Auspex Broadens Network Storage Product Line, Increases Global Reach

Adam Eisner, theWHIR.com

November 28, 2001 - Enterprise storage specialist Auspex Systems (Auspex.com) is broadening its product line, which is currently making a splash both at home and abroad.

The California-based company, which introduced the world's first Network Attached Storage (NAS) server more than a decade ago, is well-known among enterprises in the United States for its high-end storage solutions, some of which are capable of scaling up to nine terabytes. But the company is making a number of strategic moves in an effort to diversify its product offering and increase its implementation of products on a global scale.

Earlier this month, Auspex released a "product roadmap" designed to "move the company beyond its origins as a pioneer in Network Attached Storage." While Auspex has not fully revealed the nature of its new products, pegged for release in 2002, the company said they will be based on the engine that drives its current NS3000 series of network servers. The new product line will feature secure cross-platform file sharing, data replication and various other disaster recovery strategies, and will contain major elements of the company's NS3000 product line, which boasts a proprietary architecture that separates back-end storage subsystems from the engine that controls front-end management functions.

Auspex's NS2000 and NS3000 series have seen success in both North America and worldwide. Yesterday, the company announced that the Austin Technology Center of Schlumberger Oil and Gas Information Solution would be the latest North American firm to use an 3.7 TB NS3000 series machine.

A number of European hosting firms, ISPs and enterprises have also adopted Auspex's platform in the past year. These include Easynet, a major ISP based in France, and Internet France, a leading Web hosting company. Internet France, which hosts more than 10,000 Web sites, is using the Auspex storage system to launch a new suite of higher-level services aimed at hosting mission-critical applications like e-commerce sites and online communities. Because the NS series of machines feature dedicated processors that can process both network and storage tasks in parallel, companies don't have to worry about conflicts between application and storage workload that can lead to slower response times - a critical feature for companies that rely on uptime and speed.

"Since we installed the Auspex system, our benchmarks consistently show that we are delivering page downloads several times faster than our main competitors and significantly better than we were able to achieve in the past with server-attached storage," said Gabrielle Thevenot, Marketing Manager for Internet France, at the time of the agreement.

According to Jeronimo Munoz, Auspex's Director of Sales for Southern Europe, companies like Easynet appreciate the NS server series because of the nature of their business, which includes a wide range of communications access services, makes downtime impossible. After purchasing one NS2000 server and realizing the benefits, Easynet "decided to buy another one to secure their system and to back up one to another," Munoz said.

Hosting companies and ISPs also appreciate the cross-platform abilities of the NS series, as they are often required to work in the UNIX and Windows environments simultaneously - something Auspex systems are able to handle with ease. "You can use the same data on UNIX or Windows. It's not necessary to duplicate the data," Munoz said.

Auspex plans to unveil its new product line at StorageNext (http://www.storagenet2001.com/) in New York City next month.