Release Date: 04/19/2004

SNS Announces iSANmp™ - OS X/Windows iSCSI Volume Sharing Software at NAB 2004

LAS VEGAS, April 19, 2004 — Studio Network Solutions® (SNS) will welcome iSANmp™ to its family of shared storage networking software during its official introduction at the 2004 NAB show in Las Vegas. Built on the iSCSI protocol, iSANmp is the perfect solution for facilities that need to share audio and video files over Ethernet - whether in an adjacent editing suite or with a remote location across the globe. iSCSI is an IP-based storage networking standard that enables rapid and efficient transport of block-level I/O data over high-speed Ethernet. iSANmp works with both Windows and Mac OS X systems and is the first such product available to Mac users.

At last year’s NAB, SNS enabled cross-platform, shared storage Fibre Channel networking with its SANmp™ software and has now expanded its feature set to include iSCSI. To bring this new technology to the Mac platform required the creation of an iSCSI initiator – a non-trivial piece of software that was previously unavailable for OS X. SNS has included its iSCSI initiator, as well as support for iSCSI volume sharing, into its new iSANmp application.

SNS designed this new product specifically for the A/V industries and will offer turnkey iSCSI SAN solutions at considerably less cost than that of a comparative Fibre Channel-based system.

“iSANmp is exactly what is needed to enable a reliable and efficient IP-based shared storage network for both Mac and Windows,” stated Gary Holladay, SNS President and Chief Systems Designer. “With iSCSI over multi-Gigabit Ethernet, users can achieve performance nearing that of Fibre Channel and can finally record, edit and playback projects over an Ethernet infrastructure. In the recent past, Gigabit Ethernet has been used for rudimentary file sharing as a cost effective alternative to Fibre Channel networking. One of the key advantages of iSANmp is its ability to offer block-level access to shared storage over widely deployed IP-based networks, allowing secure and easy access over Local, Metropolitan, or Wide Area Networks. Another substantial advantage in terms of performance is the fact that, unlike a typical Ethernet file-sharing network, iSANmp eliminates the overhead of SMB, AppleShare or WebDAV. This means that iSANmp offers the ability to significantly exploit the available bandwidth of Gigabit and multi-Gigabit Ethernet.”

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) approved standard protocol for encapsulating SCSI commands into TCP/IP packets and enabling I/O block data transport over IP networks. Additionally, iSANmp is Kerberos-ready and supports up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol designed to provide strong authentication by using secret-key cryptography.

Studio Network Solutions is a storage technology company specializing in products and services for the entertainment industries. Founded in 1998, SNS is a premier provider of storage area networking products and technologies for real-world media production. For more information, please visit www.studionetworksolutions.com.

All software names are trademarked and/or copyrighted by their respective manufacturers.


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