| NAS news |
Avere Adds SLC SSD Options
to 2U ASAPs
Editor:- January 26, 2010 - Avere Systems today
announced
it's shipping new
SLC
flash SSD options in its
FXT Series
10GbE NAS compatible
SSD ASAPs.
The
2U Avere FXT 2700 appliance (from $82,500) features 64GB of DRAM, 1GB of
NVRAM, and 512GB of SLC flash SSD. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and
support millions of operations/sec and tens of GB/sec throughput.
$10 million Funding for AoE Pioneer
Editor:- January
25, 2010 - Coraid
today
announced
that it has closed a $10 million Series-A
financing round with
Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners to accelerate the development and
adoption of its AoE
compatible storage.
New Directory for AoE Storage
Editor:- January 15,
2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new directory for
AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet NAS
Storage).
Although this
NAS mode first hit our news
pages in 2003 -
support for it has been miniscule and compatible products are only available
from a handful of vendors. Will 2010 be the year that it all changes? Maybe.
SSDs could play a part -
because less latency is wasted in this low level network storage interface.
New edition - the Top 10 SSD Companies
Editor:-
January 7, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published the 11 quarterly edition of the
top 10 SSD oems -
ranked by search volume in the 4th quarter of 2009.
This is always
one of the most popular articles on our site. I know that many SSD companies
themselves are nervous and eager to see how they've fared in this important list
which predicts future winners in the market based on the world's leading SSD
focus group. I've tried to be more direct with my own analytical comments too -
even if it means repeating some things I've already said in other places -
because I know that most of you don't have the time to read hundreds of SSD
articles. ...read the
article
Accusys Announces New iSCSI RAID
Editor:- October
12, 2009 - Accusys
today announced a
new range of
rackmount IP SAN products.
Accusys iSCSI ExaRAID family
includes 2U-12 bay, 3U-16 bay and 4U-24 bay
RAID systems designed
with active-active redundant controller support for high reliability and
availability, link aggregation and jumbo frame support for maximizing bandwidth
and performance over the Ethernet.
Dedupe Makes NAS SSD Affordable - says WhipTail's CTO
Editor:-
October 12, 2009 -
WhipTail Technologies
became the 1st SSD appliance company to market integrated in-line
deduplication.
At
SNW WhipTail
announced
it will ship its newly renamed Racerunner (6TB) NAS SSDs with
Exar's Hifn
BitWackr
deduplication and compression solution in Q4 2009. Racerunner has demonstrated
deduplication performance in excess of 1Gbps.
James Candelaria, CTO of
WhipTail Technologies said "Once again, we're proving
Tier 0 storage
doesn't have to be expensive. By providing in-line de-duplication, customers can
save money by investing only in the storage they need."
Storspeed Unveils NAS SSD Appliance
Editor:- October
8, 2009 - Storspeed
emerged from stealth mode and unveiled the
SP5000
Application-Aware cache.
This is a NAS compatible SSD
accelerator (base price $65,000 ) which uses a
fat flash SSD
environment integrated within a
hybrid storage
pool.
Storspeed says its patent-pending real-time traffic inspection
engine identifies and dynamically accelerates user and application traffic
automatically with no user intervention or complex
tiering.
This
is the 4th automatic SSD accelerator product to be launched in the past
month.
Avere Launches Hybrid NAS SSD Rackmounts
Editor:-
October 5, 2009 - Avere
Systems unveiled its
FXT Series of
clusterable 2U rackmount
hybrid
NAS appliances.
Each
module contains upto 8x 3.5"
SAS
hard drives, 64GB
DRAM and 1GB of
nv RAM. The embedded
Avere OS
provides storage acceleration by dynamically tiering between the internal
rotating and solid state storage. List pricing starts at $52,500.
"The FXT Series is a milestone in the evolution of storage
products with its dynamic use of storage media to maximize speed while
minimizing cost," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. "The
end-result is a product line that can deliver tremendous business value to
customers by providing high performance and high efficiency to the storage
network simultaneously."
Editor's comments:- Avere is the
3rd company in recent weeks to announce an automatic solution for the age old
problem of accelerating
legacy hard disk array applications with solid state storage. There are
some interesting differences in approach and target markets.
Avere's
product is aimed at NAS
systems. It's a complete end user solution which includes the hard disks
which are to be accelerated. Avere says the new product can be configured with
upto 1.6TB of DRAM per cluster.
Dataram's product is
aimed at SAN systems.
It's an end user upgrade solution which fits between the customer's
FC switch and
pre-existing SAN rotating storage arrays. In some cases where users have already
over provisioned hard disks - the
XcelaSAN
may also, as a side effect, increase the usable storage capacity as well as
speed up the apps.
Adaptec's
product is aimed at DAS
systems. The
MaxIQ
SSD Cache Performance Kit is an integrator / oem solution which
simplifies the task of building a hybrid storage pool.
Key questions
for customers are going to be:- Does it work? How does the price / performance
compare to vanilla SSDs and human tuning? And how
reliable are the
new products going to be? Understanding the
failure modes in
large SSD arrays is not something that traditional storage designers know
very much about.
NextIO Names New VP Sales
Editor:- September 15, 2009
-
NextIO has named DaWane
Wanek as VP of world wide sales.
Prior to joining NextIO, Wanek
served as a member of the executive team at
Dell, where he was a
director of the Advanced Systems Group. Wanek has also held senior sales
leadership positions with companies such as
RLX Technologies,
Scalable Software,
BMC Software and
Data General.
HDS will Remarket InMage's Appshot
Editor:- September
1, 2009 - Hitachi Data
Systems will co-brand and resell InMage's
Appshot
replication technology the 2 companies
announced
today.
InMage supports rapid, reliable recovery for various key
enterprise applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint as well
as Oracle, MySQL, BlackBerry Server, SAP, and any Windows, Linux or UNIX file
system.
NetApp's Revenue Dips, Names New CEO
Editor:- August
19, 2009 - Network
Appliance today
named
a new CEO.
Tom Georgens is the company's new president and CEO,
succeeding Dan Warmenhoven, who led the company as CEO for the past 15 years.
The transition in leadership, which is effective immediately, is the result of a
management succession process. Georgens, 49, joined NetApp in October 2005 as
executive vp and general manager of Enterprise Storage Systems.
NetApp also
reported
that revenue for the quarter ended July 31, 2009 declined 4% compared
to a year ago.
Editor's comments:- 2 years ago NetApp was one
of the world's fastest
growing storage companies and you might have expected that its leading
position in the analyst
reported fast growing storage
iSCSI market (at that
time) would have protected its revenue growth - even in the adverse market
which followed. But the company has become a laggardly follower rather than a
leader in the critical iSCSI SSD
market. That's clear to potential buyers - even if they aren't buying too many
of those products right now.
Naming a new CEO now - at a low dip in
the company's fortunes - means the new guy will look good when growth comes
back. (If it does.)
TB/hr NAS Indexing
Editor:- August 11, 2009 - Ever
wondered how long it would take to index your corporate data to make it easily
searchable?
Index Engines
today published a
useful
benchmark answering that question.
They sustained 1 Terabyte
per hour on a NAS system
from BlueArc. Base
price for the software is $85,000, and they say you should allow 4% to 8% of
the target storage as an indexing overhead.
I thought it would be
interesting to see how this compares to
Google's hardware
search appliance .
Google has published lots of
case studies
here - but I couldn't find a single magic number in the brief time before my
attention span moved on to the next thing ambushing my to-do list.
Caringo Offers Free 4TB Cloud Storage Evaluation
Editor:-
June 23, 2009 - Caringo
today
announced
it's offering a free way to evaluate the benefits of its cloud storage -
with the release of a Windows compatible CloudFolder linked to 4TB storage.
The
company says users can drag and drop individual files or whole directories to
CloudFolder for remote storage and can also make it a shared folder. Retrieving
files is as easy as double clicking on a file or folder.
Mark Goros,
CEO at Caringo says "We believe CloudFolder will inspire users to test and
deploy private cloud storage within an organization or throughout a network of
managed service customers."
QLogic Ships 40Gbps InfiniBand Switches
Editor:-
June 8, 2009 - QLogic
today announced general availability of its
12000
Series 40Gb/sec QDR InfiniBand switches.
"With 864 ports and
bandwidth of 51 terabits per second, the QLogic 12000 series is the highest
capacity general purpose QDR InfiniBand switch on the market today," said
David Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. "The
huge bandwidth of this solution brings HPC customers better scale-out
performance, lower latencies, simpler management and reduced costs."
See
also:- SAN switches,
InfiniBand
Dedupe Company Gets Duplicate Offers to Acquire It.
Editor:-
June 1, 2009 - EMC
says it wants to buy
Data Domain
for approximately
$1.8 billion.
EMC says its all-cash offer represents a 20%
premium to the cash
and stock offer made by
Network Appliance
for Data Domain on May 20, 2009.
What's the fuss about? - Maybe the big companies think that customers
are ready to put their money into dedupe technology after years of vendors
talking about it.
See also:- this article by Data Domain -
Is Deduplication of
Data Safe? - and More Deduplication FAQs
FCIA Reports on 2nd FCoE Plugfest
Editor:- May 20,
2009 - the Fibre Channel
Industry Association today
announced that
it successfully completed its 2nd FCoE Plugfest the week of May 12th at the
University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab.
Seanodes Warns of Virtual Storage Indigestion
Editor:-
May 20, 2009 - in what I initially assumed would be a bland
press
release yesterday from Seanodes I saw this
thought provoking observation from Frank Gana who founded the
iSCSI software company.
He
said - "The paradox in the 'virtual world' is that businesses invest in
VMware Infrastructure to reduce costs and simplify their environment, but then
find they need high-end
network storage, which
eliminates a large part of these benefits. Although the model is sound, Storage
Virtual Appliances are not immune from some of the same pitfalls, so we caution
users not to trade a headache for a stomachache just because their budget is
small."
Seanodes is warning that although IT users are looking
at storage virtual appliance to control costs during the economic downturn -
there can be hidden costs or technical problems if you choose the wrong route.
Amen to that - I say. Rushing to save costs by tampering with quick
fixes to technology infrastructure can be the worst way to go about it. Action
is not a substitute for careful research and planning to avoid failure.
Samsung Buddies up to Fusion-io
Editor:- May 19,
2009 - Fusion-io
announced it's
collaborating with Samsung
on memory technology for its ioSAN (its
PCIe form factor SSD
card with dual integrated 10GbE
or Infiniband
ports.
"Fusion-io has developed new types of solid state storage
products, and our work with them will enable enterprises to take advantage of
this innovative technology in the very near future," said Jim Elliott, Vice
President, Memory Marketing of Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
...Later:-
May 22, 2009 - an article in
The Register
summarizes recent people IO changes at Fusion-io.
Streaming Surveillance Camera Storage
Editor:-
April 27, 2009 - SoleraTec
has incorporated support for the
Real Time Streaming
Protocol that allows for the direct video feed capture of IP-based video
surveillance cameras in version 5.2 of its
digital surveillance manager
software (SVM).
SoleraTec says its software is unique in its
ability to provide a file-based search and retrieval interface that enables the
user to actually play video surveillance files without first needing to retrieve
original hi-res assets from storage.
When its SVM ingests files, it
automatically creates low-resolution proxy files for fast search and view. Once
a desired video asset has been selected, clipped, and marked for export, the
new, user-configurable "extended export" functionality enables the
user to export needed data in a variety of ways, such as FTP, email, and local
file systems. Pricing for Phoenix 5.2 starts at $996.
Cache-A Launches Tape Archive for Video Editors
Editor:-
April 17, 2009 - Cache-A
today announced its 1st product - the
Prime-Cache data tape deck -
an LTO-4 compatible
NAS appliance for the
digital film and professional video industry.
"Today's digital
film and video professionals working with file-based workflows need a highly
reliable and cost-effective storage medium for content archiving, interchange
and backup," said Phil Ritti, President and CEO of Cache-A Corp. "We
are delighted to offer these professionals a new line of products specifically
designed to meet their needs while extending the current base of award-winning
A-Series technology into future generations."
Cache-A has licensed Quantum's A-Series technology compatible with
industry-standard LTO data tape drives - the most successful line of
tape drives ever produced
- with more than 2.5 million drives deployed and 100 million cartridges
shipped.
Cache-A says that with a single Prime-Cache system, a user could
manage a 200TB archive for a total cost of less than $20,000 including media -
and with an archive life of 30 years.
SAN Solutions will Unveil Media Verification Engine at NAB
Editor:-
April 13, 2009 - SAN
Solutions announced that it will showcase the company's new Crawler
media verification engine next week at The
NAB Show.
In scanning file systems and indexing and verifying
media across a
SAN or
NAS based architecture, the
Crawler confirms the ongoing utility and value of stored media, and also enables
the content owner to federate storage archives and use a central database to
search all of its media assets.
Pillar Launches Axiom SSD Brick
Editor:- March 9,
2009 - Pillar Data
Systems launched the Axiom SSD Brick, a storage module with upto 12
Intel SSDs which
is compatible with Pillar's distributed RAID systems.
Pillar's
application
aware QoS software dynamically chooses storage types (SSD, FC-HDD, or
SATA-HDD) and tunes performance to satisfy quality of service priorities
based on user selections for each type of application.
Petabyte NAS for Gas has Small Footprint
Houston,
TX - February 17, 2009 - Landmark announced today the immediate
availability of its PetroStor disk storage platform, which provides
petabytes of online capacity for users with large seismic data sets in the oil
and gas exploration markets.
Combining enterprise-class storage
from NetApp with
real-time compression from Storewize,
the PetroStor costs less than $1,000 per terabyte. Landmark can help users
migrate their archives from tape to disk and also index files according to their
specific architecture, as well as incorporate metadata that makes users' files
easy to find in their ever-growing libraries of data.
"The
traditional tape model is
cumbersome and it restricts an organization's ability to make timely, informed
decisions," said Patrick Rogers, VP of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "With
the PetroStor storage solution, customers can keep all their data on enterprise
disk storage - providing fast, efficient and reliable access to data and thereby
enhancing their decision-making process while also eliminating the financial and
operational burdens of tape."
The House Always Wins - with Greener Storage
Palo Alto, Calif. -
February 10, 2009 - Pivot3, Inc today announced that 3 casinos have
chosen its IP SAN storage for a large-scale video surveillance expansion
project in Oklahoma.
By making this switch to
Pivot3's
Serverless Computing the Stringtown, McAlester, and Grant casinos stripped
out approximately 90 Dell
servers from the project. In addition to the
green benefits
of nearly 70kW saved, the casino saved more than $300,000 in lower acquisition
costs, lower surveillance data center build-out costs, and reduced power and
cooling. ...Pivot3
profile, NAS,
surveillance
- editor mentions | |
