Products: StoneFly

While SAN technology first came to market in the early 1990s, price and technical complexity kept it relegated to those who could afford to buy, install, and maintain Fibre Channel networks. Now, a little more than a decade later, new generations of storage area network products such as iSCSI deliver both simplicity and entry-level pricing.

iSCSI, it turns out, has been in line to replace FC networks for the last four years or so. But companies including Studio Network Solutions have recently released products that live up to the promise of lower cost and relative simplicity.

Add StoneFly's ValueSAN IP SAN-based storage system. Designed for the pocketbooks of “underserved or budget-constrained” groups, ValueSAN is based on the company's storage networking architecture, StoneFusion, an intelligent iSCSI storage packet routing technology that works over Ethernet/IP networks. ValueSAN employs Storage Concentrator i3000 hardware nodes, which aggregate data transfer while making it bidirectional to speed things along. www.stonefly.com