Agami Systems

Agami Systems, a storage newcomer with deep roots that go back to a past life, is building out its NAS product line in hopes of blooming as a disaster recovery tool.

Agami came out with its low-end AIS-3000 series last November, and then added a midrange AIS6000 family in March. (See Agami Speeds Up NAS.)

Today, Agami upgraded its operating system to add high-availability capabilities. (See Agami Goes HA.) Agami 2.0 lets customers mirror file systems over the WAN for synchronous or asynchronous replication. The new OS also supports snapshot scheduling and snapshot rollback to make it easier to manage and restore from snapshots after a failure. With the new features, Agami is billing its products as "enterprise-class" systems.

But Agami, which claims around 20 customers, is still practically in the starting gate when compared to enterprise NAS leaders Network Appliance and EMC. Without a compelling product, Agami could find itself roadkill, like its technology ancestor Zambeel, the failed distributed file system startup that contributed the intellectual property for Agami.

NAS startups have been able to make headway attacking specific markets that enable them to avoid taking on the leaders head-on. For example, Isilon targets verticals such as media, broadcasting, and gas and oil exploration, and ONStor sells gateways that support any vendor's storage.