Enhance Technology UltraStor RS8 IP & UltraStor RS16 I
UltraStor RS8 IP $2,799 and up; Ultrastor RS16 IP $4,400 (MSRP for empty units with no drives installed)
High-speed IP SAN storage devices that support up to eight or 16 SATA II drives with various RAID arrays, available with interfaces to dual SCSI (DAS) or Gigabit Ethernet (iSCSI), dual Ultra320 SCSI ports, or dual Fibre Channel ports, with speeds up to 200 to 220MBps depending on interface chosen
www.enhance-tech.com

With applications from CAD to imaging to high-definition media of all kinds on the rise, appetites for fast, dependable networked storage continue to soar as data volumes do likewise. Enhance Technology’s UltraStor IP products make a highly creditable splash in this product niche by delivering an intelligent iSCSI storage system with models that support up to eight (UltraStor RS8 IP) or 16 (UltraStor RS16 IP) high-speed SATA II 300Gbps drives in a variety of RAID configurations. These devices also support various host interfaces, including dual SCSI (DAS) or GbE (iSCSI), dual Ultra320 SCSI ports, or dual Fibre Channel ports and support data rates of up to 200 to 220MBps, depending on the interface.

These devices come empty, and both models are priced well under $5,000. This gives buyers an opportunity to purchase the best and fastest SATA II drives they can find to meet their storage needs. By buying drives in bulk, companies can keep prices down and obtain outstanding storage at a reasonable price, without paying additional markup for commodity devices. The UltraStor IP units also support RAID 6 (stripes data and parity across an array of drives such as RAID 5, except it builds two sets of parity information for each data parcel, designed to handle failure of up to two drives rather than one as with RAID 5) and an enterprise feature called Snapshot, with point-in-time recovery capabilities to safeguard against accidental deletions.

Enhance Technology’s primary competitors are companies such as Network Appliance (www.netapp .com), LeftHand SAN (www.lefthandnetworks.com), SANRAD (www.sanrad.com), SecureSpeed (www.secure speed.cc), and other like vendors, all of which offer rack-mountable SAN devices that support high-speed interfaces and accommodate similar data volumes. Enhance Technology’s primary competitive advantage is raw performance, and its products are well-recognized as both fast and capable. Companies and organizations in search of storage solutions to deal with high-volume/high-impact network storage requirements would be well-advised to look into Enhance Technology’s offerings.

by Ed Tittel