Products: Enhance Technology UltraStor RS16 FS

Setting up a reliable SAN involves not only solid hardware but capable software that isn't too complicated for most editors to handle.

That's Enhance Technology's approach. The company offers the latest hardware in arrays such as the UltraStor RS16 FS — a combo that can use either high-performance, pricier SAS disks, or high-capacity SATA-type drives that are integrated with 4Gbps Fibre Channel dual-port (FD) host interfaces. To address software control, Enhance mixes in Tiger Technology's metaSAN. This product helps to create a cross-platform (Mac/PC), file-level-sharing SAN that eliminates the risk of file-system corruption that would otherwise occur when multiple computers access the same disks.

Because Tiger Technologybuilds its entire company around figuring out how to make SAN technology simpler to use and more bulletproof, this makes good sense. With metaSAN, multiple computers can benefit from high-speed block-level access, cross-platform support, automatic load balancing, transparent failover, and per-client bandwidth-usage control — all the while delivering a claimed throughput of more than 600MBps.