Semiconductor maker Voyan Technology Corp. says it can demonstrate components that deliver 10Mbps to 50Mbps on copper pairs over distances of 9,000 to 12,000 feet. This is a significant improvement over DSL technology that performs slightly better than T-1 speeds over those distances. DSL can deliver higher bandwidth, but only over short stretches. The Voyan technology has not yet been put in commercial products.
Following an industry-wide trend toward storage abstraction, Unisys Corp. last month announced a new storage appliance that pools disk storage from various vendor products on a storage area network and serves it up to clients or backs it up as if from a single source. Unisys’s Storage Sentinel is a RAID controller device that comes in a refrigerator-size cabinet with 2TB of internal storage. It features snapshot, striping and mirroring capabilities over multiple platforms and applications. Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys said its focus is on selling services, with the company’s appliance being 75 per cent of the cost of rolling out a standard US$200,000 Storage Sentinel configuration. Unisys Storage Sentinel, which will be available Sept. 4, complies with the Storage Networking Industry Association’s Common Information Model, a consistent way of mapping management elements in a network.
Cylink Corp. and Expand Networks Inc. are teaming up to deliver a way to compress traffic across VPN links, making it possible to keep down the cost of these connections. The companies are working on joint marketing and sales agreements to push Cylink’s NetHawk VPN gear and Expand’s Accelerator equipment together. They will push the combination as a way to reduce the volume of traffic to storage area networks as well as a way to keep down the costs of business-continuity measures. Cylink and Expand have not yet announced details of their joint sales and marketing plans.