InfoStor articles from July 2002

InfoStor archives from July 2002

New options may ease NAS management, improve scaling.
July 1, 2002... Venture capital firms have invested big bucks in a new category of storage products that many believe may hold the key to helping end users better manage and scale network-attached storage (NAS) environments. Are they the quick fix that users...

Microsoft to move-beyond NAS.
July 1, 2002... Currently focused on Windows powered network-attached storage (NAS) software, Microsoft's new Enterprise Storage Division plans to introduce more storage products. In addition to expanding its NAS-related software family, Microsoft is...

Start-ups take on SAN, NAS leaders.(3PAR Data and Zambeel )
July 1, 2002... Storage start-ups 3PAR Data and Zambeel believe they have the products, services, and support in place to compete against a slew of other start-ups in addition to well entrenched incumbents. 3PAR and Zambeel have developed products they claim...

Shared file systems help justify SANs: PolyServe, SGI enter the marker.
July 1, 2002... Although storage area networks (SANs) allow users to share storage resources, without a shared (or clustered) file system, users can't actually share data. One of the key advantages of shared file systems is that they allow multiple users or...

Brace yourself for an onslaught of start-ups. (Editorial).
July 1, 2002... According to B2B Data Corp. (www.b2bdatacorp.com), 108 storage vendors--the majority of which were startups--received funding over the last two years. The amount of venture capital that poured into these fledglings is staggering, given the...

Confluence Networks. (Business Briefs).($28.3 million second round of venture capital funding)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Confluence Networks, a developer of next-generation network-based storage management platforms, has completed a $28.3 million second round of venture capital funding, bringing total investment to approximately $45 million. Venture Strategy...

TidalWire has acquired McData's HBA business. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... TidalWire has acquired McData's HBA business. The strategic relationship leverages McData's SAN hardware, software management, and support with Tidal Wire's HBA fulfillment and support capabilities. Under the terms of the agreement, McData will...

jobstor.com. (Business Briefs).(launched a job board )(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... jobstor.com has launched a job board designed specifically for experienced professionals seeking job opportunities within the top companies of the storage industry. The Website features an extensive database of job listings searched by...

Ikadega. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Ikadega, a NAS appliance vendor, has ceased operations after being in business for two years. The Northbrook, IL-based company had raised $15 million in venture capital, including an $8 million round in March 2001 led by Chicago-based Kettle...

TrelliSoft. (Business Briefs).(StorageAlert/Apps for Microsoft SQL Server and StorageAlert/Apps for Sybase are now available )(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... TrelliSoft's StorageAlert/Apps for Microsoft SQL Server and StorageAlert/Apps for Sybase are now available for customers in its Early Adopter program. StorageAlert has a single GUI and a common policy engine to automate and enforce storage...

Quantum and Maxell have settled all legal claims between the companies over the qualification, production, and sale of DLTtape media products. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Quantum and Maxell have settled all legal claims between the companies over the qualification, production, and sale of DLTtape media products. Quantum and Imation also have committed to completing qualification of Imation as a manufacturer of...

EMC's CLARiiON now supports Compaq Tru64 Unix operating environments. (Business Briefs).(and Storage Technology's SnapVantage)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... EMC's CLARiiON now supports Compaq Tru64 Unix operating environments, enabling customers to combine the power networked EMC CLARiiON enterprise storage systems and software with Compaq AlphaServers running the Tru64 Unix operating system and...

Veritas Software has selected Adexis, the storage division of Crane, as one of the first national solution providers to offer Veritas' ServPoint NAS software. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Veritas Software has selected Adexis, the storage division of Crane, as one of the first national solution providers to offer Veritas' ServPoint NAS software. Separately, StorageTek has selected Adexis as a national reseller of the StorageNet...

LXI's Tape Tracker 3.5 is now certified for Tivoli Storage Manager 5.1. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... LXI's Tape Tracker 3.5 is now certified for Tivoli Storage Manager 5.1. Tape Tracker consolidates tape information from multiple backup servers and network backup products, including the, iSeries 400.

Vendor group advocates disk-based backup. (News Analysis & Trends).
July 1, 2002... Acknowledging that tape-based backup can be an onerous task with a number of drawbacks, a group of software and hardware vendors have banded together to form the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative (EBSI). Spearheaded by Quantum, the group...

StorageNetworks shifts focus to software. (News Analysis & Trends).
July 1, 2002... Former storage service provider (SSP) pioneer StorageNetworks is shifting gears to focus on delivering storage management software, while continuing to support its managed service customers. With its first customer-installable software, the...

Overland, ADIC diversify core businesses: Overland partners with leading ISVs, ADIC acquires virtual tape company. (News Analysis & Trends).
July 1, 2002... As a testament to the times, both Overland Storage (formerly Overland Data) and Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) recently announced plans to broaden their storage portfolios with the introduction of new storage management software...

User perspective.(interview with Yatish Mishra of RagingWire Telecommunications Inc.)(Interview)
July 1, 2002... Yatish Mishra is president and chief technology officer at RagingWire Telecommunications, an IT solutions provider in Sacramento, CA, and a 3PAR beta customer. The company provides managed services and data-center infrastructures to large...

Keeping your SAN under lock and key; Q: we are getting ready to deploy a storage area network (SAN) and we are wondering what kinds of security measures to take. Are SANs susceptible to hacking? (Reader-Expert I/O).
July 1, 2002... The good news is that SANs are assumed to be secure from hacking mainly because your average teenage hacker does not have access to Fibre Channel equipment to practice on. The bad news is that many SANs extend beyond the locked doors of the...

Mountain View Data offers SAK alternative. (News Analysis & Trends).
July 1, 2002... Mountain View Data (MVD) recently released the latest edition of its software kit that allows OEMs to turn Intel-cased servers into network-attached storage (NAS) devices that offer high-end features at lower costs than traditional NAS,...

SNIA Education Committee focuses on end users: white papers, success stories, the SNIA Dictionary, and educational courseware serve the educational needs of storage networking IT professionals. (SNIA on Storage).(Storage Networking Industry Association)
July 1, 2002... When the Storage Networking Industry Association's Education Committee meets quarterly at SNIA Symposia, its membership discusses its mission of accelerating the adoption of storage networking by increasing the level of knowledge among end...

End-user survey; storage area networks: the Aberdeen Group surveyed 150 IS managers at mid-sized to large corporations about their SAN experiences. Here are the results.
July 1, 2002... The proliferation of data is an ongoing phenomenon, driving IS managers to deal with increasing management and cost issues that arise from the need for greater storage capacity. Storage area networks (SANs) remain one of the most popular...

Countdown to Serial: helping users weigh their interface options; new drive interfaces will meet end-user demand for better performance, lower costs, and greater flexibility. (Special Report).
July 1, 2002... Much has been said and written about Serial ATA and its potential impact on storage markets. For the past year, analysts have been forecasting big numbers for Serial ATA not only on the desktop, but also in multiuser environments where cost,...

Using policies to manage data: storage policies bring IT management closer to the goal of 'hands-free' management and data protection.
July 1, 2002... It used to be that when storage Capacity ran low, all you had to do was add another disk array, jukebox, or tape drive onto your network. That is no longer an option. Strapped with increasingly tight storage budgets, IT administrators today are...

RAID options for high-density server's: options range from software RAID to IDE/ATA and SCSI RAID to chip-level implementations.
July 1, 2002... The demand for low-cost, high-density application servers, including blade servers, is taking off rapidly. Many of these systems, typically housing two to six internal drives, already play roles at ISPs, in cluster node installations, or as...

Part I preparing for SRM deployment: the first of two articles provides tips to help you get started on storage resource management testing, installation, and deployment. (Labs Review).(storage resource management softare)
July 1, 2002... There are several aspects of storage resource management (SRM) software to test, from measuring performance impact to assessing system stability and avoiding negative interactions with third-party applications (antivirus, backup, and other disk...

PCI Express and InfiniBand are complementary: PCI Express will be used to connect support chips, while InfiniBand will be used primarily for connecting systems and storage across data centers. (Opinion).
July 1, 2002... Considerable confusion exists around the interplay of PCI Express (formerly 3GIO) and InfiniBand. Many people believe they might be competing interconnects designed to address the I/O logjam in systems used in data centers. Others think IT...

Sorting out SAN and disk drive interfaces: on the SAN front, it's Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI and InfiniBand. For disk subsystems, ATA, SCSI, and Fibre Channel face serial versions of ATA and SCSI. (Opinion).
July 1, 2002... Storage area networks (SANs) are networks that allow multiple servers to access a pool of shared storage. Today, the word "SAN" is practically synonymous with block-based SCSI I/O over Fibre Channel. Several "SCSI-over-IP" protocols (e.g.,...

HP focuses on recovery. (Software).(HP OpenView line of disk-based recovery management tools)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... In response to end-user demand for more-efficient data-recovery methods, Hewlett-Packard last month introduced a variety of new disk-based recovery management tools. The products, which fall under the HP OpenView umbrella, are designed to...

Syred debuts SAN management software. (Software).(Cloud-Stor)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... At last month's Gartner Inc. PlanetStorage conference, Syred introduced its Cloud-Stor storage area network (SAN) management software, which provides volume virtualization capabilities in either (or both) in-band or out-of-band modes. In...

NAS options proliferate. (Disk/Connectivity).
July 1, 2002... IBM recently announced new software and hardware improvements that the company claims double the performance of the TotalStorage network-attached storage (NAS) devices. For example, NFS performance was improved by up to 67%, the company claims....

Nexsan boosts disk-to-disk performance. (Disk/Connectivity).(Nexsan Technologies' InfiniSAN)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Nexsan Technologies has improved the performance of its InfiniSAN disk-to-disk (D2D) backup appliance by up to 30% and enhanced the system's underlying software architecture to make it easier to manage and upgrade. Features include new...

Eurologic introduces 2Gbps RAID. (Disk/Connectivity).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Eurologic Systems has added a 2Gbps Fibre Channel RAID subsystem to its line of SANblock disk arrays. The array includes dual external RAID controllers and up to 14 disk drives in a 4U enclosure. The company claims performance of up to 100,000...

Apcon automates Fibre Channel testing. (Disk/Connectivity).(Apcon's IntellaPatch FC32)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Apcon's IntellaPatch FC32 is a physical layer Fibre Channel switch that can be used for interoperability and reconfiguration testing. The 32-port, 2Gbps FC32 enables engineers to automate cable pulls in fiber-optic or copper environments,...

Quantum ships SDLT 320 tape drive. (Tape).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Quantum last month began production shipments of its SDLT 320 tape drive, the second product in the company's Super DLTtape family. The drives have a 160GB native capacity and 16MBps native transfer rate. The capacity boost was achieved by...

Sony PetaApp offers integrated backup system. (Tape).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Last month, Sony Electronics introduced the PetaApp system, which includes a PetaSite tape library, DTF-2 tape drives, PetaBack software, and a Brocade SilkWorm Fibre Channel fabric switch. The system can be attached to a network (SAN or NAS)...

Benchmark doubles drive capacity. (Tape).(Benchmark Storage Innovations' ValuSmart Tape 160)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Benchmark Storage Innovations is expected to begin shipping its second-generation half-high ValuSmart (VS) Tape 160 drive to OEMs this month and to end users this fall. The drive has an 80GB native capacity and 8MBps native transfer rate,...

Maxell offers LTO cleaning cartridge. (Tape).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Maxell recently introduced a cleaning cartridge for Linear Tape Open (LTO) Ultrium format tape drives. The cartridge can be used to clean any first-generation LTO Ultrium drive, regardless of manufacturer; a firmware upgrade (available as...

Plextor ships 40/12/40U CD/RW drive. (Optical).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2002... Plextor's PlexWriter 40/12/40U CD-RW external optical disk drive uses a USB 2.0 interface and delivers 40X CD-Writer, 12X CD-Rewrite, and 40X CD-Read speeds. The drive also features 40X Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) rates and 40X...

Calendar.
July 1, 2002... iSCSI Architecture Instrumentation Training Class Powered by Medusa Labs, a wholly subsidiary of Finisar Systems, this three-day applications, and test engineers as well as-course is designed to give development, field technical marketing...

Emulex's LightPulse 2Gbps LP9002L Fibre Channel HBA has been selected by Fujitsu Siemens Computers for integration into its PRIMERGY and PRIMEPOWER server series. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Emulex's LightPulse 2Gbps LP9002L Fibre Channel HBA has been selected by Fujitsu Siemens Computers for integration into its PRIMERGY and PRIMEPOWER server series. The LP9002L features automaric speed negotiation capability that enables...

TidaiWire and Antares Microsystems (manufacturer of high-end I/O peripherals for SPARC and Intel-based systems) have established a distribution partnership. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... TidaiWire and Antares Microsystems (manufacturer of high-end I/O peripherals for SPARC and Intel-based systems) have established a distribution partnership, whereby Tidal Wire becomes the master distributor and technical support provider to...

Infortrend has a distribution agreement with Bell Microproducts. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Infortrend has a distribution agreement with Bell Microproducts, whereby Bell will market and distribute Infortrend's SCSI, Fibre Channel, and IDE RAID products.

BakBone Software and SANRAD, a global provider of iSCSI storage virtualization switches, routers, and bridges, announced interoperability between SANRAD's iSCSI V Switch and BakBone's NetVault. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... BakBone Software and SANRAD, a global provider of iSCSI storage virtualization switches, routers, and bridges, announced interoperability between SANRAD's iSCSI V Switch and BakBone's NetVault. The companies have also partnered to introduce the...

DataCore Software announced its SAN-vantage partnership with CommVault Systems. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... DataCore Software announced its SAN-vantage partnership with CommVault Systems. The two companies are jointly delivering enterprise class data protection to customers in the Microsoft Windows environment.

Legato Systems has signed a strategic technology and marketing agreement with Microsoft that provides Microsoft a license to implement selected Legato technology. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Legato Systems has signed a strategic technology and marketing agreement with Microsoft that provides Microsoft a license to implement selected Legato technology. The agreement provides the foundation for joint sales and marketing activities...

Dot Hill Systems has entered into a multi-year product purchase agreement with Sun Microsystems, whereby Dot Hill will produce and private-label certain products for Sun. (Business Briefs).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Dot Hill Systems has entered into a multi-year product purchase agreement with Sun Microsystems, whereby Dot Hill will produce and private-label certain products for Sun. As part of the relationship, Dot Hill will issue warrants to Sun,...