IT managers may need more storage to handle all the storage announcements occurring this week at the Storage Decisions show in Chicago.

Aside from Microsoft's unveiling of a new storage initiative in conjunction with several partners, several other companies are also making storage-related announcements this week.

Cisco Systems will add two new products to its MDS 9000 family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches. Both the Cisco MDS 92161i fabric switch and the Cisco MSDS 9000 Multiprotocol Services Module are equipped with 14 Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Both products will support the latest version of the operating system for the Cisco MDS 9000, the SAN-OS 2.0, which is also being announced Monday. The two products are aimed at disaster recovery, remote backup, and business continuity applications, according to Cisco officials.

Veritas Software is adding support for IBM's AIX environment across its storage management offerings Monday. New AIX support has been added for Veritas' Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Oracle, Storage Foundation for Databases, Storage Foundation Cluster File System, Cluster Server, and Volume Replicator software packages.

"We're seeing a great deal of new installations of AIX, so it made sense for us to add support for the operating system," said Bob Maness, senior director of product marketing for Veritas.

Veritas' Storage Foundation 4.0 already supports Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Red Hat, and SuSe Linus.

Princeton Softech will announce an information lifecycle management product designed for PeopleSoft and the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450.

"This product addresses the need for PeopleSoft users to manage their business critical financial and enterprise data long-term," said Jim Lee vice president of product management at Princeton Softech. The new product allows PeopleSoft customers to store archived data for long term compliance and availability. "Data retention regulations are now calling for many types of data to be accessible for several years and this product makes it much easier and faster for IT managers to perform that task," said Lee.

He said the product will be followed with many other similar products for other solutions. "A similar product for Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and Informix will be available before long. Packaged applications allow a customer to implement these solutions that many now have to develop on their own," said Lee.

Also announcing a new product Monday will be Overland Storage, which is introducing the REO 9000 high capacity disk-based backup and recovery appliance. The REO 9000 offers support for up to 24 400GB disk drives for 9.6TB of total capacity with dual SCSI expansion ports. It also offers Overland Storage's Dynamic Virtual Tape feature, which sizes a virtual tape drive to match the side of the backup data to optimize storage capacity. The new system supports up to 64 virtual devices to provide flexibility for mixed-use storage environments. Prices for the REO 9000 start at US$4,949.

Network Appliance will offer up a new software product on Tuesday. LockVault is designed to help IT managers handle the storage of unstructured data in the enterprise. Unstructured data consists of field created, modified, and often moved, which make them difficult to manage. Yet much of this data is still subject to regulatory and compliance laws.

"With LockVault we unify compliance with backup and disaster recovery of all types of data with a single comprehensive solution that minimizes risk for our customers," said Mike Marchi, senior director of compliance and ILM solutions at Network Appliance.