StarPort

This application is a iSCSI Initiator [client], RAM disk and Virtual DVD drive. StarPort fully implements iSCSI and ATA-over-Ethernet client side protocols enabling you to connect to remote storage appliances such as disk arrays, tape drives, DVD-ROM image libraries and so on.

StarPort connects to iSCSI or AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) storage in the server room or creates a virtual DVD-ROM drive locally to watch movies in a home theatre extending your computing infrastructure.

StarPort's iSCSI support enables connectivity to remote storage devices over a standard IP network, regardless of where the device resides; in the next room or on another continent.

With StarPort and iSCSI you can gain full access to a device, as though the device was installed on a local machine.

Re-partition, format a remote hard disk drive with any file system, burn to a remote high-capacity Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner, implement automatic backup procedures to a remote tape drive, access remote storage devices connected through Serial and Parallel ATA and SCSI, Fibre Channel, USB or FireWire and more.

AoE protocol support provides the same functionality as iSCSI in those environments where ATA-over-Ethernet technology is used. CoRAID produces network storage appliances currently using AoE as the core protocol.

AoE delivers a simple, high performance, low cost alternative to iSCSI and FibreChannel for networked block storage by eliminating the processing overhead of TCP/IP. AoE is native in Linux 2.6.11 and beyond.

Unsatisfied with the speed of disk I/O operations ? Need a fast drive to store Internet Explorer cache files? Use StarPort's ram drive emulation which is more than 1000 times faster than your local hard drive.

A ram drive appears to your system and applications as a standard disk volume where you can read and write files. Non longer limited to the hard drives speed, the StarPort ram drive feature provides amazingly faster speed.

A virtual DVD-ROM emulation module enables as many ready to use optical drives as needed.

Create an ISO or MDS image of your CD/DVD or Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive with any disk grabbing utility and save it to your hard drive.

Any time you need to read data or run applications from that image, mount it as a virtual DVD-ROM drive in StarPort. The image will appear as a new optical drive in your system which can be used it transparently as though it is a local DVD-ROM drive.

Here are some key features of "StarPort":
SCSI device emulation. Connects over IP network and maps locally any remote iSCSI device: hard disks and disk array, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD burners, tape drives and autoloader libraries, media changers, etc.
Complete iSCSI and AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet) client-side protocols support.
Supports huge disks (above 2 TB in size) for both iSCSI and ATA-over-Ethernet configurations.
Early mounting of persistent devices (before the user logs in).
Native 32-bit and 64-bit binaries for x86 and x64 machines.
iSNS integration for easy iSCSI targets look-up.
IPv4 and IPv6 support out-of-box.
CHAP authentication provides additional security.
IPsec encryption for secure tunneling of private data over insecure WAN IP connections. The entire session content is encrypted. Your company critical data would remain encrypted during replication from the main site to remote sites.
DVD-ROM drive emulation built-in. Allows mounting existing DVD-ROM ISO and MDS images as DVD-ROM drives. This prevents original DVD-ROM media from physical damage or loss, allows you to use client machines without optical drives and allows storing DVD backup data on a single server.
Local RAM disk emulation provide extremely high performance for I/O critical applications.
Fully conforms to the latest iSCSI Standard 1.0 (former Draft 20).


Requirements:
Minimum:
800 MHz Intel Pentium III class processor
512 MB of RAM
10 MB of disk space for StarPort application data
Shared disk volume for Windows installation, Windows swap file and StarPort executables
Fast Ethernet connection

Recommended :
2 GHz Intel Xeon class processor
4 GB of RAM
1 GB of disk space for StarPort application data and log files
Dedicated disk volumes for Windows installation, Windows swap file and StarPort executables
Gigabit Ethernet connection


Limitations:
30 days trial