Plasmon Expands Its NAS Line.

Plasmon IDE is adding to its Network-Attached Storage Devices (NASD) line with three scalable products collectively dubbed NetReady. Senior product manager Rick Hoffman told me that they will be available, both individually and bundled with Plasmon's libraries, starting in September. And Plasmon--actually its parent company, Plasmon PLC--has further enhanced its position at the top of the 12-inch WORM market by acquiring Cygnet Storage Solutions Inc.'s library manufacturing business.

The NetReady product model called Cluster Manager is at the top of the line: it's specified to support two or more libraries and up to 200 users with 100GB of HDD capacity and 128MB of onboard RAM to cache files from those libraries' media. The model called NetReady for Business supports two jukeboxes and up to 100 users with a 20GB HDD and 64MB of RAM. The smallest member of the family, model NetReady for Workgroups, supports one jukebox and up to 50 users with a 10GB HDD and 32MB of RAM. "These are relatively large disk and RAM caches, proportional to the networks they're designed for," said Hoffman. "That'll help to minimize disk swaps, which yields faster response times and also extends the jukeboxes' working lives."

The NetReady family, he noted, is specified to be "easily" integrated into Ethernet 10/100, ATM 25/155, or Token Ring network architectures. "A systems administrator should be able to configure it within minutes without disrupting the ongoing network traffic," Hoffman declared. Pricing will start at around $5,000 and range up to about $50,000.

Plasmon's reputation rests largely on its jukeboxes' support for a wide range of optical disk media. Did you know Plasmon offers a Magstar tape library too? Hoffman said so in passing and it was news to me. But it was not surprising to learn that the NetReady line is specified to be able to work with nearly all small form-factor optical media: premastered DVD-ROM, write-once DVD-R, and rewritable DVD-RAM, as well as CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, and 5.25-inch MO media--both the rewritable and the CCW-WORM versions.

"We think the real value of the NetReady devices is in their ability to boost network performance," Hoffman said. "The traditional way to add storage has been to add drives to a general-purpose server. But that's costly: you have the initial investment, you have the ongoing expenses of support, and at some point you have to add another server to handle the increased capacity. One alternatives is to dedicate a server to be a file-server. That reduces the workload on the general-purpose server, but you still incur those hardware costs, management costs, and administrative overhead. And with a dedicated file-server, you may be limited in technical things like protocol settings and connectivity options. So we think that network-attached storage--or you could call it 'server-attached' storage--is a better response to the problem because it separates the data storage functions from the 'traditional' server functions. And in this way, too, the underlying storage technology is invisible to the network user."

Consolidating The WORM Business

It costs $3.65 million, but acquiring Cygnet's large format library manufacturing capability ensures that there won't be serious competition for Plasmon in the 12-inch WORM business, as it's already the market leader in drives. And library making is not a trival enterprise: Cygnet reported revenues of almost $8 million in its fiscal year that ended in March.

Plasmon's CEO, Nigel Street, said that the acquisition enables Plasmon to offer a single-vendor, turnkey solution to its distribution and channel partners. As an OEM, Plasmon sells the majority of its drives to (and through) library manufacturers anyway, specifically FileNet and the former Philips LMS, which Plasmon acquired last year and renamed Plasmon LMS. "This step," said Street, "fully integrates 12-inch products into Plasmon's existing brand range of MO, CD/DVD-RAM, and tape based storage libraries."

In its own announcement, Cygnet claimed--and there is no reason to doubt--that its 12-inch optical library "has been installed by more imaging and enterprise-class storage end-users than any other large-format optical library." Four models are currently in production, ranging from 22-141 cartridges and from one to five drives. Cygnet will continue to manufacture them at its San Jose (CA) facility at least through December, after which Plasmon may shift production elsewhere.