Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ CentricStor Virtual Tape
Appliance launched in U.S. Market
Master distributor PeakData recruiting Value Added Resellers
Munich/Germany, June 29, 2004 —CentricStor, a powerful, heterogeneous Virtual Tape Appliance
previously available only in Europe and Asia, was launched today
for the U.S. market by PeakData Inc., a Colorado-based storage
solutions provider. CentricStor is developed by Fujitsu Siemens
Computers, the leading European IT provider. The announcement was
made at Storage World 2004 in Long Beach, California.
CentricStor is the first and only self-contained,
heterogeneous Virtual Tape Appliance that supports the predominant
operating system environments and back-up applications as well as
major tape automation platforms and tape devices from such
prominent companies as StorageTek, ADIC and IBM. The solution
enables today’s complex data centers to consolidate their
tape environments onto fewer real tape devices and tape libraries
while shrinking backup windows and dramatically reducing data
recovery times. The net result is a less capital and resource
intensive environment that saves money and time and reduces
business risk.
The Virtual Tape Appliance has been in use in Europe since
2000. It was introduced in late 2003 in the Asia/Pacific region by
Fujitsu, Ltd. There are now some 150 CentricStor systems installed
at over eleven countries worldwide. PeakData, Inc. is launching the
product in the United States with the help of a network of value
added resellers.
“Consolidation remains a powerful theme in data center
environments as organizations struggle to deal with exploding
information and the need to better protect and more quickly recover
that information while at the same time maintaining strict control
over capital and operational costs,” said Dianne McAdam,
Senior Analyst and Partner, Data Mobility Group. “Tape
virtualization is becoming an increasingly popular means of
addressing a substantial portion of that challenge. CentricStor, a
product with a solid track record, is a welcome entrant into the
U.S. market for that purpose.”
“CentricStor represents the best possible combination
of capabilities in the market, which is why PeakData is so excited
to be bringing this technology to the United States through our
network of resellers,” said Mike Holland, Vice President of
marketing and general manager of the CentricStor business unit for
PeakData, Inc. “Our company has had substantial experience
selling virtual tape systems and we believe there is no other tape
virtualization product with CentricStor’s performance,
scalability, flexibility and ease of installation and
operation.”
“CentricStor has proven its value to customers
throughout Europe over the past three years,” said Dr. Helmut
Beck, Vice President Storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
“We now believe it is the right time and we also believe we
have the right partner in PeakData to bring this outstanding
storage solution to customers in the U.S.”
PeakData’s first U.S. customer is the Orange County
Public School System in Orlando, Florida, one of the
country’s 20 largest school systems with over 140,000
students and 25,000 employees. “We had been looking for quite
some time for a heterogeneous virtual tape solution that would
consolidate our tape environment, enabling us to save cost while at
the same time facilitating a migration from our legacy environment
in the future,” said Darryl Zietlow, Manager of Storage and
Systems for the school system. “We had all but given up hope
when CentricStor came along”.
“We have now been able to consolidate a wide variety of
dozens of older tape devices, including mainframe, DLT (Digital
Linear Tape) and 4MM (Millimeter) tape to a single, automated tape
environment employing a StorageTek tape library and four LTO
drives. At the same time we have reduced our tape media from over
7,000 cartridges to fewer than 500. We calculate that the
operational savings will pay for the system in less than 12 months.
More important, we have been able to incorporate all our systems,
including our legacy mainframes, into the CentricStor environment
and now have a smooth migration path for our systems and
applications in the future without concern for the tape devices and
media behind them,” he added.
CentricStor - Backgrounder
CentricStor is the name given to Fujitsu Siemens
Computers’ “Virtual Tape Appliance”, which is
used to consolidate the tape backup processes. The open storage
solution is employed for mainframes and for open system
environments running Unix and Windows. CentricStor employs virtual
tape drives to provide all linked systems with a multitude of
high-performance and permanently available backup and archiving
resources over the storage area network. This universal
connectivity enables different servers and applications to access
the virtual archive simultaneously, without the need for a real
tape drive for each individual system.
CentricStor integrates transparently into existing IT
environments, making it unnecessary to modify existing application
and backup scenarios. Since CentricStor replaces the direct link to
the real storage peripherals, upgrading to the latest drive
technology without affecting the host systems and applications
poses no problems. Information about CentricStor in Europe can be
found at
www.centricstor.com
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About Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Fujitsu Siemens Computers is the leading European IT provider
with a responsible strategic focus on next-generation Mobility and
Business Critical Computing products, services and solutions. With
a portfolio of exceptional depth, our offering extends from
handhelds through desktops to enterprise-class IT infrastructure
solutions. Fujitsu Siemens Computers has a strong presence in all
key markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Leveraging
the strengths, innovation and global reach of our joint
shareholders, Fujitsu Limited and Siemens AG, we make sure we meet
the needs of customers: large corporations, small and medium
enterprises and private users. For further please visit::
www.fujitsu-siemens.com
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