EchoView E400 Takes Top Storage Honor

Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Datamation readers chose well when they voted Storage Technology Corp.’s EchoViewE400 into the top spot in the storage category of our annual Product of the Year awards,according to at least one industry analyst.

The data protection appliance easily beat out its closest competitors, bringing in 418votes. Sun Microsystems Inc.’s StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel Array came in a strong secondwith 312 votes. BacBone Software Inc. grabbed third place with its NetVault 7 taking 125votes.

Storage Technology’s EchoView E400 swept the field largely because of its ability toprovide fast data recovery, eliminate backup windows and increase availability.

”This is clearly a good appliance with a number of good things going for it,” says MikeKarp, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, an analyst firm based inBolder, Colo. ”Any company that has to have its data up and online all the time will findthis very cost efficient. This is absolutely critical.

”The fact is that your readers gave the EchoView an award because it has all the value ofother disc storage products, but it has additional value, as well,” adds Karp. ”The realvalue here is that anytime something bad happens, you’ve got this online repository of datato refer to.”

The EchoView E400 is an appliance that straddles the storage world and the security world.J.R. Roedel, senior director for marketing and business development at Storage Technology,says the appliance is aimed at improving the reliability of the entire backup process, andthat way it takes a storage product and gives it a security edge.

”In any storage platform that we are putting out today, you have to address the securityconcern as part of it,” says Roedel. ”Customers look at overall strategy and they’resaying they’ve had enough of the point product. They want a little bit more. Make it moresimple to manage, and protect the data and archive it.”

The product supports Windows 2000, Solaris clients, Oracle Exchange, and SQL Server. Theappliance captures data as it’s written, maintaining a complete data history that isdesigned to be quickly accessed and recovered back to the protected server. The EchoViewE400 protects up to 50 volumes and 400 gigabytes of data.

”EchoView E400 winning this award really shows that backup/recovery are still the mosttalked about issues in IT,” says Steve Duplessie, an analyst with the Enterprise StorageGroup. ”The old way of doing backup/recovery simply isn’t going to work much longer. Thereis just too much data in play. The EchoView is designed to be able to effectively recoverinstantly, instead of waiting hours or days to just find the data necessary to recover,then try to recover it. There is huge value in that ‘instant’ ability for IT pro’s.

”I mean, how much does it cost waiting those hours or days?,” adds Duplessie. ”Whileevery company is different, they can all say one thing the same — it costs a lot.”

An e-commerce company, for instance, can’t afford to be down. For a business dependent ononline sales, staying online means survival.

Karp says to imagine that e-commerce business having a corrupted data base that suppliesinformation to sales. Now they can no longer extract needed price figures. Sales aren’tbeing made. Money is being lost.

Karp says if the company is using a tape backup, they have to go get the tape and thenstart searching, from the beginning, for the last uncorrupted data stored. Tape doesn’tlend itself to logical divisions, like a disc does. ”With tape, it could take you days orhours or minutes to find that data,” says Karp. ”If you’re doing business online, youcan’t afford that. Using a disc, it could be seconds.”

Karp also points out that the EchoView keeps a record of every time data is written to theEchoView appliance. It replicates or mirrors each update. Then if a backup is needed, ITcan check the update listings and pull down the last one before the data was corrupted or aconnection was lost.

”It’s a very efficient way to handle the problem,” says Karp. ”This is an essential partof a sophisticated data protection scheme.”

Courtesy of Datamation.com.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Cloud Insider for top news, trends, and analysis.

Latest Articles

15 Software Defined Storage Best Practices

Software Defined Storage (SDS) enables the use of commodity storage hardware. Learn 15 best practices for SDS implementation.

What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) is the encapsulation and transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) frames over enhanced Ethernet networks, combining the advantages of Ethernet...

9 Types of Computer Memory Defined (With Use Cases)

Computer memory is a term for all of the types of data storage technology that a computer may use. Learn more about the X types of computer memory.