Compaq's VersaStor Technology Gains Momentum with Industry Support

Strategic Insights -

Compaq Computer Corporation has made significant strides in its VersaStor Technology, which aims to revolutionize the way storage capacity is grown and managed. The company has announced that an elite group of storage networking companies has committed to supporting VersaStor, a premier implementation of networked storage pooling. This milestone marks a crucial step towards enabling SAN customers to leverage business information as a virtual resource.

Key Takeaways:

  • Emulex Corporation (Nasdaq: EMLX), JNI Corporation (Nasdaq: JNIC), McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDT), QLogic Corporation (Nasdaq: QLGC), StoreAge Networking Technologies, and Troika Networks have signed letters of intent to develop VersaStor-Ready products.
  • Brocade Communications Systems (Nasdaq: BRCD) also supports the VersaStor initiative, joining IBM in endorsing the technology.
  • VersaStor helps erase boundaries between disparate storage systems, allowing them to be combined into a SAN-attached storage pool that is simple to manage as a single resource.
  • The technology supports serverless, transparent data migration and allows storage pools to grow or shrink dynamically, making it ideal for applications with changing storage needs.
  • Morgan Keegan predicts the SAN virtualization software market will exceed $1 billion by 2003.
  • Compaq's VersaStor Technology creates virtual disks and space-efficient snapshots that are selectively presented to servers connected to the SAN, abstracting storage and simplifying management.
  • Customer benefits include elimination of downtime from storage reconfigurations, data migration, and disk-full failures, as well as improved productivity, faster recovery time, improved storage utilization, and lower overall storage costs.

Statistics:

  • $1 billion: projected revenue for the SAN virtualization software market by 2003 ( Morgan Keegan, "Virtualizing the SAN - A New Link Emerges in the SAN Value Chain," July 5, 2000)
  • 2001: planned availability of Compaq's VersaStor Technology in the second half of the year

Sources:

  • Morgan Keegan, "Virtualizing the SAN - A New Link Emerges in the SAN Value Chain," July 5, 2000
  • Compaq Computer Corporation press release, Monday [no date specified]

(http://www.compaq.com/products/storageworks/announcements/versastor.html)

  • VersaStor Technology product information, Compaq Computer Corporation