogeneous SAN environment. "Retrieve's software is the key missing ingredient and one of the most important requirements to take effective advantage of the huge promise of Storage Area Networks," said Michael Gluck, president and chief operating officer Chief Operating Officer (COO) The officer of a firm responsible for day-to-day management, usually the president or an executive vice-president. of Chaparral Technologies. The "plumbing" (e.g. fibre channel switches Major manufacturers of Fibre Channel switches are: Brocade, Cisco, McData and Qlogic.
"Retrieve is extremely pleased and excited with the prospect of running its Pacemaker software on a very high speed and cost effective platform such as the Chaparral Storage Router," said Bruce Thompson, Chief Architect of Retrieve. "It provides not only the higher speed and throughput, but offers the additional benefits of high availability Also called "RAS" (reliability, availability, serviceability) or "fault resilient," it refers to a multiprocessing system that can quickly recover from a failure. There may be a minute or two of downtime while one system switches over to another, but processing will continue. including fail-over and fault tolerance See fault tolerant. (architecture) fault tolerance - 1. The ability of a system or component to continue normal operation despite the presence of hardware or software faults. This often involves some degree of redundancy. 2. ." SAN Solutions Storage Area Networks (SANs) offer a faster and better alternative to conventional LAN-based storage and backup models. IT managers are facing exponential growth Extremely fast growth. On a chart, the line curves up rather than being straight. Contrast with linear. in storage, exploding WEB sites and e-commerce systems required to be up 24 hours a day. Companies are recognizing that DATA is a key corporate asset that must be available and accessible. They don't want to lose customers due to network or storage problems, and they need better performance and continuous availability of information. The future direction is clear: companies are going to migrate from today's isolated islands of storage that are connected to separate servers to a SAN environment where the storage can be shared by heterogeneous UNIX and NT servers and clients. SANs are not new, although the terminology is new. Mainframe environments for years have utilized SANs in the form of ESCON (Enterprise Systems CONnection) An IBM S/390 fiber-optic channel that transfers 17 Mbytes/sec over distances up to 60 km depending on connection type. ESCON allows peripheral devices to be located across large campuses and metropolitan areas. (Enterprise System CONnection). But the UNIX market has been primarily SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. based - a point-to-point limited connection. Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research in Santa Barbara Santa Barbara (săn'tə bär`brə, –bərə), city (1990 pop. 85,571), seat of Santa Barbara co., S Calif., on the Pacific Ocean; inc. 1850. popularized the term "storage area network" to suggest a better alternative to network-attached storage See NAS. which was limiting because it relied on network protocols and didn't guarantee delivery. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Peterson, SANs have three major components: the interfaces including SCSI and Fibre Channel; the interconnects such as extenders, multiplexers, hubs, switches and routers; and the switching fabric. Data Sharing and Device Sharing The promise of SANs remains unfilled until you can effectively access and share the storage on the network. Instead of having to have a tape drive or tape library attached to each and every server for backup purposes, SANs offer the ability to centrally manage and install a department-wide, campus-wide, or even enterprise-wide automated backup system Noun 1. backup system - a computer system for making backups ADP system, ADPS, automatic data processing system, computer system, computing system - a system of one or more computers and associated software with common storage in an optimum cost-effective and efficient manner. As more and more companies migrate mission critical applications from UNIX to NT (especially when the Wolfpack clustering NT 5.0 is available), it will become urgently important to be able to access and share data from heterogeneous UNIX and NT platforms. "Chaparral's collaboration with Retrieve will accelerate the adoption and implementation of SAN solutions due to the high level of integration they achieve," according to Peterson. "We are only at the beginning of a very exciting new era for storage that offers tremendous promise for both the end users as well as the vendors that can bring innovative and cost effective solutions to the SAN environment." About Retrieve Retrieve, Inc. based in Boulder, Colorado The City of Boulder (, Mountain Time Zone) is a home rule municipality located in Boulder County, Colorado, United States. Boulder is the 11th most populous city in the State of Colorado, as well as the most populous city and the county , is an innovative Company whose mission is to create, develop and deliver universal architecture to enable ease of use and reduced cost of ownership for the advanced server and storage applications that are defining the next generation of Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions. About Chaparral Chaparral, headquartered in Longmont, CO, provides intelligent Fibre Channel storage products and solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs). Chaparral recently signed a letter of intent to form a strategic alliance with Adaptec. Adaptec will receive an equity stake in Chaparral in exchange for the transfer of certain external storage technologies. Chaparral's FS1200, the first of the Enabler(TM) series of Intelligent Storage Routers offers industry-leading performance and the smallest form factor Fibre Channel to SCSI connectivity device. The FS1200 is available in either a 3 1/2 inch board for OEMs or in a half-height 5 1/4 inch canister for easy integration into existing SCSI-based peripheral subsystems. Chaparral recently announced plans to integrate Intelliguard's Celestra(TM) Power agent into Chaparral's Enabler(TM) family of intelligent storage routers to deliver the ultimate high-speed backup solution over Fibre Channel. |
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