Taipei, Taiwan, November 7th, 2005— Qsan has extended its technology lead over other storage solution providers in SMB segment by supporting Windows VSS in its innovative Snapshot-on-the-box, which is the advanced feature offered in both S series (SCSI U320) and P series (iSCSI) product lines of storage controllers.

Qsan Snapshot-on-the-box is a point-in-time volume replication. It makes consistent & instant copies of data volumes without any system downtime. It can keep up to 32 snapshots for all data volumes. Rollback feature is provided so users can easily restore the previously-snapshoted data easily while continuing using the volume for further data access. The data access is just regular as before including read & write without any impact on end users. The "on-the-box" terminology implies the fact that it does not require any proprietary agents installed at host side. The snapshot is taken at volume level. It will not consume any host CPU cycles thus the server is dedicated to the specific application. The snapshot copies can be taken manually or by schedule such as hourly and daily.

To make Qsan Snapshot-on-the-box more effectively available to various Win32-based applications, Qsan has implemented the hardware provider interface to support Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service. Microsoft VSS is the storage service provided on Windows Server 2003 to create point-in-time copies of application data. It works as follows: Application does snapshot by triggering Windows VSS at server side, the hardware provider implemented by Qsan, as an software agent installed on the host, will instruct Qsan S or P series at target side to complete the actual snapshot action. In the following diagram, a virus attacking MS Exchange Server crashing its data volume, as Qsan S or P series is deployed and snapshot is taken, the IT department easily rollbacks the data volume in 25 minutes with only 15 minutes data loss as a typical scenario. By using MS Exchange Server on top of Windows Server 2003 with Volume Shadow Copy Service, the snapshot is taken with transactional consistency guaranteed, e.g. email message and corresponding log info is either all included or all excluded in the snapshot copy atomically.



"What we are trying to accomplish here at Qsan is to evolve traditional RAID products by adding new flavors, why small & medium businesses are not able to enjoy EMC-class of storage features/benefits?" said Eric Kao , Director of Sales & Marketing at Qsan. "The success factor is definitely easy-to-use and low total cost of ownership. Snapshot-on-the-box is simply the first step for Qsan to march in this specific direction."

Qsan Technology Inc.
Qsan Technology, Inc., develops, manufactures and markets storage controllers for IP SAN. It aims to become IntelliRAID provider, IP SAN expert and SMB ILM innovator. Headquartered in Taipei Taiwan , Qsan was founded in 2004 and is privately held. Distribution partners are worldwide including Europe, the United States and Greater China Region. For more information, visit www.qsan.com.tw