iQstor releases iQ1000 storage system to deliver SAN solutions for small to mid-sized businesses

"The mid-tier market segment is underserved by existing storage solutions, and with the iQ1000 we will provide a compelling answer to those businesses that need an enterprise level solution in today's economy", Jason Lo, president and CEO, iQstor Networks, stated. "The iQ1000 will allow many of the mid-tier companies to build larger, more flexible and more cost-effective enterprise-level storage area networks, and the integrated and automated iQ1000 storage solutions will allow IT professionals to simply deploy powerful and optimised network infrastructures for competitive advantage."

The new Fibre Channel iQ1000 Storage System provides an intelligent storage building block of 15 drives in a 3U rackmount form factor, scaling up to 120 drives (17.5 TB) supported per storage subsystem. Ensuring high availability by utilizing fully redundant, hot swappable components for disk drives, power supplies, cooling modules and storage system components, the iQ1000 also features dual active SP100 storage processors with transparent fail-over support to further increase availability.

Integrated RAID level (0, 1, 3, 5 and 1+0) provides data protection and helps keep business critical applications running. The iQ1000 subsystem supports four host connections and 2 FC-AL disk loops at 2Gb/second, and provides centralized administration to increase productivity and reduce costs.

Enterprise level data service features provided by the iQ1000 Storage System include:

• Storage Virtualisation Services (SVS) to consolidate storage resources, reduce complexity, increase ease-of-use and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Managed Snapshot Services (MSS) to improve disaster recovery and increase data availability
• Remote Replication Services (RRS) for off-site replication for enhanced business continuity, server-less data migration facility between heterogeneous storage subsystems, and the ability to access mission-critical applications immediately after a primary site disaster
• Intelligent Capacity Management (ICM) for policy based storage provisioning and expansion, enabling file system growth
• Data Backup Services (DBS) with snapshot and mirroring for improved disaster recovery

iQstor has embedded storage management and data services into the storage processors, allowing their SAN solutions to reduce the workload of storage administrators at mid-tier enterprises and optimise their storage resources, increasing productivity and reducing operating costs.

iQstor's iQ1000 Storage System is released to general availability on May 12, 2003 and is available through reseller channel partners. iQ1000 pricing starts from $25,200.