The News

Intransa annouces IP5500 - The industry's next-generation modular IP san solution for the mid-market

26/10/2004

Evolving IP SANs to Deliver Enterprise-Class Scalability at Lower Cost of Ownership

STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD ORLANDO, Fla.— Oct 26, 2004—Intransa, the global leader in intelligent information storage, delivery, and management over IP, announced today the world-wide availability of the Intransa IP5500 IP SAN solution. The Intransa IP5500 is the next-generation in its revolutionary line of storage products built upon Intransa’s IntraStorTM modular storage architecture and StorControlTM software. Designed to adapt to customers’ growing storage needs, the IP5500 is the industry’s only IP SAN solution designed with a patented, fully modular architecture to allow on the fly enhancements to storage capacity, performance and availability. By connecting a new disk enclosure to the controller, the IP5500 can easily add storage without disruption to applications or users. In addition, by adding additional controllers the performance can be increased dynamically based on business requirements.

The new Intransa IP5500 delivers additional benefits to organizations facing the challenges of managing exponential data growth:

• Performance and speed improvements – The IP5500 is 80 percent faster than its predecessors, making it the fastest IP SAN on the market. The use of familiar Gigabit-Ethernet technologies further speeds installation, management and maintenance tasks.

• High availability and redundancy – The IP5500 delivers N-way active-active failover from all hosts, volumes, and components. Point-in-time snapshots enhance granular data recoverability and can also be used for testing, data mining, or zero-downtime backup.

• Easy capacity expansion -- The IP5500 scales seamlessly from 2 TB to over 48 TB with the addition of modular building-block disk enclosures and storage controllers. The IP5500 was designed to help companies achieve the capacity benefits of enterprise-class Fibre Channel SANs without the prohibitive cost.

“Traditional Fibre Channel SANs, while offering high performance and off loading the storage burden from the network, often require the expertise of new personnel to implement and subsequently manage the environment,” said William Terrill, senior analyst at Burton Group. “Intransa’s new IP5500 achieves the same net effect by using efficient, industry standard hardware on top of TCP/IP networking. This reduces the costs traditionally associated with Fibre Channel SANs. Furthermore, because TCP/IP networking is accelerated by greater CPU power and future improvements in processor performance and low cost TCP/IP offload engines (TOEs) will greatly enhance the benefits of IP SANs.”

What sets the Intransa IP5500 apart from other products in the emerging IP SAN arena is its modular approach to management. Adding capacity becomes as simple as plugging in a new disk enclosure.  The disks are automatically recognized, pooled and brought online for use by applications needing more storage. Future upgrades to the system can be integrated simply with the addition of a new controller.

"At Nielsen Media Research, we have found the economics of iSCSI to be too compelling to ignore," said Robert Stevenson, technology strategist at Nielsen Media Research.  “Our work with Intransa's IP5500, showed us the potential to deliver tier three storage services at a lower total cost of ownership using existing IP networking infrastructure.”  

The IP5500 leverages the power of TCP/IP networking with the low-cost-per-megabyte advantage of ATA disk drives– in an appliance that provides the scalability, availability and performance benefits of an enterprise-class SAN, without the complexity and interoperability challenges of Fibre Channel.

“Too great a percentage of each dollar spent on IT is a premium for managing the infrastructure on an on-going basis,” said Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of global marketing and services at Intransa. “When business needs dictate a shift in demand, capacity should scale in a straightforward manner. By building the new IP5500 on industry-standard technologies, leveraging the widespread use of Ethernet and inexpensive disk, Intransa is delivering a new approach to managing all kinds of data where performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness requirements are not mutually exclusive.”
Intransa’s Approach to IP Storage Area Networking
Intransa leads the pack of IP SAN providers by delivering the industry’s most comprehensive suite of IP SAN solutions to meet the needs of small, mid-tier, and enterprise-class customers alike. The Intransa IP storage offering is based on the company’s IntraStor™ three-tiered modular architecture that enable companies to quickly adapt and grow storage resources without requiring major forklift upgrades. This leading approach allows customers to independently scale and provision storage resources without impacting the management or performance of their network storage system. In addition to the IntraStorTM architecture, the Intransa StorControlTM system software provides a complete suite of enterprise-class storage management and data protection features that allow IT administrators to seamlessly grow and manage their storage environment based on business requirements.  Administrators can easily add an additional storage controller or disk enclosure without impacting performance or system availability. This allows enterprises to simultaneously address capacity and availability - reaping the benefits of increased uptime and investment protection through lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Intransa will be demonstrating the IP5500 at Storage Networking World beginning Monday, October 25, at the Intransa booth C26.

Intransa IP5500 Pricing
The Intransa IP5500 is available for immediate release and has a list price of ,000 for a 2 TB system which includes hardware, software and one year of support. Pricing for the IP5500 4 TB storage system begins at ,000.

About Intransa
Headquartered in San Jose, California, Intransa is an innovator of enterprise-class, intelligent IP storage solutions that radically reduce the complexity of deploying scalable network storage. Based on advanced technology that leverages the cost and performance advantage of Ethernet and the ubiquity of IP networks, Intransa's products are enabling a new generation of information storage, delivery, and management over IP networks. Founded in September 2000, Intransa has secured million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Menlo 
Ventures, Sofinnova Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, US Venture Partners, and a major pension fund.

Intransa, the Intransa logo, IntraStor and StorControl are trademarks of Intransa Inc. All other brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.