IceWEB’s Iplicity Smashes Legacy Storage Vendor Lock-in

IceWEB, Inc. announced that their Iplicity Data Storage platform enables the incorporating available disk storage resident in non-Iplicity based legacy storage vendor products such as those produced by EMC Corporation, Network Appliance, Hitachi, EqualLogic, Hewlett Packard, and IBM.

Gary Dunham, SVP of Product Development & Engineering for IceWEB, said of the announcement: "Iplicity represents the next generation of data storage infrastructure. For years, both SMB and Enterprise users of storage products from older legacy vendors have endured painful and expensive upgrades, grossly inflated hard drive prices, overpriced features and add-on costs for simple capabilities like remote replication, and been locked in to architectures chosen back when there were, well, quite frankly, many fewer choices."

"We are in a period of consolidation and change within the networked storage market space," Dunham continued, "This past year alone, innovative storage players Left Hand and Data Domain were swallowed whole by the status-quo manufacturers HP and EMC. Rumors are that 3Par and others, perhaps Isilon and Compellent may soon follow as this consolidation continues. Make no mistake; these acquisitions are less about acquiring features and capabilities than they are about quashing emerging competition, limiting end customer choice and protecting established turf. The key question here is; where are end users who purchased those products to turn for the innovative features and performance increases they once expected from those cutting edge manufacturers? Furthermore, what are the options for enterprise and SMB clients who have purchased products from the legacy vendors, but who, in response to the harsh current day economic realities and focus on reducing capital expenditures (doing more with less) to do to support their ever growing storage needs without breaking the IT budget?"

"Iplicity may be able to answer some of these needs. Iplicity, with its feature rich and easy to administer environment allows end clients to utilize available space on older, less high performing, more expensive legacy storage. This capability allows users with less flexible storage deployments to manage space they have available in their existing environment completely, as if it were directly attached to the Iplicity network storage, enabling them to take full advantage of features such as unlimited snapshots, local and remote (push and pull) system, volume and folder replication, bandwidth consumption management, capabilities to integrate with VMWare and Citrix Xen, integrated virus scanning, the capability to convert this older storage into resources available to IceWEB’s patent pending Locally Connected Cloud Storage Devices (LCCSD), full support of the widest range of industry standard access protocols including CIFS, WEBDAV, Rsync, FTP, NFS, AOE and SMB. These and many more feature sets forthcoming such as IP compression and full in-line data de-duplication, which can be added non-disruptively far surpass what is available, at least at any reasonable price, from most of the legacy vendors. It’s an intelligent simple choice.  Intelligence and Simplicity equals Iplicity. End customers who would like to learn more or see a live on-line demonstration of these capabilities should email me prove-it@iplicity.com and I’d personally be delighted to take them through the whole process," Dunham concluded.