CentricStor Integrated with NAS Filers from Network Appliance

Singapore, March 17, 2005

Fujitsu Asia Pte Ltd, a leading regional IT and communications solutions provider, today announced that the CentricStor virtual tape appliance has been successfully integrated with network attached storage (NAS) systems from storage solutions provider Network Appliance (NetApp).

With this breakthrough, users of NetApp NAS systems now have a more efficient way to backup and consolidate magnetic tapes in data centres.

Developed by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, CentricStor is the world’s first self-contained appliance designed to virtualise magnetic tape processing across major system platforms in heterogeneous environments.

The appliance enables NetApp users to rapidly secure data from many single or multiple NAS filers simultaneously via Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). Supporting open-system and mainframe environments, it permits the entire tape backup to be efficiently consolidated within a data centre.

With numerous parallel tape drives, CentricStor accelerates backup of single NAS filers without the need for extra real tape drives, thus enabling cost and time savings during data backup. Having a large number of virtual tape drives also avoids bottlenecks during backup that might otherwise occur if real tape drives are used.

The drives can be reserved over long periods of time just like locally available hardware, but without the added cost. Backup time windows are also greatly shortened with numerous backup processes running in parallel.

"Through our strong relationship with Network Appliance, we enable customers to implement industry-leading storage products with a new approach towards Information Lifecycle Management for backup and disaster recovery. The combination of NetApp unified storage solutions and Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ CentricStor enables enterprises to achieve breakthrough efficiency and agility gains for disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. Our certification efforts enable customers to utilise CentricStor to backup data from NetApp primary storage to a cost-effective consolidated tape environment," said Dr Helmut Beck, Vice President of Storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

"Combining NetApp’s online and nearline disk storage systems with CentricStor offers new options for improving enterprise backup environments,” said Richard Clifton, Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Data Center & Applications Business Unit, Network Appliance. "More than with direct backup to tape, customers can select transparent virtual tape resources that increase backup and recovery speeds while minimising adjustment needs in their back-up infrastructures and procedures. Compatibility between customers’ existing backup software and NetApp storage systems through the NDMP protocol enables virtual tape systems to improve data protection management and increase the availability of servers and storage for applications."

The CentricStor fail-safe disaster protection solution combines the speed of disk with tape reliability for disk-to-disk-to-tape backup with integrated Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) functions. CentricStor supports leading backup applications, major system platforms and major tape automation environments. Many satisfied customers in Europe are already using CentricStor for data protection and near-line storage consolidation. The powerful virtual tape appliance was released for Southeast Asian markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam by Fujitsu Asia in late-2004. Visit www.centricstor.com to find out more about CentricStor.