Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Storage Seeks NAS Appeal

The campaign to reach the growing customer base of SMBs and departmental users is on full tilt -- and network attached storage (NAS), typically viewed as simpler to implement than SANs, has taken on new significance.

During this week's Storage Networking World tradeshow, several NAS products got upgrades, and in each case the theme was ease of... [fill in the blank]. Here's a sampling:

  • Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) has revamped its Windows-based NAS product line. The products formerly called HP StorageWorks NAS have been renamed HP ProLiant Storage Server, with model numbers that reflect the ProLiant servers on which they are based.

    "When we told customers that our NAS was a ProLiant server with a NAS system loaded on to it, they said, 'Why don't you just call it that?' " says Jim Hankins, NAS product marketing manager at HP.

    HP also enhanced its iSCSI Feature Pack, which is rumored to be based on technology from FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) that outfits the NAS boxes with block-level access to SAN-stored data (see FalconStor's Flyin'). Introduced last month with support for Microsoft Exchange, the pack now supports Oracle 9i and 10g databases and incorporates software called Application Storage Manager to consolidate a variety of block-data management functions on the NAS devices into one interface.

  • 1