Sean Anderson, systems engineer at wireless equipment maker, Comarco Inc., bought a 4 terabyte (TB) iSCSI SAN from Intransa Inc. In November 2004 and is in the process of replacing it with Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Proliant Storage Server running WSS 2003 R2 after recently testing a beta of the product. 'We had no trouble with Intransa the product is really slick. There's not a lot to learn, but you pay for it,' Anderson said.

'If you have a staff trained in Windows and in networking you can use HP Storage Server [R2] and get the same results.' More info on iSCSI SANs Comarco forked out $15,000 for two front-end Storage Controller Modules (SCMs) from Intransa, but in order to grow bandwidth, the company found its maintenance charges also growing $1,000 per SCM. The cost reduction with HP was a real eye opener. Comarco paid approximately half the price for an HP Proliant Storage Server running WSS R2, with an iSCSI card from Alacritech to ensure bandwidth and MSA (Modular Smart Array] 30 storage on the back end from HP. 'Performance actually improved using Storage Server, not dramatically, but under a heavy load it was noticeable,' Anderson added.

Canon Mpc190 Driver Windows 7 64 Bit. Comarco also expects its maintenance charges to drop 25% with HP Storage Server R2. 'We're looking for consistency,' Anderson noted.

'Intransa would make us one time offers. We needed something we could budget on year after year.' On the downside, he said the load balancing isn't quite as good in WSS R2 and there's more manual configuration than with Intransa, but he said the cost savings were worth it. A spokeswoman for Intransa said the company couldn't comment on specific customer installments. 'Generally speaking, Intransa sees Microsoft Storage Server R2 as being complimentary to its architecture.

Many customers are looking for NAS file support on the front end of their Storage Area Networks, in addition to support of VSS [Volume Shadow Copy Service] and VDS [Virtual Disk Service]. Hp Probook 4520s Drivers For Windows 7 64 Bit. We expect to see customers installing Storage Server R2 in front of an Intransa SAN, enabling excellent file support combined with Intransa's robust virtualization tools that can virtualize a myriad of targets and represent them as pooled storage to Storage Server,' the company said in an e-mail. Microsoft wasn't surprised by the performance Comarco was able to get out of WSS R2.