Astute Networks, Inc. announced availability of the industry's first edge storage products designed to help Telecom, Military and Media customers rapidly, reliably and economically deploy new content and services beyond the enterprise - to the edge of the network. The Caspian R1100 Edge Storage Blade (Caspian R1100) and the Caspian E1112 RTM Storage Blade (Caspian E1112) were built specifically to meet the new demands and solve the complexities of delivering voice, video and data to the edge of network. With a 'no compromises' architecture, the Caspian R1100 and E1112 are the first 10Gb iSCSI bladed storage products with built-in high performance, carrier grade reliability, rack density, power & cooling efficiencies, and deployment simplicities - all integrated into one ATCA chassis.

Astute Networks Caspian R1100

"Until today, Carriers wanting to deploy storage closer to the consumer had to choose complex, proprietary configurations of fibre channel storage which carry higher acquisition and total lifecycle costs," stated Clark Masters, CEO and President of Astute Networks. "Looking to expand their revenue base and take advantage of the explosion in the interactive and personalized content market, the Carriers now have an open systems, ATCA solution with the availability of Caspian Family of Edge Storage Blades. We're excited about bringing these products to market with our best in class partners and look forward to making Edge Storage made Simple(TM) a reality for customers worldwide."

The Caspian R1100 and E1112 promise to revolutionize the economics of storage for telecom central offices (COs) and mobile switching centers (MSCs) by significantly reducing the acquisition costs and total cost of ownership of storage. The critical differences provided by the Caspian R1100 and E1112 for the telecom customer base are the unmatched combination of high performance, high reliability, deployment simplicity, and blade density. For the first time, storage can provide the same value proposition to telecom customers that server blades provide - high density, ease of scalability, and ease of deployment and provisioning. This value will be critical to carriers as they deploy storage-intensive applications such as IPTV, IMS, and VoD into their IP networks.

"One of the biggest trends we see effecting the Telecom market in 2008 centers around the expansion of video and data services driving consolidation to all IP networks," said Lee Doyle, group vice president and general manager of IDC's Network Infrastructure. "As this occurs more video and services will move towards the edge of the network where the importance of open, reliable and easy to deploy storage and servers will be critical to the success. The Caspian R1100's design based on ATCA, 10GbE iSCSI bladed storage certainly positions Astute Networks to play well in this emerging and growing market."

At NXTcomm08 in Las Vegas, NV, Astute Networks and their partners, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Kontron, and NEI Inc., will be demonstrating the Caspian R1100 running innovative, new solutions for IPTV, SIP Acceleration and iSCSI boot manageability & serviceability.