Crag Technologies Inc, a San Jose-based start-up, launched the first components in its series of planned storage area network building blocks last week, and says it should be ready with a complete SAN fibre channel-based systems over the next four or five months. Crag isn’t quite as new as it seems. It started life 18 months ago as Ridge Technologies Inc (CI No 3265), with big plans for the Windows NT storage market. But in May this year the company was acquired by Adaptec Inc, which at the same time was negotiating to buy Symbios Inc, Hyundai’s storage unit. After pressure from the US Federal Trade Commission, Adaptec abandoned its bid for the unit, and in August decided instead to cut back operations to its core businesses (CI No 3,498). Ridge – which Adaptec had intended to merge with Symbios – was one of the casualties. The company bought back its intellectual property and technology, but couldn’t get the rights to its name back. So it started out again as Crag with new venture capital funding. Originally, the company had planned to launch its first products by September, but the Adaptec situation put things on hold until now. Crag is focusing on selling high-end storage products to the commodity market, the first being a high-density RAID subsystem and storage management software. The CT 3000 RAID array crams up to 12, 1.6 inch drives or 20 one-inch drives running at 10,000 RPM, giving up to 216Gb capacity, according to Crag. But the future focus will be on software. The first software product is Perspective, an object-oriented Java-based SAN management tool, is aimed at OEMs, and is designed to be independent of both operating system and hardware. That depends on establishing standards, and Crag says it is working with Veritas Software Inc and others on developing an API detailing how software should talk to RAID controllers, variously called the Common Configuration API or the Array Services API. Crag is also involved in the Desktop Management Forum’s Common Information Model. Crag says it plans to develop a complete SAN, the next step being a SAN controller to support the RAID subsystems, and a variety of hosts, fibre channel hubs and switches, also including backup and hierarchical storage management features. It lists its competitors as EMC Corp and Data General Corp’s CLARiiON unit, although those might also end up as partners.
