04-Dec-2007

Sanat Launches Data Storage Models Scaling To 40 TB Capacity.

For a featured release http://www.bpotimes.com/efytimes/fullnews.asp

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13-Nov-2007

Sanat Technologies has appointed Ramani as its new country manager. He would be based out of Bangalore and will head Sanat's sales and marketing activities in India.

Commenting on the appointment, Vasan V. S., director of Sanat Technologies, said, "We are pleased to have Ramani on board as our country manager. His experience in the Indian market will help service local customers better and improve ties with channel partners. He will drive Sanat's efforts toward sales, customer and partner programs."

Ramani has over 13 years experience in the IT and telecom industries. Prior to joining Sanat, he was sales manager at a storage system vendor based out of Bangalore. He was instrumental in developing channel business for volume storage solutions and empowering partners through training.

Ramani also gained valuable experience as an entrepreneur. He has a degree in Electronics & Telecommunications from Regional Engineering College, Silchar, and completed his MBA from JBIMS, Mumbai.

For a featured release http://www.channeltimes.com/India/News/Ramani_Joins_Sanat_Technologies

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20-Sep-2007

SANAT Launches India’s First NAS gateway product – SANAT g4000 product model

Chennai, September 19, 2007: SANAT Technologies Pvt. Ltd. today announced the launch of India’s first NAS (Network Attached Storage) gateway product – the SANAT g4000 product model. The SANAT g4000 product model is an addition to SANAT’s existing suite of NAS and IPSAN product models that cater to the Library management and Audio/Video industry.

Mr. Vasan V S, Director, Sanat Technologies Pvt. Ltd. said, “The SANAT g4000 Gateway features a comprehensive suite of advanced data management capabilities to help consolidate, protect, and recover mission-critical data for enterprise applications and users. The SANAT StorOS based g4000 NAS Gateway is a network-based solution designed to provide heterogeneous access to Fibre Channel attached storage arrays.” “ With the launch of this solution, the usage of infrastructure of enterprises will broaden. Thus facilitating a higher return on investment”, he added.

The Gateway can help leverage the dynamic provisioning capabilities of StorOS® software across an existing Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure to support an expanded set of business applications. The SANAT g4000 NAS gateway is based on the StorOS® microkernel operating system, which is designed to unify block and file storage networking paradigms under a common architecture.

The g4000 NAS gateway typically removes the administrative nightmare involved with managing multiple “NAS heads” and make users live with a single folder interface to the storage. Additional storage can be seamlessly added by enterprises without needing to do any reconfiguration of any separate machines. The g4000 NAS gateway model has been extensively tested with WMS 100 / AMS 200 / AMS 500 storage systems from Hitachi Data Systems. The storage from these arrays was allocated seamlessly through the g4000 NAS gateway product to Windows/UNIX client machines.

Background:

The front end of the NAS gateway connects to the LAN over Ethernet. The back end connects to a RAID array via Fibre Channel or to a Fibre Channel switch, in which case the NAS gateway becomes a front end to a storage area network (SAN). Single RAID arrays can scale to several terabytes, but switches enable a large number of disk arrays to be attached. It is possible to put a gateway into an existing SAN and that is the primary way they are being deployed. Usually, some LUNs on a storage system are allocated to the gateway to use for file-systems and the NAS gateway treats them like dedicated devices. The administration differences are in setting up the LUNs in what is typically a resource shared storage system.

HIGHLIGHTS OF SANAT StorOS BASED g4000:

• Heterogeneous unified storage environment—Designed to provide unified storage access for multi-protocol, multi-vendor storage environments
• Storage consolidation — Designed to enable organizations to consolidate UNIX®, Windows® and Web workloads with existing SAN storage, thereby helping to increase storage utilization.
• Use of existing SAN infrastructure — Designed to integrate into existing SAN storage environments, helping to optimize investment protection and ROI.
• Data Management—Designed to provide advanced data management solutions that maximize availability and can help to significantly reduce operational cost

SPECIFICATIONS of SANAT g4000 NAS Gateway:

Firmware: SANAT StorOS® 3.5.4 or later

Standard Software features:

SnapPict®, ShareNet®, Automatic Backup / Restore feature, ADS/LDAP/NIS/Local user database, Storage policy allocation on a per user / group, SMB/CIFS, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, iSCSI, FCP protocols support

Hardware features:

Two 100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports, Two Fibre Channel ports, 19” rack mount enclosure, cooling fans with appropriate power supply

For a featured release http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/21658/news.htm

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04-Apr-2007

SANAT Launches India's First GigE-capable IP SAN Product - iSTOR Series

SANAT Technologies announced the launch of India’s first IPSAN product – iSTOR series - adding to its existing suite of rSTOR NAS product models. This is an enterprise class IPSAN target product that is scalable and completely standards-compliant.

Some of the critical features in this flagship iSTOR product are:

• Fully compliant with the iSCSI standard – IETF RFC 3270 standard specifications. This will enable the iSTOR data storage box to completely interoperate with any of the well known iSCSI initiators available in the market from Microsoft, Linux iSCSI initiator, UNH iSCSI initiator.
• Supports multiple authentication methods – CHAP and mutual CHAP – for authenticating the users logging into the target. This will be auto negotiated with the initiator.
• iSTOR supports data encryption for the data on the move – to ensure that the security of the data is not compromised.
• Complete error recovery level available – The support of ERL2 error recovery level in iSTOR as per the iSCSI protocol ensures complete fault tolerance and resilience of the data transfer between the initiator and target and ensures error free storage transfer over IP.
• The iSTOR will work completely transparent to the client OS that is running the initiator. This essentially gives complete flexibility to customers on what OS that they can access this iSTOR storage from irrespective of whether they are running Windows, Linux, Solaris or other UNIX flavors.
• iSTOR is optimized to transfer data over any kind of network – LAN, WAN etc. – thereby leveraging on the current infrastructure investment of the customers.

The product will be available by mid-April for GA (General Availability) distribution.

SANAT Technologies has a proprietary automatic desktop/server backup/restore module that will benefit small enterprises who cannot afford the backup software products available in the market to insure them against the loss of their business critical data. The rSTOR OS is also capable of seamlessly interoperating with any of the commercial backup software available in the market. SANAT Technologies is in advanced stages of releasing further enhancements on its flagship firmware including having 10GigE support to boost up the I/O performance. SANAT Technologies is also talking to leading storage vendor for OEM’ing its Audio-Video performance improvement as part of its firmware to cater to the performance-hungry AV segment.

One of SANAT Technologies prestigious customers is IIT, Chennai. Speaking about using the storage solution from SANAT, Prof. Kamakoti, C.Sc. Department, IITM, mentions: “The storage solutions from SANAT Technologies went live in our network seamlessly with very little effort. We had a similar experience when we scaled up the storage capacity of the box. The performance of this product is excellent and gels well with the research projects that we are executing in the niche technology areas. Much like the performance, the cost of the solution was also very attractive and highly competitive.”

About SANAT Technologies

SANAT Technologies is a leading developer of innovative data storage NAS & IPSAN product solutions that offers to its customers attractive cost-to-performance data storage solutions enabling the customers to have a higher RoI. SANAT Technologies closely aligns with some of the leading global technology partners like Intel® and Hitachi® to wed the hardware expertise of these partners with our own firmware and software management expertise. This partnership allows us to uniquely satisfy the customer data storage requirements at an affordable cost. For more details of the product models offered by SANAT and how it has mitigated the business risks of its customers in various industry segments, please visit our website at http://www.sanatdata.net

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30-Nov-2006

SANAT Technologies launches their desktop Terabox NAS model with 1 TB capacity

In probably the first of its kind of release in India, SANAT Technologies has announced that it has launched its desktop NAS model targeted towards home users as well as SOHO users in two flavors: T-Home and T104.

T-Home is targeted towards home users with a fixed storage capacity of 640GB that can be used by SOHO users or home users to store their personal memories. This comes in with an added RAID protection to ensure against data loss on account of any costly media failures.

T104 is an entry level desktop model with a fixed storage capacity of 1TB that can be used small scale enterprises without too much data growth. This has an attractive cost-to-performance ratio to meet the data storage needs of customers within a requirement of 1 TB capacity

"The introduction of Terabox series is to cater to a particular segment which is extremely price conscious as well as having a data storage requirement. Typically for the home users since there has been heavy amount of content digitization of personal memories, this is a secure cost-effective storage of data using the T-Home model. T104 is a lower end entry level desktop NAS model for corporate small sized businesses who have not made an investment in a rack-based IT environment" exclaimed Vasan, Director, SANAT Technologies.

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20-Oct-2006

Gemini Communications signs up as an authorized distributor for SANAT Technologies

SANAT Technologies has signed up Gemini Communications, a company based out of Chennai, India as one of their authorized national distributors in India. Gemini Communications is one of the top 5 network and system integrators in India with a special focus on storage networking.

Vasan, Director, SANAT Technologies mentions that this is a very critical milestones in the evolution of SANAT Technologies. On the eve of this signing up, Vasan said "SANAT Technologies is very keen to partner with network integrators and distributors with an excellent storage domain background. Our go-to-market strategy will be to go with our channel partners and system/network integrators for reaching a wider market instead of focusing on doing direct sales to our customers".

Ramkumar, CEO, Gemini Communications talking about this event, mentioned that "Storage has been one of the important vertical that we have been very bullish on for the last few years. Gemini has a lot of experience in configuring and servicing the storage requirements of our customers. We believe that the product portfolio from SANAT Technologies is an excellent value addition to our prospects and customers with an attractive cost-to-performance proposition".

.DQChannels news

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21-Sep-2006

Chennai-based Sanat Technologies Pvt Ltd, a start-up company developing storage solutions such as NAS and IP-SAN-primarily for SMB market, is in the process of appointing channel partners across the country to market its solutions.

Sanat, which recently made a soft launch of its NAS boxes in the market, has already tasted success with 18 installations in the last six-eight weeks, according to the company source. "Our storage solutions would be best-of-the-breed in the market. We are heavily depended on channels for our success," said VS Vasan, Founder-Director, Sanat Technologies.

Sanat is the first Indian company to join Intel global storage community program recently, which is worth mentioning here.

To start with, Sanat is offering NAS solutions in one and two terabit space, before scaling up to six terabit. "Unlike big storage vendors who just claim to offer special (customized) solutions for SMB market, we provide true SMB products at cheaper price coupled with best value (at par in technology with any brand). We will market our products across the industry segments," he quoted. Sanat's NAS boxes are available from Rs 1.3 lakh to Rs 8 lakh. The company is also preparing to launch its IP-SAN solutions in the market, shortly.

According to Mike Wall, GM (Storage Group Marketing), Intel, "Innovative storage solutions, based on Intel storage technology, such as those from Sanat can significantly reduce the complexities associated with building a NAS or SAN environment."

He also added, "As a member of the Intel Storage Community, we share a common vision with Sanat Technologies of delivering affordable enterprise-class storage solutions for organizations of all sizes."

Sanat is looking for partners at three levels and are already in talks with big league system integrators in the country. "There has been a lot of interest from large SIs for our NAS product. At the second level, we are appointing SIs in every region, who will integrate our NAS product with their solution offering in the market. Finally, we are planning to rope in leading sub-distributors across the country, who are already into selling servers and other storage solutions from several leading brands," said R Ram Kumar, Co-founder of Sanat and CEO of Gemini Communication Limited, who is driving these channel initiatives.

In the first phase, the company has identified eight cities (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune) to establish channel network and will be appointing three-four partners in every region. "By the end of this fiscal, we will be present in all the States of India with 50 channel partners addressing the market," he informed. Sanat will engage the same channels to market its IP-SAN solution. "We will be a 100 percent channel company," Kumar added.

The company is looking for a turnover of Rs 2 crore in the first nine months of operations (July-March, 2006) and projecting a revenue of Rs 8 crore in the next fiscal. IP-SAN will be a major component with 60 percent revenue contribution, during next year.

Sanat claims to offer NAS storage solution with advanced features like instant and scheduled back-up with compression, built-in auto back-up and other documented features available in it. It is a Linux-based product, which is completely customizable. Similarly, IP-SAN product is inter-operable with all popularly available iSCSI initiators in the industry today.

In the next stage, Sanat wants to take its storage solution to global markets. Initially, it will be targeting the Middle-East and South Asian markets, before expanding into other geographies. "We are confident about competing with global vendors like IBM, HP, Hitachi, EMC and NetAPP in the storage space, in the next two-three years," added Vasan.

StorOS is the flagship firmware from Sanat Technologies.

.DQChannels news

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07-Aug-2006

Chennai based SANAT Technologies has been accepted by Intel as a member of its global Intel Storage Community, becoming the first Indian company to join.

StorOS, the flagship firmware solution from SANAT Technologies, incorporates storage volume management features including: auto-backup functionality of desktop / server machines; high performing hardware RAID functionality; trademark SnapPict functionality for protecting against accidental deletion of data; and sharing of storage space across the various users running the different flavors of Windows and UNIX.

Mike Wall, general manager of Intel Storage Group Marketing, said, "Innovative storage solutions, based on Intel storage technology, such those from SANAT can significantly reduce the complexities associated with building a NAS or SAN environment."

"As a member of the Intel Storage Community, we share a common vision with SANAT Technologies of delivering affordable enterprise-class storage solutions for organizations of all sizes," he added

Ram Kumar, co-founder of SANAT Technologies, said, "We are the first Indian company to indigenously develop storage solutions, based on the latest generation Intel storage technology designed for affordable data protection."

"We offer a wide range of NAS solutions, catering to the small and medium business segments as well as to the enterprise segment. We believe Intel's extensive hardware expertise in this domain combined with our firmware expertise offers a compelling storage solution to our customers," he added.

READ FULL STORY

Cybermedia news

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06-May-2006

Cost-effective, simple, and with an increased range of offerings, iSCSI is finally beginning to make its presence felt among SMBs.

The migration from direct-attached storage to iSCSI is emerging as one of the growth markets for the season, primarily driven by first time network storage deployments among SMBs. The technology is gaining traction as SMB storage environments gain complexity warranting the need to move to networked storage.

However, the iSCSI market is still awaiting ramp-up and the accelerated run-up that vendors had expected of it a few years back. According to Sumit Mukhija, business development manager, Cisco Systems, India and SAARC, "While overall networked storage adoption has been very high, the iSCSI adoption, in particular, has been a bit on the slower side."

With a large legacy presence in the data center segment, and being the de facto choice for mission critical applications, FC SAN will continue to be the dominating protocol of choice for SANs. According to industry experts, even while the momentum has started picking up in the last one year and will further accelerate with the growing number of iSCSI implementations, the technology is not going to replace Fibre Channel SANs (FC SAN) any time soon. The odds continue to be highly skewed in favor of the traditional fibre at least for the next 2-3 years.

However, with the ability to afford cost-effective and affordable SAN, iSCSI is lowering the entry level barrier for storage consolidation and opening up the floodgates of networked storage for SMBs. Spurring in its wake, a whole new trend of mainline proliferation of networked storage among the cost conscious small and medium enterprises.

According to industry experts, iSCSI SANs will proliferate the market in 2006 and beyond. As per IDC, the worldwide iSCSI market will more than double this year, reaching $842 mn, up from $314.1 mn in 2005. Expected to surpass the $1 bn mark in 2007.

According to IDC, in India, the IP SAN market stood at $4.54 mn in 2005, a growth of almost 200% over the previous year. According to Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India & SAARC, the adoption rate has picked up considerably over the last two years and is bound to grow in the coming years. "It has grown from being a connectivity tool to a niche in itself," he adds.

Vasan, co-founder of Sanat Technologies, explains that in the technology adoption curve, iSCSI is in a place where the market is getting educated about the technology, and is curious to know more and adopt.

Storage vendors are gung ho about the Indian iSCSI market opportunity, foreseeing faster growth rates as compared to the other markets worldwide. "Part of the reason is that there is a huge market in India that will deploy networked storage for the first time and can straightaway migrate from Direct Attached to iSCSI, without having to necessarily consider FC SAN," says Soumitra Agarwal, director, Marketing, NetApp.

Considering its inherent cost advantage, SMB forms the core of the iSCSI market opportunity in India. According to Mukhija, early adopters of iSCSI include the SMBs and the IT/ITeS verticals, and will continue to be the mainstay market in the foreseeable future. "The SMBs are beginning to require block-level access. Hence, they will ultimately need a solution, which will be able to address issue, which NAS could not and for which fibre channel is too expensive," he elaborates.

While iSCSI will not replace fibre channel in large enterprises, it will compliment it by catering to specific requirements. While large enterprises who have already invested in FC SAN may not be do a forklift migration to IP SAN, they will certainly be looking at it for newer applications, or for moving some existing ones.

Sometimes, it is not viable for an enterprise to invest in fiber channel connectivity for all servers. Here, iSCSI provides cost-effective connectivity for additional servers.

According to Agarwal, for enterprises, which have already deployed NFS or CIFS, and are looking to add block-based access for certain applications, iSCSI is a logical choice. And for those enterprises, who have already deployed FC SAN at the core of the data centre, iSCSI forms an attractive choice for SAN expansion or for deployment at regions or departments.

In terms of applications, some iSCSI deployment sweetspots in an enterprise are: remote access, DR, midrange enterprise applications, mid-to-small sized data centres, development/test/Q&A environments, and compute grids (where boot-from-SAN is a requirement).

The low cost of setting up an iSCSI network as compared to setting an FC SAN as well as the low TCO for both the basic installation and for subsequent maintenance, makes iSCSI adoption compelling. IP-based storage has attained increased prominence, because of the cost factor as it helps in total network storage consolidation of storage resources at a lower cost and centralizes the storage architecture.

According to Arindam Bose, head, IT, LG Electronics India, iSCSI offers the compelling benefits of consolidation, while leveraging the ease of use and low cost of IP network. This low cost is partly fuelled by organizations leveraging on their existing IP backbone investment for implementing iSCSI as compared to making fresh investments on FC, explains Vasan.

Furthermore, as Chugh points out, it also helps in leveraging existing investments in FC SAN and in the case of NAS helps in extending NAS consolidation capabilities to include traditional block applications.

Another key driver for IP SAN is the ability to overcome the limitations of distance. It helps centralize the storage infrastructure and provides total consolidation to the storage infrastructure by connecting stranded servers. Traditional SAN is limited by distance but IP SAN can help overcome that limitation by connecting geographically distributed servers/networks.

Among emerging growth drivers for the Indian market over the coming years is the emergence of global SAN. According to Ravi Srinivasan, co-founder and senior VP, Client & Technology Solutions, OfficeTiger, locations in India are increasingly being viewed as part of a global network for many companies. Thereby, global SAN will become important, and iSCSI will be an effective way for global organizations to allow easy access to data transfers from around the globe. The growth of global companies' India operations will typically be the biggest driver. "Many large companies worldwide already have Fibre Channel implementations, but for India operations that have stranded high performance servers, or for remote offices to access central data centre SANs that may be in North America and Europe, iSCSI can and will be used," he explains further.

With more and more vendors coming out with iSCSI based offerings, availability of native iSCSI drivers for other OS apart from Windows and new innovations around the iSCSI technology, the market will receive further spurt, driving a faster pace of growth over the next 2-3 years.

Over the next few years even as iSCSI overcomes some of its critical limitations and becomes more robust with the constant innovations and enhancements taking place around the technology, it will continue to act complimentary to traditional fibre channel SAN rather than replace it.

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