Gladiator enters storage arena

Storage vendor MTI Technology will ship its Gladiator 6700 fibre channel device next week, targeting the storage area network (SAN) market. The scaleable RAID storage system allows customers to start at 218Gb for $149,000, and extends to 1Tb for $459,000. It also has a volume-mapping facility which allows a large storage array to be segmented off to different servers on a fibre channel-based SAN. California-based MTI said features such as volume-mapping, which protects against data corruption and storage wastage, are necessary tools for the SAN market. In addition, Gladiator 6700 is scaleable, so customers do not have to buy additional controllers to increase the number of hard drives. Claus Egge, IDC analyst, said the product had some good features, adding: "It shows that MTI is keeping up with the competition in this market." MTI’s UK office is in Godalming, Surrey. ®