Enterprise storage appliance on tap from SANgate
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SOUTHBOROUGH, MASS. - Start-up SANgate is taking on storage giants EMC and Hitachi Data Systems with software and hardware that will let storage administrators transfer mainframe host-based data more easily and quickly to open systems storage arrays.
SANgate's package, dubbed an enterprise storage appliance (ESA), is a dedicated server that runs storage applications, such as data migration, point-in-time copying or remote mirroring.
A large amount of data exists on mainframes that companies may want to move to Unix or Windows NT storage facilities during system migrations.
In a storage-area network (SAN), the SANgate ESA connects to a Fibre Channel switch and the storage subsystems. Similarly, in mainframe storage networks, the SANgate ESA is connected to the storage subsystems and to an Enterprise Systems Connection (ESCON) director, which attaches to the mainframe and facilitates connectivity to the SAN. Two SANgate ESAs can be deployed in a fault-tolerant cluster to protect against failures.
In mirroring applications, data can be copied to different systems. For instance, a company may want to mirror data from an EMC Symmetrix to an IBM Enterprise Storage System (code-named Shark) or Hitachi Lightning series storage array.
The ESA will compete against EMC's hardware-based Symmetrix Data Migration Services, which work only with EMC Symmetrix equipment. It will also compete with Amdahl's Transparent Data Migration Facility, which transfers data at 250G byte/hour in contrast to SANgate's 1 terabyte per hour.
Initially, SANgate's appliance will work with ESCON-based storage on OS/390 mainframes and migrate any type of MVS database or other data to a variety of Unix environments.
SANgate's ESA will go into beta testing in October for shipment in spring 2002.
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