InfoStor articles from January 2004

InfoStor archives from January 2004

Serial ATA activity heats up.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Few disk drive interfaces have generated the buzz that Serial ATA (SATA) is generating. And based on drive shipment predictions, it's easy to understand why. International Data Corp. analyst Dave Reinsel predicts that shipments of SATA...

Veritas ports VM to Cisco switches: but will users buy in?(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Although it's unclear when--or if--the trend toward fabric-based intelligence (running storage applications on switches) will take off, it's clear that there is considerable end-user interest in the concept. In an Info-Stor reader survey, 44%...

The ABCs of ILM.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Information life-cycle management (ILM), or data life-cycle management, is quickly becoming one of the storage industry's most overused and abused terms. ILM has come to mean anything from disk-based backup to hierarchical storage management...

I-L-M, buy-from-me, M-O-N-E-Y.(editorial)
January 1, 2004... We--and most likely you, too--have recently been barraged by vendors muting their information life-cycle management (ILM) strategies, products, visions, and snake oil. In fact, I think I recall seeing a press release that described a disk...

Storage Networking Industry Association.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... The Storage Networking Industry Association has launched two initiatives under the auspices of the newly formed Data Management Forum (DMF). The Data Protection Initiative (DPI) and Information Lifecycle Management Initiative (ILMI) will focus...

OuterBay and EMC have a business and technology agreement focused on expanding the range of solutions available in support of customers' information life-cycle management strategies.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... OuterBay and EMC have a business and technology agreement focused on expanding the range of solutions available in support of customers" information lifecycle management strategies. As part of the agreement, OuterBay Application Data Management...

Data Domain.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Data Domain has secured $17 million in Series B funding. The new round of financing, led by Palo Alto-based Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by original investors Greylock and New Enterprise Associates, brings Data Domains total funding re $26...

Nexsan Technologies.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Nexsan Technologies has secured $17 million in venture capital funding, led by VantagePoint Venture Partners. RRE Ventures, Gesfid First Gen-e, and a syndicate of individual investors formed by Beechtree Capital also participated in the round.

Aarohi Communications has secured $13.5 million in Series B1 financing, bringing total funding to more than $36 million.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Aarohi Communications has secured $13.5 million in Series B 1 financing, bringing total funding to more than $36 million. The round was led by new corporate investors McData and Infineon Technologies and included participation from previous...

Agility Recovery Solutions has added online data backup capability to its portfolio of service offerings.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Agility Recovery Solutions has added online data backup capability to its portfolio of service offerings. The new service, which is the result of a strategic agreement with AmeriVault, synchronizes online data backup, off-site storage, and...

iLumin, which provides intelligent content solutions, and Permabit, a software company that offers content-addressed storage (CAS) software, are jointly marketing Permabit's Permeon software and iLumin's Assentor Enterprise as a complete e-mail archiving solution.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... iLumin, which provides intelligent content solutions, and Permabit, a software company that offers content-addressed storage (CAS) software, are jointly marketing Permabit's Permeon software and iLumin's Assenter Enterprise as a complete e-mail...

FalconStor Software.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... FalconStor Software has announced qualification of its IPStor iSCSI appliance under the Designed for Windows Logo Program.

StorageTek and IBM have a reseller agreement whereby StorageTek is offering IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... StorageTek and IBM have a reseller agreement whereby SrorageTek is offering IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM Tivoli Software's flagship data-protection storage management software.

Symantec has completed the acquisition of PowerQuest.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Symantec has completed the acquisition of PowerQuest, which will enable Symantec to deliver solutions that allow customers to build, manage, and protect their IT infrastructures with end-to-end security management capabilities.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers will offer Exabyte's VXA-2 Packet Tape Drives.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Fujitsu Siemens Computers will offer Exabyte's VXA-2 Packet Tape Drives, both internal and external models, as optional storage components for its Intel-based Primergy line of servers.

QLogic has been chosen to be the supplier of Fibre Channel HBAs for a series of SAN solutions.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... QLogic has been chosen to be the supplier of Fibre Channel HBAs for a series of SAN solutions built upon the Hewlett-Packard StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) 1000.

Ciprico.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Ciprico has selected Kodak Service and Support, a business unit of Eastman Kodak Company, as its US service provider for Ciprico's line of DiMeda storage solutions. DiMeda products facilitate real-time file sharing between multiple...

XIOtech.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... XIOtech has launched its Dimensional Partner Program, a channel program for resellers of Magnitude 3D distributed storage clustering architecture.

OuterBay.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... OuterBay introduced its Outsourcing Partner Program to enable partners to provide its software to customers as a hosted or managed service. Participating partners include AdvizeX, Appshop, Data Intensity, and NEC. Outsourcing Partners will...

EqualLogic.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... EqualLogic's PeerStorage array has earned the Microsoft Designed for Windows Logo qualification for iSCSI devices

Atempo and Softek have jointly certified Atempo's Time Navigator data-protection software with Softek's Storage Manager.(Business Briefs)
January 1, 2004... Atempo and Softek have jointly certified Atempo's Time Navigator data-protection software with Softek's Storage Manager, resulting in seamless interoperability between the two products across multiple platforms.

Maranti touts 'application-aware controllers'.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... More than a year after it was expected to begin shipments, start-up Maranti Networks last month released its CoreSTOR Adaptive Storage Services Platforms, which the company genetically refers to as network storage services controllers. The...

ExaGrid crisscrosses the competition.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... While larger and more-established vendors are knee-high in visions of utility computing, start-up ExaGrid is making final preparations for the release of its Grid Protected Storage architecture, a framework analysts say creates a...

Cloverleaf targets large SAN/NAS shops.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Cloverleaf Communications has begun shipments of an Intelligent Storage Networking (iSN) system that includes a storage administrator's wish list of software functionality. Only a partial listing of the software functions available with the iSN...

Gateway enters SAN, NAS markets.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... In a move that may propel the company into the competitive storage area network (SAN) market, Gateway recently announced that it will resell Hitachi Data Systems' Thunder 9500V series storage systems. However, Gateway will face an uphill battle...

ONStor delivers SAN-based file services.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Start-up ONStor claims its SF4400 "SAN filer" addresses users' top network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) issues, including backup, load balancing, clustering, return on investment (ROI), management, and performance. ...

NetApp furthers 'storage-grid' vision.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... Network Appliance is continuing to move forward with the storage grid strategy it outlined in November when it announced the acquisition of Spinnaker Networks. Its latest product releases support a storage-grid approach by leveraging the same...

NetApp, Veritas push DLM, D2D backup.(news analysis & trends)
January 1, 2004... This quarter, Network Appliance's alliance with Veritas will yield integrated products targeting data life-cycle management (DLM) and regulatory compliance as the result of an expanded partnership announced last August. Later in the year, the...

Leveraging storage resource management software: users are looking beyond basic capacity monitoring and reporting to SRM functions such as chargeback, capacity planning and provisioning, and "active" management.(Special Report)
January 1, 2004... Although storage resource management (SRM) software has not quite taken the world by storm--yet--things have definitely been happening in the market in terms of adoption strategies and vendor offerings. "SRM has had so much promise, and it...

Blade servers and storage implications: Part I: blade servers may revolutionize the data center, but they bring up some new and old storage challenges.
January 1, 2004... Blade servers provide a modular computing architecture aimed at improving operational efficiencies by reducing overall management and physical data-center costs. The first generation of blades was primarily geared toward edge applications and...

Fibre Channel update: to 4Gbps and beyond: last year, the FCIA approved 4Gbps Fibre Channel for use in SAN fabrics. End-user solutions are expected in the second half of this year.
January 1, 2004... The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) has been talking about speed issues throughout this past year, with discussions centering on whether to advance the speed from 2Gbps to 3Gbps or 4Gbps. First, the decision was made to maintain 4Gbps...

Snapshots enhance the power of replication: Part III: software-based point-in-time copies, or snapshots, enable a number of benefits, including replication between heterogeneous storage systems.
January 1, 2004... There is more to replication than mirroring for disaster recovery. Although replicating data can reduce recovery time, making point-in-time (PIT) copies, or snapshots, of data can "also be invaluable to IT organizations. The convergence of...

iSCSI accelerates the transition to network storage: an examination of the potential benefits of iSCSI shows why it may be a worthy alternative (or complement) to DAS, NAS, and Fibre Channel SANs.
January 1, 2004... Exploding data growth is placing tremendous pressure on enterprises to store, protect, distribute, and derive value from all that data. IT executives are increasingly looking for new storage solutions to manage their growing storage needs,...

Application-aware infrastructures ensure business continuance: building storage networks that are "application-aware" enables IT organizations to enforce service levels and availability policies based on the business value of data and applications.
January 1, 2004... In these challenging economic times, IT professionals are often faced with the mandate to protect their company's expanding data infrastructure while trying to maintain fiscal responsibility--requirements that are typically mutually exclusive....

Solving information life-cycle management challenges: ILM boils down to classifying data based on its relative business value and then putting the data on the most appropriate storage resource.
January 1, 2004... New government regulations on data retention, such as SEC Rule 17a-4 for financial services, HIPAA for healthcare, and 21 CFR Part 11 for the life sciences industries, are driving the need to manage data over its life cycle and to dispose of it...

Technical implications for iSCSI deployment: issues include performance, high availability, interoperability, manageability, and scalability.
January 1, 2004... The ratification of the iSCSI specification and Microsoft's delivery ofiSCSI driver support last year are expected to accelerate implementation ofiSCSl-based storage systems, iSCSI promises the benefits of storage area networks (SANs) at less...

Eye-POPing results in NAS server tests: FIA's Gigabit NAS server turns in impressive throughput results, but performance depends on the operating environment.(lab review)
January 1, 2004... With the explosion of rack-mounted servers and the emergence of server blades in self-contained dusters, an old problem re-emerges: how to deal with storage. With many new systems having no room for internal storage beyond the bare minimum to...

iSCSI and TCP/IP offload engines: TOEs relieve CPUs from protocol processing, but whether or not you need them in an iSCSI environment depends on application requirements.(SNIA on storage)
January 1, 2004... TCP/IP offloading is a networking technology that assigns all, or part of, the tasks associated with the processing of the TCP/IP protocol to entities in the host system other than the CPU, freeing the CPU from protocol processing. iSCSI...

Sepaton launches virtual tape appliance.(Disk/Connectivity)
January 1, 2004... Sepaton (formerly SANgate) this month announced its new company name (which backwards spells "no tapes") and first product: the S2100 virtual tape appliance, which reportedly accelerates data restore speeds by a factor of 10. The appliance...

NAS for SMBs.(Disk/Connectivity)
January 1, 2004... Several vendors recently announced network-attached storage (NAS) fliers for the small-to-medium-business (SMB) and entry-level markets. Fastora released a new family of NAS servers based on Windows Storage Sewer 2003. The LiteStor...

Security for data 'at rest'.(Disk/Connectivity)
January 1, 2004... Decru and Vormetric recently upgraded their security appliances. Decru is shipping its DataFort T520 for encryption and authentication and with logging capabilities for tape backup environments. The company also introduced the DataFort FC520 to...

Sony ships DAT media.(Tape)
January 1, 2004... Sony Electronics last month began shipping a new 4mm DAT media cartridge. The DAT 72 cartridge has a 36GB native capacity (up to 72GB with 2:1 compression) and an 11GB-per-hour native data-transfer rate. The cartridges feature anti-static resin...

St. Bernard adds disk-based backup.(Software)
January 1, 2004... The 9.1 release of St. Bernard Software's Open File Manager software supports disk-level technology (which was previously available only to the company's OEMs and resellers) and Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)....

Storactive releases LiveServ for Exchange.(Software)
January 1, 2004... Storactive recently shipped LiveServ, disk-based backup-and-recovery software [hat provides continuous, zero-loss recovery of Exchange servers. The software reportedly overcomes many of the limitations of traditional tape-based backup products,...

LXI centralizes backup.(Software)
January 1, 2004... LXI last month introduced Universal Client Backup software for centralized control, management, and backup of disparate platforms (iSeries, Unix, AIX, or Linux) running LXI MMS or TMS/ix. The software helps organizations leverage existing...

Acronis upgrades backup software.(Software)
January 1, 2004... Acronis' True Image Server 7.0 provides server disk imaging backup, disaster recovery, and bare-metal restore. New features include support for incremental backups, scheduling, image verification, and the ability to done a disk drive to another...

AmeriVault broadens recovery services.(Software)
January 1, 2004... Online server backup and-recovery provider AmeriVault recently introduced Enhanced Recovery Services Suite, which includes a dedicated vault managed by AmeriVault in a client's data center. For faster recovery, a mobile vault can be made ready...

Calendar.(Calendar)
January 1, 2004... February 12 IP Storage Forum on the Road Seminar Series--Los Angeles Sponsored by the Storage Networking Industry Association, the half-day seminars include both technical and strategic sessions presented by IP Storage Forum experts,...