History 2002: Sudden French Passion for NAS

While 2 manufacturing giants have realized that they can’t be profitable selling NAS, this has not prevented smaller firms from jumping into the fray, and not without some courage, it must be said. They hope, in any case, to take advantage of the void left by the 2 withdrawals. Several Taiwanese manufacturers have tried to gobble up the niche, joined more recently by 3 French companies: two veteran storage firms, Additional Design and Digital Storage, and a brand new entity, Synerway.

Additional Design: Nasstor from 4 to 16 disks
€5.5 million company Additional Design has been a storage wholesaler since 1988.

“We have been working in NAS for 3 years,” explains CEO Lucien Dalmasso. “But we haven’t found the ideal product. So we decided to make it.“

The product is Nasstor, with an ample, well-conceived range of models, all of which integrate Microsoft’s NAS SAK software and hot-swappable HDDs.

Why choose SAK? “For the flexibility,” replies Dalmasso, “the possibility of offering storage in several environments.”

Did the company have any difficulty implementing the system? “No particular problems,” he affirmed. “The hardest thing was just obtaining the kit from the labyrinth of Microsoft.”

The Additional Design product line starts with the Bronze model: 1U, one Celeron GHz processor, 128MB RAM, 4xIDE HDDs (40 to 160GB per unit), 5xhot-swappable fans, RAID-0, 1, 5 and 0+1, 2×10/100 Internet ports (from €2,600). And so forth, up to the Diamond model: 2U, 2xPentium Ill 1.3 GHz, 512MB RAM, 16xFC HDDS (18 to 73GB), spare disk, 2Gb FC connection, RAID-0, 1 and 5, OS mirrored, 2×10/100 Internet ports, SCSI, FC and GbE cards, snapshot. For RAID controllers, Additional Design turned to its Taiwanese supplier, Promise. The chassis integration is handled by another French firm, Dataswift.

Digital Storage: up to 3TB
It is offering a new line of NAS servers fairly close to that of Additional Design, also built around Microsoft’s Windows 2000 NAS server appliance. The company has opted for Intel’s 2GHz processors, with all ATA-100 type drives from 80 to 180GB, at 7,200rpm. At the low end is the NAS-420, 1U, from 320 to 720GB on IDE HDDs, for prices starting at €5,300. The NAS-1600, with capacity from 1.28 to 2.88TB starts at €21,000.

Synerway: Backup box with Atempo Software
French start-up Synerway, launched last July by 3 former employees of Atempo, is making its debut with 2 NAS solutions for backup, relying for the software side on Atempo’s highly complete Time Navigator engine.

The Synerbox includes a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of RAM with a 40GB HDD, SCSI interface and an Internet card for network connection. The internal HDD serves as cache rather than actual backup, which occurs, via SCSI, on one or more HDD or tape devices connected to the Synerbox. In the event of tape drive failure during backup, data are temporarily stored on the internal HDD. Nearly all OSs as well as wide range of tape drives and libraries are supported. Among the applications for which data may be backed up are, notably, SOL Server, Lotus Notes, MS Exchange and Oracle. With 5 Windows and 1 Exchange or SQL agents, the Synerbox runs at €5,640. One of the firms first customers, incidentally, through no particular miracle, is the Basilica of Lourdes! Synerway also offers a packaged solution for small companies with an even more attractive price, with the Synerbox (here with 80GB HDD) and an Exabyte VXA-1 tape drive (33/3). Backup this time takes place on the unit’s internal HDD, and is then duplicated on the tape unit. The solution starts at €4,000 with 3 Windows agents.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 178 on November 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.