Network Appliance enters the disk versus tape battle
Network Appliance enters the disk versus tape battle
Network Appliance is the second vendor to release a hard disk based storage system to act as an archive and replace tape and optical. EMC fired the starting pistol earlier in the year.
SnapLock, like the EMC system, is being targeted at industries that are highly regulated such as the financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Like their rivals they are pitching at end users that want to archive emails, records, images and digital assets.
SnapLock uses write once, read many (WORM) technology with Network Appliance's (NetApp) NearStore application.
Whereas EMC went into the fight claiming their solution offered a better cost per megabyte than tape or optical archive solutions, the NetApp announcement was all about speed.
"SnapLock is designed to overcome current archival media limitations such as slow search and retrieval performance and poor reliability," the release states.
NetApp have gone down the open standards route and use industry standard protocols such as CIFS and NFS.
Non-storage vendors are about to join the move to magnetic based archiving, with NetApp claiming that it is about to announce deals with Documentum, IXOS and Legato, moving the systems fully in to the document management, imaging and content and storage management arenas.
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