XIOtech is a Portlock Software customer that develops comprehensive networked storage solutions. Eliminating risk, managing IT costs, simplifying capacity management, meeting performance demands, and ensuring business continuity are all critical factors by which an enterprise-class storage solution is measured. Striving to meet these customer challenges, XIOtech is dedicated to delivering greater business benefits from IT investments through networked storage solutions that manage, protect, and deliver data anywhere at any time.

Helping XIOtech customers ensure uptime and maximize the value of their NetWare investments requires a strong, flexible storage management solution to augment today’s enterprise backup hardware.

XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE* storage platform, along with Portlock Software’s Storage Manager and a comprehensive suite of application-specific software, makes storing, managing, safeguarding, and retrieving data on heterogeneous computing platforms, including Novell’s NetWare platform, easy and cost effective. Whether on a departmental level or across a global enterprise, XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE storage platform ensures data integrity with enterprise-class functionality, scalability, and availability.

For customers who are using new storage devices, it’s all about getting data from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. Portlock Storage Manager allows easy server recovery and migration from local disks to other media, such as XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE. Portlock Storage Manager’s total support for NetWare allows for extremely fast system recovery or server duplication, providing administrators with the ability to copy, create, clone, image, restore, and resize DOS, NetWare, and NSS partitions and volumes.

Portlock Storage Manager is the only storage management software solution for the NetWare platform that currently supports Novell Storage Services (NSS). But that isn’t the only reason XIOtech uses Portlock Storage Manager and recommends the product to its customers. According to Darin Fast, Corporate Systems Engineer for XIOtech, “I help XIOtech customers connect their NetWare systems to the MAGNITUDE storage platform. I use Portlock Storage Manager in our Enterprise Solutions Lab to facilitate these tasks, and I recommend the product to our NetWare customers who want to migrate local disks to the MAGNITUDE, or need to migrate entire NetWare servers across the wire using IP (Internet Protocol). Along with NSS support, Portlock Storage Manager has many other useful features. For, example, if a user initializes a disk by mistake, Portlock Storage Manager can quickly fix the partition table without having to restore data from tape or other backup device.”

"Portlock Software’s Storage Manager product is outstanding,” noted Fast. “We were excited by their disaster recovery products that support ‘bare-metal’ restores from files, tape drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, FTP, and Web servers within a Novell environment. Not only does Portlock Storage Manager keep XIOtech’s customers’ NetWare systems running smoothly, it provides faster disk migration, faster image backups, and higher performance than many other solutions.”

Portlock Storage Manager can completely backup or image a NetWare server, including the DOS partitions, traditional NetWare volumes and NSS volumes. Portlock Storage Manager supports imaging to tape, DVD, and hard disk, and is also able to pull images from a Web server—enabling quick, efficient restores from a highly available source. Utilizing third generation imaging technology, its server image and restore technology supports images stored on disk drives, CD-ROMs, high-speed streaming to SCSI tape drives, and TCP/IP communication links for server-to-server replication across the room — or across the continent.

Portlock Storage Manager provides a high-speed image and restore solution for NetWare users, providing the ability to quickly image disk drives on a server for fast and easy restores. Performance is very high: for example, using SDLT tape drives, 40 GB of data can be restored per hour. Installation times have been reduced from 75 minutes for NetWare 6 to 10 minutes. Additionally, Portlock Storage Manager is twice as fast as a tape backup solution, saving users significant downtime. When a disaster strikes, a complete system can be restored from tape. Nothing needs to be installed on the server to begin a system recovery.

“We are extremely pleased by the synergy and success of Novell’s NetWare 6 and Portlock Storage Manager,” said John J. Hanley, CEO of Portlock Software. “Our relationship with Novell is so good, I don’t know how to make it any better. I’ve been involved with Novell for over 20 years and have great respect for company and its technologies. Our products offer customers a flexible and powerful set of tools to manage storage on NetWare servers supporting IDE, SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel and Storage Area Networks (SANs). Portlock Storage Manager provides an intuitive, cost effective storage management solution for Novell’s NetWare customers.”

When it comes to developing to Novell, there's nothing Portlock needs that doesn't get provided," said Jeff Hartwick, Portlock Software Marketing Manager. "Novell's expertise and willingness to help us deliver products is invaluable, which is in large part why Portlock is such a fast-growing company. Novell depends on Portlock Storage Manager and ships our image and restore technology as part of the Digital Airlines NetWare 6 Demonstration CD. And Novell Technical Support continues to recommend Portlock Storage Manager as the preferred solution for Data/Disaster Recovery. Through joint testing and development, Portlock will continue to work with Novell to meet market needs for powerful Storage Management products. Portlock Software's focus on excellence has fostered a large and loyal NetWare platform customer base, as evidenced by Novell customer requests to have Portlock products included in their NetWare package

*All other third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.