Internet Storage Company Sees Future Growth

Internet storage management firm ANDATACO
continues to figure in the highly competitive storage management and RAID
storage industry, expecting continued growth in the Japanese Open Systems
marketplace.

Operating in Asia from Australia to Korea, ANDATACO is a growing RAID
storage manufacturer, reportedly registering annual sales of around $100
million–with 10% coming from Asia–and is one of many companies competing
in the lucrative RAID Disk industry. An industry with an estimated $9
billion at stake.

“We expect to double our market share over the next two to three years,”
said Tony Cequeira, Manager of Asia/Pacific sales. “Through the work of our distribution partners, we have consistently ranked in the top 10 when it comes to RAID Open Systems market share in Japan.”

Along with ANDATACO, other major competitors include Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, EMC, Compaq/Digital, and Clarion.

“All of these companies produce and sell RAID technology, but we will be
taking it another step when we ship our first GigaRAID/AA this month. This
is a dual active/active controller solution, and utilizes a 100% Java based
RAID management software utility. We support this on HP, Sun, SGI and NT
platforms,” Cequeira said.

“The system is one more step in our delivery of application specific
architecture (ASA) solutions. We build RAID products that meet the I/O
requirements of applications such as databases, image processing, Internet
service providers, and others. No one else does this.”

RAID “disk arrays” are designed to allow for many disk drives to be viewed
as a single disk to a host or network, and offer greater performance, reliability and redundancy than standard disk drives.

“With our GigaRAID/AA, we can offer a single unit with over 1-terrabyte of
capacity to image processing, video editing, and other sequential
applications. This compliments our current GigaRAID/HA product line, which
supports Database applications.”

The GigaRAID/AA is managed by ANDATACO’s latest Web Storage Manager (WSM),
introduced two years ago. WSM manages RAID systems from browsers like
Netscape and Internet Explorer. ANDATACO RAID products currently support
Ultra SCSI, LVD, and Fibre Channel technologies and are at work in
companies such as NTT, Kansai Cellular, Matsushita, and Fuji Xerox, the
company said.

“Where growth in the overall Information Technology has fallen off a bit in
Japan, we see the storage products and storage management industry growing
at around 5-10% a year, ” added Cequeira.

“Our suggestion to systems administrators everywhere is to view these
products as parts to an overall ‘storage strategy,’ rather than as the one
component that can meet all their needs. Storage hardware and software
needs to work in conjunction with an organization’s systems and network
strategy. Because storage is often the most expensive part of a new server
installation, care must be taken to balance all components and to optimize
performance and reliability.”

ANDATACO products are distributed in Japan by Itochu Electronics and NOX
Company, Ltd.