Stories about: Procom Technology

EMC and Sun Microsystems Monday released updated and new systems designed for the growing content-addressable storage market.

Sun is buying all the intellectual property rights to the NAS technology it uses in its StorEdge 5000 NAS products. Currently it licenses it from Procom Technology. Sun will pay Procom about US$50 million for the rights. Sun wants to make and develop its NAS products more cheaply and sell them at lower prices.

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday will announce a number of new storage products, including a new server that signals the company's return to NAS (network-attached storage). Called the StorEdge 5210, the file server is a midrange NAS appliance developed with technology that Sun licensed from Procom Technology in April.

Open source spells doom for Oracle, DB2 . . . Sybase and other general-purpose databases, predicts Tim O’Reilly. “MySQL might do to databases what Apache did for Web serving,” says the president of technical book publisher and conference organiser O’Reilly & Associates. Apache, he claims, has forced Microsoft to make its IIS Web server software “effectively free in bundles”. David Axmark, co-founder and “open sorcerer” at MySQL, the developers of the open-source database, cautions that you won’t see Larry Ellison approving free deals for Oracle9i in the near future, if ever. Still, he says, “MySQL has already forced prices down in databases.” And the price pressure will pick up steam with the release of MySQL Enterprise in two years.

Network-attached storage (NAS) is quietly transitioning from an ad hoc, departmental storage add-on to a serious top-down enterprise storage resource. This highly reliable file server approach has always been relatively inexpensive and easy to configure and manage. But now, a single NAS server accommodates tens of terabytes of data, and NAS systems sport more efficient backup technology and support applications more efficiently over today's faster Gigabit Ethernet networks. What's missing? Better tools to manage across distributed NAS resources.

Procom Technology Inc. this week launched a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance for enterprise networks. The NetForce 3200C is a two-node cluster in which each NAS appliance will take over for the other in the event of a failure.

Procom Technology Inc. this week launched a high-end network-attached storage appliance for enterprise networks.

Vendors are circling the emerging SAN (storage area network) opportunity in anticipation of a feeding frenzy. They know it is only a matter of time before most larger enterprises jump in and implement SANs. However, for now only brave early adopters are prepared to chance the unfamiliar and somewhat choppy waters of this developing market.

Storage area network (SAN) technology has also not been able to sidestep the problem which has plagued several other emerging technologies -- the lack of proper industry standards.