DST Product Lets Clients Manage Networks from the Net
It was only a matter of time. Hard-drive clusters (“redundant arrays of independent disks,” or “RAIDs,” in industry lingo), long used in business settings to create backups of important data and speed up the transfer of large files, could be coming to the home PC.
At least that’s what officials at Iwill Corp.’s North American headquarters in Irvine are hoping. In a move that likely will be followed by other peripheral makers, Iwill is pushing the idea of mini-RAIDS using two low-cost IDE-style hard drives on home and business PCs. Up to now, most RAIDs have used SCSI-based drives, which are generally more expensive.
These devices will allow users to either create automatic clones of their main hard drives in case one of them fails, or to split data among two drives acting in concert, which speeds up transfer of large files used in things like video and high-end sound applications.
While the automatic backup might be a hard sell to home users, more are using their computers for music and video editing, which makes RAIDs a sensible option. Not surprisingly, that’s the feature Iwill is touting the loudest.
The company will sell hardware add-ons that allow users to install their own RAIDs for less than $300, including the cost of the extra hard drive. Though several companies offer software that purports to do the same thing, including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 2000, hardware setups usually offer faster performance.
Iwill plans to offer the RAID controllers built in to its line of motherboards or as a plug-in computer card.
DST Takes on Big Boys
What’s a multibillion-dollar disadvantage when you’ve got a good idea? Computer veteran Murli Advani is taking on IBM subsidiary Tivoli and the likes of Novell Inc. with a system he says makes network management and enterprise-wide software upgrades as easy as surfing the Web.
Advani is chairman of Orange-based DS Technologies Inc., a three-person firm pushing a network management system accessible anywhere on the Internet.
Xpenet promises to turn time-consuming tasks such as data synchronizing, software upgrades, backups and file updates into a cakewalk, thanks to a system that uses the everyday Web browser to manage networks from anywhere. In addition to making network chores easier for end customers, particularly those that manage scattered offices using the same network, DST hopes to sell the system to firms such as outsourced network administrators and off-site “help-desks,” which can troubleshoot problems without making the costly trip to customers’ locations.
Though several industry heavyweights offer similar applications, Advani insists his is easier to use and more flexible.
For more: www.dst-inc.com.
OC Firms E-Merging in $20M Deal
A small Irvine company called eSynch Corp. is purchasing an even smaller outfit based in Tustin called eLiberation.com in a deal valued at $20 million.
Officials with eSynch, a 7-year-old firm that makes software geared to broadband sound and video, say acquiring eLiberation’s Web hub, ePilot, will give their products broader exposure. The ePilot Web site and browser add-on software pays users for viewing advertising while they use the Internet.
The deal brings eSynch closer to its idea of selling television-like advertising over the Internet by giving the company entry into what eLiberation says is one of the top-300 most visited sites on the Internet and customers who use the eLiberation’s add-on.
The moves comes on the heels of eSynch’s launch of a media player that works with almost every sound and video format on the market, including Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Media, RealNetworks and Apple’s QuickTime.
For more: www.esynch.com.
Bits:
AudioRamp.com, an Irvine company set to release a line of home stereos that play MP3 music files, has launched related software that manages users’ music collections and devices that play them. The software allows users to move music to and from their home and work PCs, Walkman-type devices and home stereo equipment. For the free download: www.audioramp.com … Epicor Software Corp., Irvine, has wooed its 3,000th customer. For more: www.epicor.com. … Toshiba Corp. announced a series of partnerships designed to make it easier to hook the company’s laptops into wireless networks and the Internet … Sun Microsystems Inc. has selected Aliso Viejo-based QLogic Corp.’s ISP2100 line of controllers for Sun’s StorEdge T3 family of RAID disk arrays … Art Technology Group, a software maker based in Cambridge, Mass., has signed on SiteLite Inc., Rancho Santa Margarita, to handle customer questions about network configurations. For more: www.sitelite.com … StarBase Corp., Santa Ana, has released StarTeam Web Approval, an add-on to the company’s StarTeam workflow management package. The software makes it easier for different departments within a company to approve different steps of a large project … SRS Labs Inc. has demonstrated software that plays multi-channel surround-sound over the Internet through four-speaker and two-speaker setups. For more: www.srslabs.com Odetics Inc., Anaheim, said it has reduced the terms of a settlement with Storage Technology Corp. Under the new terms, STC will pay Odetics $17.8 million instead of $20 million.
Ken Spencer Brown can be reached at kbrown@ocbj.com or (949) 833-8373, ext. 239.
