Taipei, Taiwan, Dec. 5, 2007 – Maxtronic, Int’l Co., Ltd., a global supplier in enterprise-class RAID and storage solutions, now supports VDS (Virtual Disk Service) 1.1, the latest version of VDS hardware provider, to enhance management ability on Arena RAID storage systems. Microsoft^® VDS 1.1 adds new storage management interface to support iSCSI SANs and multi-path IO features which allows users enable better and wider Arena RAID storage solution under Microsoft^® Windows Server 2003 R2, Storage manager for SANs or later.

VDS Hardware Provider Overview
Instead VDS defines a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide a standardized and single interface to manage disks and RAID volumes. The unified programming interface defines how the management software would communicate with Arena RAID system and has two sets of providers:

• A built-in software provider that allows users to manage disks at operating system level.
• A hardware provider that is supported by third party vendor to translate VDS instruction to hardware specific command for their own RAID systems. As the result, anyone can use one compatible storage application to manage any hardware that supplies a VDS hardware provider.

VDS 1.1 enhance features
Instead of using old VDS 1.0 that can only support fiber channel, the new VDS 1.1 feature further extends storage management capabilities to iSCSI and MPIO deployments. By adopting VDS 1.1 hardware provider, Arena brings the benefits and conveniences to the users because Arena storage array can be provisioned directly from Storage Manager for SANs or iSCSI on Windows.

About Microsoft VDS
Virtual Disk Service is a Microsoft Windows service that performs query and configuration operations at the request of end users, scripts, and applications. The service extends the existing storage capabilities of the Windows Server family in the following ways:
• Provides an API to the existing volume and disk management features in Windows.
• Unifies volume management and hardware Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) management under a single API.

For more detail, please visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa381442.aspx