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Product category: Printing Pre-Press Systems and Materials (Repro, Platemakers, CTP, Workflow, Document Management, Design Software, etc.)
News Release from: Kodak Graphic Communications Group | Subject: Exastore
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial Team on 02 March 2004

KPG Simplifies High Volume Data Storage

A new solution to the growing challenges of reliable access to increasing quantities of digital data is now available from Kodak Polychrome Graphics with the UK launch of Exanet's scalable storage sys

A new solution to the growing challenges of reliable access to increasing quantities of digital data is now available from Kodak Polychrome Graphics with the UK launch of Exanet's scalable storage system Exastore Exanet's system is already selling exclusively via KPG in North America and the distribution agreement has recently been extended to include Europe

The Exastore family of digital storage systems allows users to easily and quickly access and manage vast amounts of ever-changing data in a cost-effective and high performance manner.

Exastore provides automated, intelligent management and simple file-sharing for digital media applications across a wide range of system platforms including Apple, Windows, UNIX and Linux.

Furthermore, in a major advance for digital data storage technology, the system uses industry-standard, off-the-shelf hardware to provide users with an unmatched combination of scalable capacity, performance and cost effective system management.

KPG is targeting Exastore at large commercial printers with or without prepress facilities, medium - sized commercial printers with prepress facilities, prepress houses, publishing houses and large advertising agencies.

Said Terry Baber, UK managing director for KPG: "As we help our customers migrate to digital working, sooner or later they come up against the data storage issue and this solution is perfect for companies storing one terabyte of data or more.

As data expands, the demands of capacity and bandwidth grow relentlessly.

Eventually, the data spreads across a patchwork of separate, isolated storage systems, and users have to navigate their way through islands of data linked by complex networking.

It becomes harder to organise the data, flow it smoothly to users, back it up, and restore it.

Customers tell us that operators can spend up to 20% of their time just managing data." That is a major drain on resources, and without a solution things would get more difficult as data and applications become more diverse and production more dispersed, he added.

Existing systems include high-end enterprise products that hold all data on a single monolithic central storage system, and 'storage virtualisation', which attempts to solve the problem by inserting software or hardware between servers and storage systems to create the illusion of one storage system.

Michael Chazot vice president of European sales for Exanet explained: "Centralised systems require a large up-front investment in hardware and have severe upgrade/scalability limits, while virtualisation imposes limits on capacity, bandwidth and I/O and is, at best, a partial solution." Exastore's approach to data storage has been to create the first storage system that independently scales capacity, performance and I/O while drastically simplifying operation and management.

Its foundation on off-the-shelf industry-standard servers and RAID arrays provides customers with a low-cost entry-point and a modular growth-path combined with protection of their initial investment.

It consolidates the entire network-attached storage infrastructure into a single, limitlessly expandable resource.

Its patent-pending, highly durable architecture consists of modules that contain processing, I/O and cache resources, which can be added as needed without practical limit to increase capacity, bandwidth and I/O.

Capacity or performance modules can be added independently of each other without disrupting data availability, and the file system can dynamically expand to make use of added capacity.

This would allow the system to grow almost without limits and would significantly reduce reconfiguration time for storage administrators.

Exastore optimises performance on the fly, routes traffic, creates copies of frequently requested data in its cache and allocates bandwidth from moment to moment to avoid hot spots.

That ensures fast access to information for client systems.

The system is said to further simplify management by automating time-consuming storage administration tasks such as disk-grooming, load-balancing, data relocation, volume allocation and volume management.

The system also auto-detects when new nodes are plugged in, disk arrays added or other changes made to underlying storage subsystems - eliminating the need for manual reconfiguration.

Exastore supports NFS, CIFS, and ATS file protocols to fit easily into existing data centre infrastructures.

It integrates with existing system management frameworks such as Openview, Tivoli, CA-Unicenter, and others, and can use legacy RAID devices, speeding initial implementation and reducing upfront costs.

It uses the Linux Operating System, which greatly expands the possible server platforms, and its modular architecture supports either a centralised data centre or a distributed environment.

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