ESG has found that Enterprise system administrators are interested in consolidating storage services to run within an intelligent storage area network and that early adopters are realizing significant benefits and savings. This ESG Lab report presents the results of hands-on testing of the capabilities of Incipient Network Storage Platform (NSP) including on-line migration, copy services and centralized heterogeneous storage provisioning. Enterprise-class fault tolerance, serviceability and the savings that can be achieved by moving storage services to Incipient software embedded on an intelligent Fibre Channel switch are also examined.

The goal of ESG Lab Validation reports is to educate customers about various storage and storage-related products, including storage systems, backup-to-disk solutions, storage management applications, backup and recovery software, storage virtualization platforms, etc. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the necessary evaluation process that end-users should conduct before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these technologies.