Reldata Extended Enterprise Grade Data Protection Services for its Unified IP Storage Gateways

Reldata unveils advanced snapshot functionality, incremental data replication and NDMP support in its unified IP SAN/NAS Storage Gateway

Parsippany, 3rd April 2006, Reldata Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class unified IP SAN/NAS storage gateways, announces a set of innovative data protection features available as a free upgrade to its flagship product, Reldata IP Storage Gateway 9200. The features, which include extended multiple snapshots and clones, incremental data replication over iSCSI and support for NDMP 4.0 backup protocol, will help further reduce costs of the disaster recovery planning, simplify remote back-up procedures and ensure the availability and consistency of distributed data in multi-vendor unified storage environments. The new features are designed to ultimately bring down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the storage networking solutions built around Reldata 9200 Gateways, especially since the company continues to maintain 9200’s current all-inclusive list price at $25,000.

“The data consolidation and data protection management in IP infrastructures can be greatly simplified through deployment of unified IP storage gateways”, said Kirill Malkin, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Reldata Inc. “Our new and improved virtual volume manager, that is now integrated in the Reldata 9200 Gateways, offers advanced data protection capabilities over IP networks on both block- and file-level, greatly enhancing the high-performance iSCSI SAN and NAS capacity provisioning, and open, vendor-independent consolidation of Fibre Channel, SCSI and iSCSI disk and tape storage.”

The Reldata 9200 now supports both independent and synchronized copy-on-write snapshots of individual storage volumes and volume groups. Unlike most other snapshot solutions, Reldata’s technology supports over two hundred block-level volume snapshots, including the snapshots of file systems and iSCSI targets. The Reldata volume snapshots do not cause disk fragmentation and can be converted between read-only and writable at any time, also supporting “rollback” to a read-only or “roll forward” to an updated writable snapshot. The snapshots can be easily duplicated, or “cloned”, opening access to dynamically updated volumes, and providing simple means for outfitting a computer grid with initially identical storage volumes. A new patent-pending feature also allows the administrator to provide snapshots as iSCSI targets, CIFS shares or NFS mounting points for rapid data recovery via IP SAN or NAS hosts.

Reldata’s patent-pending remote incremental volume replication procedure uses advanced volume snapshot technology combined with incremental updates transported over iSCSI. Not only this approach ensures the availability of the source volume at all times, but it also allows an unlimited access to the latest volume replica on the remote side, even as the replication continues to roll forward. It also significantly reduces the amount of replication traffic by coalescing interim updates between replication cycles, and allows a short time period between the cycles. The replication data traffic can be further accelerated and protected using IPSec encryption and compression.

Additional new remote data protection functionality allows remote volume replication and volume mirroring to multiple external iSCSI targets, as well as uni- and bi-directional file replication over TCP/IP networks. These activities can be automatically scheduled and used as part of a multi-site disaster recovery solution ensuring distributed data consistency across all replication destinations, and can encompass block- and file-level resources of the entire enterprise.

Completing the new data protection feature set, the Reldata 9200 is now "NDMP backup ready". The appliance includes support for the open standard network backup protocol NDMP 4.0. An NDMP-compliant backup software can now provide backup protection to the Reldata 9200 NAS volumes by backing them up either to locally attached tape libraries or to a remote tape target provider. The appliance can also expose locally attached tape library to be used for a backup of external NAS volumes. This constitutes an enterprise-wide solution for NDMP-based backup, and without the need for proprietary backup software agents.

Finally, as an additional part of the upgrade, the Reldata 9200 now offers out-of-the-box high-performance support for both Microsoft® Active Directory and standard Network Information Services (NIS/Yellow Pages) authentication resources, working well across WAN connections. It facilitates a fast, simple lookup of individual user and user group properties, quota management and authentication for thousands of users.

Reldata will be demonstrating the IP Storage Gateway 9200 at the Storage Networking World in San Diego, California, on April 3-6, 2006.

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About RELDATA

RELDATA is a leading provider of enterprise-class unified IP SAN/NAS storage gateway appliances. RELDATA storage networking solutions provide significant savings in the total cost of ownership for enterprise storage infrastructure through convergence of block-level iSCSI SAN and file-level NAS, multi-vendor storage consolidation, dynamic capacity provisioning and enabling block- and file-level data protection over IP. RELDATA is represented in the European market by its German affiliate RELDATA Europe GmbH. RELDATA products are sold through accredited distributors and resellers. Comprehensive and flexible Service Level Agreements reflect RELDATA’s commitment to high reliability and availability of its products. RELDATA is a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
Reldata on the Internet: www.reldata.com .

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