InfoStor articles from January 2009

InfoStor archives from January 2009

Dell extends EMC deal: Celerra added to lineup.(NEWS analysis + trends)
January 1, 2009... Dell and EMC announced last month that they have extended the length and scope of their storage partnership, and that Dell will add EMC's Celerra NX4 NAS systems to its storage portfolio. Praveen Asthana, Dell's director of enterprise...

FalconStor brings de-dupe to NAS backups.(NEWS analysis + trends)
January 1, 2009... FalconStor Software has extended the data de-duplication capabilities of its widely used Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product to a new segment of the data protection market--NAS-based disk-to-disk (D2D) backups. The company has announced a...

Lab reviews and webcasts.(ONLINE)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The print edition of InfoStor often does not permit the space to run long, in-depth Lab Reviews, but we've got a wealth of hands-on, technical reviews at infostor.com. Our Lab Reviews come from two organizations: the Enterprise Strategy Group...

Webcasts.(ONLINE)
January 1, 2009... We also have an extensive lineup of webcasts on infostor.com, from research/ consulting firms such as the Taneja Group as well as a variety of vendors. Some of the more recent webcasts include: * "New Approaches to Disaster Recovery: Are...

The 'C' in CDP has been downgraded.(EDITORIAL)
January 1, 2009... When I started writing this month's Special Report on continuous data protection (CDP), I had a goal of not getting into the "true CDP" vs. "near CDP" discussion/ argument. It just seemed old school, and we had already covered that angle in a...

Reldata.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... Reldata announced five new additions to its VAR channel: Capstone Technology Solutions, Condor Storage, DASDI, infoStructure and VarData. The VARs will distribute Reldata's virtualized storage platforms, which provide unified iSCSI SAN, NAS and...

JMR Electronics is partnering with white box manufacturer Source Code, which will resell JMR's BlueStor PeSAN products.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... JMR Electronics is partnering with white box manufacturer Source Code, which will resell JMR's BlueStor PeSAN products. BlueStor PeSAN storage subsystems are based on the PCIe bus.

Microsoft has approved Neverfail's continuous availability and disaster recovery software as part of its SQL Server Always On program.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... Microsoft has approved Neverfail's continuous availability and disaster recovery software as part of its SQL Server Always On program. The certification applies specifically to Neverfail for SQL Server software, which combines database...

RAID Inc. has entered into an OEM agreement with NEC Corporation of America.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... RAID Inc. has entered into an OEM agreement with NEC Corporation of America. RAID Inc. will license NEC's HYDRAstor HS8 grid storage platforms and the HYDRAstor trademark, and sell them under the brand Grid-X Backup.

Intel and Hitachi GST have announced plans to jointly develop NAND-based solid-state disk (SSD) drives.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... Intel and Hitachi GST have announced plans to jointly develop NAND-based solid-state disk (SSD) drives, with production shipments expected in 2010.

Oracle has contributed block I/O data integrity code, which was developed in part with Emulex, to the Linux community.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... Oracle has contributed block I/O data integrity code, which was developed in part with Emulex, to the Linux community. The code will be integrated into the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. The data integrity code exposes data protection information to the...

Hifn announced that Gresham Enterprise Storage has chosen its Express DR 1050 capacity optimization cards to integrate into Gresham's Clareti Storage Director.(Business BRIEFS)
January 1, 2009... Hifn announced that Gresham Enterprise Storage has chosen its Express DR 1050 capacity optimization cards to integrate into Gresham's Clareti Storage Director, a tape virtualization and backup virtualization solution.

Brocade adds fabric monitoring service.(NEWS analysis + trends)
January 1, 2009... Brocade has revamped an acquired network monitoring technology to offer customers a more comprehensive remote monitoring, alerting, and reporting service for data center fabrics. The Network Monitoring Service (NMS) provides real-time...

pNFS boosts NAS performance.(ESg: insights)(parallel network file system)(network-attached storage)
January 1, 2009... In our last column (see "What's next for NAS?" at infostor.com), we discussed scale-out NAS. As a follow-on to that article, we're going to explore some new functionality that leverages scale-out architectures to drive performance improvements:...

CA offers SaaS-based DR service.(NEWS analysis + trends)
January 1, 2009... Add CA to the list of software vendors turning their data protection products into services. The company recently announced the availability of CA Instant Recovery On Demand, a hosted and managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of its CA...

Scalability is a multidimensional challenge.(ANALYST VIEW)
January 1, 2009... Traditionally, scalability has been myopically viewed in terms of capacity growth demands and addressed by simply adding more storage. However, an extreme rate of data growth, greater demands for online data availability and accessibility, and...

CDP delivers granular recovery: "true" continuous data protection (CDP) enables companies to recover to any point in time (APIT), but do you really need to?(Special REPORT)
January 1, 2009... The first generation of continuous data protection (CDP) products did not live up to their exalted expectations, to say the least. And there were a number of reasons for that. For one, most of the early pioneers were relatively unknown...

Primary storage optimization moves forward: adoption of PSO is picking up, but there are a number of issues and developments that may change the game.
January 1, 2009... Data is growing at explosive rates, but the real news around that topic concerns new technologies designed to help users manage this growth. Storage capacity optimization (SCO) technologies, such as enhanced compression, single instancing,...

iSCSI plants roots in the Global 2000.(SNIA on storage)
January 1, 2009... A recent end-user survey conducted by TheInfoPro (TIP), an independent IT research firm, revealed several interesting findings regarding iSCSI adoption in Global 2000 organizations. It is well known that the use of iSCSI has consistently been...

VDI and snapshots: a winning combination.(ANALYST view)
January 1, 2009... The proliferation of user desktops is rapidly becoming an administrative quagmire for today's data centers. Desktop virtualization products have recently emerged, however, to reduce the negative economic impact of deploying a multitude of...

SANmelody = storage virtualization panacea.(lab REVIEW)
January 1, 2009... DataCore Software's SANmelody provides centralized disk virtualization software for small and medium-sized IT environments with 2TB to 32TB of usable disk space. In the same way that other forms of virtualization improve on server hardware, the...

HDS adds SSDs to disk arrays.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced plans to offer flash-based solid-state disk (SSD) drives in 73GB and 146GB capacities for its Universal Storage Platform V (USP V) array and the midrange Universal Storage Platform VM (USP VM) during the...

Symantec upgrades SRM.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... The latest version of Symantec's Veritas CommandCentral storage resource management (SRM) software features integrated storage change management capabilities. CommandCentral 5.1 now includes agentless functionality and an addition called...

Caringo adds file system.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Caringo has rounded out its content-addressable storage (CAS) product line with software that eliminates the capacity limitations of traditional NAS systems. The company's CAStor Content File Server (CFS) provides standard file system...

LSI enhances SAS/SATA adapters.(NEW PRODUCTS)(MegaRAID firmware)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The 3.5 release of LSI's MegaRAID firmware, which works with the company's MegaRAID SAS 8700 and 8800 family of 3Gbps SAS/SATA adapters, includes a number of enhancements, including multipathing and load balancing. The single-controller...

iQstor bundles SANs.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... iQstor Networks has introduced a turnkey SAN configuration consisting of its iQ2850 iSCSI arrays or iQ2880 Fibre Channel arrays combined with management and security software, including storage virtualization and SAN management, as well as data...

Calendar.(Brief article)(Calendar)
January 1, 2009... SEND BROCHURE/CONFERENCE INFORMATION TO STEVE SMITH, STEVESM@PENNWELL.COM OR FA X: (603) 891-0597. MARCH 1-6 SHARE--AUSTIN, TX The SHARE event features a technical program, compiled by users for users, across areas such as...

Bycast launches digital archiving platform.(NEW PRODUCTS)(StorageGRID 8 )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Long-term digital archiving has spawned a new crop of scalable, virtualized storage technologies that span multiple locations, and has led to the creation of archiving and storage services delivered via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models and...

Robobak offers 'thin' option.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... Remote and branch office backup specialist Robobak has launched version 9 of its Data Protection Suite software with a number of upgrades, including an option capable of cutting the backup window for full remote backups of Microsoft Exchange...

Avid upgrades arrays.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Avid Technology )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Avid Technology has launched a new version of its Unity ISIS storage platform with more capacity and performance than its predecessor. The array has been revamped to support the storage demands of real-time high definition (HD) video...

Reldata adds DR.(NEW PRODUCTS)(disaster recovery )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Reldata has added disaster recovery functionality to its line of unified iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication platforms that allows companies to replicate data from any disk array to Reldata's 9240 appliances at remote DR sites. The functionality...

Paragon manages disks.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Paragon Software Group's Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Paragon Software Group's Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite is a set of tools to manage hard disk drives. Features in the new Server Edition include: * File-level and image-level backups; * The ability to exclude files and folders from a...

Maxell analyzes tape cartridges.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Maxell's LTO Cartridge Memory (CM) Analyzer examines the quality of LTO tape cartridges by reading information stored on the LTO memory chip to determine whether the cartridge is intact or has deteriorated. The CA Analyzer tracks information...

Crossroads verifies tape media.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... The 3.0 version of Crossroads Systems' ReadVerify Appliance (RVA), which provides tape management and monitoring functionality, includes an ArchiveVerify feature that validates the readability of data and guarantees data restore. The RVA...

Enhance intros SATA arrays.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Enhance Technology's EnhanceRAID IP Series )(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Enhance Technology recently added three disk arrays to its EnhanceRAID IP Series of SATAbased disk subsystems, which include 64-bit processors and support for Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI. The R4 IP is a 1U, four-disk subsystem with dual GbE...

SpiderOak upgrades 'cloud' service.(NEW PRODUCTS)
January 1, 2009... Online backup services provider SpiderOak has added a number of features in the 2.0 version of its software suite, including a 4X increase in speed, faster file retrieval from large folders, and reduced memory usage during backups. Another...

StoneFly adds SAS expansion.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Dynamic Network Factory's StoneFly subsidiary recently began shipping SAS expansion enclosures for the S-Class models in its Integrated Storage Concentrator line of IP SAN disk arrays, which also support SATA drives. Pricing starts at about...