InfoStor articles from September 2008

InfoStor archives from September 2008

De-dupe inches into VTL backup: Part one of a two-part series.(CASE STUDIES)
September 1, 2008... The exodus from tape- to disk-based backup is well underway as IT managers attempt to find a way--any way-to escape the money pit that is tape management. But what might be surprising to some is that while disk-based backup solutions have...

EMC loads up midrange arrays.
September 1, 2008... EMC last month began shipping the Clariion CX4 Series of midrange disk arrays, which bring together a myriad of features and functions-including flash-based solid-state disk (SSD) drives, disk spin-down technology and dual-protocol SAN...

SSDs vs. HDDs: Pre-game warm-up: the upcoming battle between solid-state disk (SSD) drives and traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) is looming, and the heat in the controversy is reminiscent of the old iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel debates, even though the game hasn't really begun.(EDITORIAL)
September 1, 2008... SSDs have been around for decades, but until recently they have been outrageously expensive. Prices are coming down, but from a cost-per-gigabyte perspective they're still outrageously expensive. However, if you do the numbers on a...

ProStor Systems has announced availability of its RDX technology with entry-level HP ProLiant servers and xw series workstations.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... ProStor Systems has announced availability of its RDX technology with entry-level HP ProLiant servers and xw series workstations. The removable disk cartridges are available in 160GB and 320GB versions.

Emulex's 8Gbps LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs are now available and qualified for Hitachi Data Systems' enterprise and midrange storage platforms.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Emulex's 8Gbps LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs are now available and qualified for Hitachi Data Systems' enterprise and midrange storage platforms. Separately, Emulex's LightPulse HBAs have been qualified for use with EMC's Clariion CM midrange...

Hifn has earned certified status.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Hifn has earned certified status in Microsoft's Partner Program.

Caringo has entered into an OEM agreement with Messaging Architects.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Caringo has entered into an OEM agreement with Messaging Architects. Caringo's CAStor technology will be embedded into the latest release of M+Guardian Enterprise Email Firewall.

QLogic's 7200 Series InfiniBand double data rate (DDR) adapters have been certified as Intel Cluster Ready.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... QLogic's 7200 Series InfiniBand double data rate (DDR) adapters have been certified as Intel Cluster Ready. Separately, QLogic's 2500 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel adapters are certified for the latest release of VMware ESX and ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

Sepaton is guaranteeing a 40:1 de-duplication ratio on MS Exchange 2003 data for users with Symantec NetBackup software.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Sepaton is guaranteeing a 40:1 de-duplication ratio on MS Exchange 2003 data for users with Symantec NetBackup software. The FastStart Deduplication for NetBackup Environments package includes Sepaton's S2100-ES2 VTL and DeltaStor data...

Asempra Technologies has joined the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA) Program.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Asempra Technologies has joined the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA) Program as an Elite Partner.

FalconStor Software has a partnering agreement with China Security & Surveillance Technology to bring the efficiencies of SAN virtualization.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... FalconStor Software has a partnering agreement with China Security & Surveillance Technology to bring the efficiencies of SAN virtualization, storage provisioning, business continuity, and storage management to the digital video security and...

Moonwalk Inc., an Australian developer of data management and protection software.(Business BRIEFS)
September 1, 2008... Moonwalk Inc., an Australian developer of data management and protection software, announced that its Moonwalk 6.0 software has been certified for compatibility with the Hitachi Content Archive Platform.

NetApp de-dupes competitors' arrays.(NEWS analysis + trends)
September 1, 2008... NetApp has fired a shot across the respective bows of its competitors with the announcement that its VSeries family of storage virtualization controllers can now front-end primary storage systems from any vendor with virtualization and data...

IBM debuts TSM suite with CDP.(NEWS analysis + trends)
September 1, 2008... IBM recently began shipping the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) FastBack software suite, the first set of new products resulting from the company's acquisition of FilesX in April. The software provides continuous data protection (CDP) and...

Storage buyers battle weak economy.(NEWS analysis + trends)(Market overview)
September 1, 2008... Economic downturns typically touch off budget cuts, and if IT buyers have not felt the squeeze yet you will: It's coming and coming fast. As a result, some promising new storage technologies are facing an uphill battle in terms of adoption and...

Pivot3 combines server, storage virtualization.(NEWS analysis + trends)
September 1, 2008... Pivot3 is hoping to break out of its niche role as a storage provider for the digital video surveillance market with the debut this month of a new platform for the masses that runs both server virtualization and storage virtualization on one...

Storage device trends for data centers: drive and interface options are multiplying, making it easier for integrators and OEMs to meet a wider range of end-user requirements.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/ controllers)
September 1, 2008... Storage device options continue to broaden for end users, integrators, and storage system OEMs. For enterprise applications, hard disk drives (HDDs) are now available in several form factors, configured with parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, Serial...

The state of solid state in the enterprise.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/controllers)(Reprint)
September 1, 2008... Flash drives, also known as solid-state disks (SSDs), have a bright future in the enterprise space. They promise to overcome most limitations of traditional hard drives: performance, power consumption, heat dissipation, mean time between...

SSD flash drives enter the enterprise: Solid-state disk (SSD) drive manufacturers have solved most of the problems associated with flash memory technology, paving the way for use in enterprise-level storage systems.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/controllers)
September 1, 2008... Until recently, the idea of using solid-state disk (SSD) flash drives in an enterprise storage subsystem would have been deemed ludicrous. However, recent trends in NAND technology have made SSDs more viable in the enterprise storage market....

TMS combines RAM, flash.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/controllers)
September 1, 2008... Texas Memory Systems' most recent SSD product is a RAM-based, non-volatile SSD capable of sustaining up to 600,000 I/Os per second (IOPS), according to the company, and delivering up to 512GB of capacity in a 4U rack-mount chassis. The new...

Micron ships SLC NAND SSDs.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/controllers)(Micron Technology Inc.)
September 1, 2008... Micron Technology recently announced the next generation of its SSD drives for enterprise servers and notebook computing applications. The new NAND-based drives, the enterprise-class ReaISSD P200 and the client-focused ReaISSD C200, have...

IDC benchmarks SSDs.(Special REPORT: RAID disk drives/interfaces/controllers)
September 1, 2008... The recent buzz surrounding flash-based storage and its potential applications in the enterprise has prompted many in the industry to weigh the pros and cons of augmenting or replacing traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) with high-performance...

Disaster-recovery management comes of age: DRM collects information from DR processes to identify vulnerabilities in the recovery paths. It mitigates these gaps by repairing them or providing administrators with detailed, actionable reports, which fulfills many DR requirements.
September 1, 2008... Corporate disaster recovery (DR) for critical applications is a big, serious business--or it should be. But the poor state of many critically important DR environments says otherwise. It's not that the elements of a DR architecture are missing....

Multi-tier storage saves energy, space: combining energy-efficient tape, disk, and data de-duplication technology is the answer to many storage-related energy consumption concerns.(SNIA on storage)
September 1, 2008... Power, cooling, and space limitations are key issues faced by IT managers. Demand-side contributors include decreased hardware acquisition costs, sharp increases in server density, and an exponential rise in the volume of data being stored and...

What's in a name?(Esg insight)
September 1, 2008... You know that awkward feeling; it happens in a meeting with a client or a vendor, or with your team or your manager. When some buzzword, acronym, or industry term comes up, but you're not quite sure of the meaning, do you ask, or do you pretend...

Pillar pushes into SMB market.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Pillar Data recently began shipping the Axiom 300, an SMB version of its storage arrays designed primarily for its channel partners. The Axiom 300 includes a NAS unit, Fibre Channel or iSCSI Slammer storage controllers, capacities ranging...

Intel debuts SSD drives.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... At its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference last month, Intel's NAND Products Group took the wraps off solid-state disk (SSD) drives for mobile and desktop platforms, as well as enterprise-class SSDs, based on flash memory technology. ...

Nexsan goes green.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Nexsan recently introduced The Edge, a "green" NAS system that supports CIFS and NFS, as well as the company's energy-saving AutoMAID (massive array of idle disk) 2.0 technology. The Edge can be used to tier Nexsan's SAS/SATA disk arrays with...

Calendar.(Brief article)(Calendar)
September 1, 2008... SEPTEMBER 29-OCTOBER Gartner IT Security Conference--LONDON, ENGLAND Sponsored by Gartner, this summit presents a layered approach combining risk management and compliance, secure business enablement, and infrastructure protection. It...

Promise ships 16-port RAID.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Introduced this month, and due within 30 days, Promise Technology's SuperTrak EX16650 is latest addition to the company's line of EX RAID controllers. The 16-port EX16650 supports SAS disk drives and virtually all (more than 15) Linux kernel...

AIC intros iSCSI RAID array.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Advanced Industrial Computer (AIC) recently began shipping the X12000 RAID array, an iSCSI-based system based on iStor Networks' Gigastor "storage system on a chip." The X12000 supports four Gigabit Ethernet ports or one 10Gbps Ethernet port....

Enhance RAID delivers 800MBps.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Enhance Technology's 3U, 16-drive Ultrastor RS SS series supports SAS (15,000rpm) and/or SATA (7,200rpm or 10,000rpm) disk drives, up to 80TB of capacity, and more than 800MBps of throughput when configured with 15,000rpm SAS drives. The model...

NetCom array supports RAID 6.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... NetCom USA's NR6 family of 2U RAID subsystems come with either external PCI or eSATA interfaces and support RAID levels 0, 5, 6, and 10 and capacities ranging from 2TB to 8TB. The company claims throughput up to 400MBps. The arrays are...

StoneFly supports VMware, Xen.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... At the LinuxWorld conference last month, StoneFly (a subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory) announced that its IP SAN systems are certified with the VMware and Citrix/Xen server virtualization platforms. StoneFly also debuted SAN-based...

Quantum expands management tools.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Quantum has broadened the scope of its Vision management and reporting software, which covers the company's tape- and disk-based backup products, with features such as trend analysis of performance, data de-duplication ratios, capacity...

Sans Digital adds 2-bay RAID.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Sans Digital's TR2UT-B is a two-bay member of the company's line of TowerRAID arrays. The subsystem supports USB 2.0 and eSATA connections, and RAID 0, RAID 1, spanning, and JBOD configurations. The TR2UT-B is based on Silicon Image's 5744...

D2D for 64-bit Oses.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Advanced Vault's disk-to-disk (D2D) backup appliances are designed to replace complicated manual tasks with automated data protection and recovery. The company recently announced that it is extending those capabilities to include support for...

Asempra upgrades recovery tool.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Asempra Technologies has announced a new version of its Business Continuity Server (BCS) with expanded application support and performance and scalability upgrades for recovering applications in Microsoft environments. BCS 2.7 ensures...

Spectra Logic targets SMEs.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... Spectra Logic has released a new version of its T50 tape library, which is based on LTO-4 technology and includes features such as drive-level encryption and key management. The 4U T50e library stores up to 80TB, and allows users to scale from...

iStor upgrades management tool.(NEW PRODUCTS)
September 1, 2008... iStor Networks has released new management software for its iSCSI-based integraStor IP SAN systems. The integraSuite/MC Management Center software includes features such as virtualization (which presents a common pool of storage that can be...

Cleversafe goes commercial.(NEW PRODUCTS)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Cleversafe has announced the first commercially available Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet), a platform for storing and archiving digital content. Built using Cleversafe's appliances, the dsNet was created by a group of the company's service...