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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 16, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 24
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Breaking News -
Storage:
Akara Enables FICON Over SONET
Solution For IBM Customers
Akara, a leading provider of Storage over SONET extension solutions for
business continuance and disaster recovery, announced recently that it has
successfully completed interoperability testing between Akara's OUSP 2000
Product Family and IBM's TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (codename
Shark) eXtended Remote Copy (XRC) solution under IBM's TotalStorage Proven
program. The Akara OUSP is the first storage over SONET extension device that
enables enterprises to extend FICON XRC over distances up to and beyond 1,000
kilometers over any SONET/SDH, DWDM or dark fiber network.
The Akara solution has successfully completed interoperability testing with
an
ESS XRC solution and is the first and only FICON over SONET technology
available to cost-effectively address the backup and recovery requirements of
enterprises that need to deploy storage connectivity over distances beyond 150
and up to thousands of kilometers over a Wide Area Network (WAN) to meet
business continuance goals. With Akara's OUSP, enterprises with ESS
installations and IBM's fiber connection (FICON) connectivity can address
their needs for backup and recovery over thousands of kilometers by mirroring
data from the application or local site to the recovery or secondary site
using IBM's distance-independent XRC remote copy solution over the WAN.
By using the Akara OUSP to extend FICON XRC, customers get a significantly
more cost effective, manageable, and scalable extension solution than previous
alternatives for extending ESCON. Customers using the ESS and Akara can enjoy
many additional operational benefits by going with a FICON based solution. The
implementation of FICON relieves constraints that previously limited
customers' ability to grow their configurations. Easier management
capabilities are also enabled because FICON configurations can be implemented
with one-fourth the number of channels required for ESCON configurations.
"With the increased visibility of Akara's solutions to the IBM Business
Partner and sales representative community, Akara can have greater visibility
with customers and look towards smoother, reliable implementations. This can
lead to reduced sales cycles and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction,"
said Kathleen Smith, vice president, Emerging Business Opportunites for IBM
Systems Group.
Akara's OUSP product family provides native support for Fibre Channel,
FICON,
ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet on a single platform onto any SONET/SDH
(DS3/OC-3/12/48, STM-1/4/16), DWDM or dark fiber network. The addition of
integrated data compression, combined with the ability to dynamically share
MAN/WAN bandwidth between multiple applications allows for up to 90% more
efficient use of WAN bandwidth and can reduce operational costs by as much as
60%. Other key features contributing to the flexibility and success of the
OUSP include the device's software tunable port capability, which enables an
enterprise to assign different protocols to different ports, ie. ESCON to
FICON, and configure the number of OUSP ports from 2 to 8 meeting the
enterprises diverse and growing storage networking needs.
"IT executives are seeking cost-effective solutions with management
simplicity
to meet their storage and business continuance requirements," said Ed Ogonek,
Akara's CEO. "With enterprises deploying IBM's data center technology and
migrating from ESCON to FICON to meet growing capacity and performance
requirements, the need for a FICON over SONET solution to cost- effectively
support their storage over extended distance requirements was clear. This
technology, the first and only of its kind, provides IBM customers with the
product modularity and scalability and with the product life-cycle resiliency
that they are demanding. The ability to deploy XRC over FICON in extended
distance implementations provides both IBM and Akara with a multitude a new
business opportunities and underpins Akara's commitment to partnering with
storage industry leaders such as IBM to meet our customers' business
requirements."
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