November 11th, 1999

[4:15 PM] Powerful Storage Networking Tool Brings Up To 200 MB/Sec Data Transfers
by Staff

A powerful networking tool is coming to the Mac (and Win NT). Charismac has pre-announced that they will be announcing a new product called FibreShare at Comdex next week. The product works with fibre channel networks and allows network administrators to build networks capable of up to 200 MB/sec data transfer. Aimed at markets that transfer huge files, this FibreShare will be an important product for Macs in the corporate market. According to Charismac:

Charismac Engineering Inc. will unveil their cross-platform SAN (storage area network) management software, FibreShare, at Comdex next week in Las Vegas. FibreShare is an open-systems volume management software solution aimed at the enterprise, digital audio/video and pre-press markets.

FibreShare can be used in native operating system environments or can be configured to run in cross-platform solutions. FibreShare is fully application independent.

FibreShare enables users to create, edit and administer open-systems shared storage networks utilizing high-speed fibre channel storage. Charismac will show FibreShare running under both Macintosh and Windows NT from the Fibre Channel Community suite, N250, in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Charismac will show multiple machines playing back video footage from a shared fibre channel disk array.

With performance capabilities of up to 200 MB/sec in a dual loop configuration, fibre channel storage is quickly becoming the interface of choice in the enterprise, audio/video and pre-press markets. FibreShare is the only solution available that provides users with all the software tools necessary to administer and work in a high-speed SAN.

FibreShare allows one or more administrators to set up single drives or multi-disk arrays and assign users and groups privileges to specific volumes in a shared storage network configuration. Administrators can customize privilege levels specific to users or workgroups to enable access to volumes that require intense I/O operations.

FibreShare runs native to both Windows NT and the Mac OS. FibreShare is fully scaleable, allowing your network room to grow. New users as well as additional storage may be dynamically added to a FibreShare network.

Both the NT and Macintosh versions of FibreShare include Charismac's cross-platform storage management software RAID suite developed native to the specific OS being used. This suite allows both single drives as well as high-performance disk arrays to be effortlessly added into a simple to use and maintain FibreShare network.

More information on FibreShare, and serial storage technology in general, can be found at the Charismac Engineering web page, www.Charismac.com.

Since the product has not officially been announced, despite the company's press release, their is not specific information on the product at the company's web site. Pricing and availability have also yet to be announced.

Charismac