Taipei, Taiwan, May 30, 2005 -- Areca Technology Corporation, a leading provider of internal and external SATA ll RAID controllers with RAID 6 function, today announced thatthe company's families of external RAID controllers provide full support for the Microsoft Windows server-based Multipath I/O (MPIO).
Areca software driver has utilized Microsoft's Multipath I/O to deliver highly dependable enterprise storage solutions to their customers. Customers will immediately take advantage of increasing levels of system availability and performance through load-balancing and interoperability of Areca storage products. Prior to MPIO availability, customers were required to pay thousands of dollars for alternative multipathing software licenses necessary for the level of protection now bundled in Areca’s base offering.
Multipath I/O is the ability to use more than one physical read/write path to access a storage device, providing improved system reliability and availability via fault tolerance and/or load balancing of the I/O traffic. In the case of storage management, where the preservation of data is vital, Multipath I/O provides extra support points that can protect against data loss or system failure. The introduction of Microsoft's Multipath I/O delivers a standard and interoperable path for communication between storage devices and Windows Server.
IT professionals continue to tell us they need cost-effective storage solutions to help ensure data availability, realize the savings of file server consolidation and maintain business continuity, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Enterprise Storage Division at Microsoft. "With enterprise-ready features like Multipath I/O, Windows Storage Server 2003 meets those critical storage needs, all at a low total cost of ownership."
Additional information on Microsoft® Multipath I/O storage technologies can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/
technologies/storage/mpio/default.mspx