| NAS news |
New Models from Solid
Access Technologies
Newburyport,
Mass - May 6, 2008 - Solid Access Technologies today announced higher
capacity models in its 2U rackmount line of RAM SSDs.
The
128GB model (price $75,000) is shipping now. The 256GB models will ship next
month. Both models are part of the USSD 200 product line - which dramatically
increases server efficiency by recovering CPU cycles formally lost in I/O wait
cycles. They deliver random read/write performance of 95,000 IOPS using a single
Fibre Channel link and over 70,000 IOPS using SAS. Access time is under 10
microseconds
"For applications facing critical performance
demands that can't be serviced by decades old spindle-based storage, ultra-fast
SSD is emerging as a weapon of choice to improve lagging storage speed,"
said Solid Access Managing Partner, Tomas Havrda. ...Solid Access
Technologies profile
Multiple Vendors Announce Support for FCoE
Editor:-
April 11, 2008 - this week Emulex and Intel
launched 10Gb/s Fibre
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapters.
Emulex explained the
thinking behind this. With FCoE, customers may now leverage the ubiquity of
Ethernet to converge both storage and networking traffic, improve overall
efficiency and simplify the infrastructure. Designed to natively transport Fibre
Channel traffic over the Ethernet network, FCoE will take advantage of lossless
Ethernet in the data center. A lossless Ethernet fabric provides the level of
performance and reliable delivery of data required for enterprise storage
environments.
Intel's PCIe dual port FCoE adapter will be in volume production in
May and will be priced at $799. The entire Intel 10GbE family will have FCoE
support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by July and on Windows later this year.
FCoE will be a new standard with support from leading storage and
switch oems. The first mention on these news pages was in
October 2007 -
when QLogic unveiled its products.
In theory FCoE may help customers
with an installed base of legacy FC applications reduce costs by moving them
onto Ethernet environments. In practise, as we saw with the long drawn out
birth pangs of the iSCSI
market - tidying up all the loose ends could take many years.
Book Digitization Project Selects Isilon Storage
SEATTLE, WA
- April 8, 2008 - the University of Michigan has selected Isilon Systems'
IQ clustered storage system as the primary repository for its Michigan
Digitization Project.
In partnership with
Google, the University is digitizing more
than 7.5 million books.
Each digitized book is approximately 55MB in
size, downloading at a rate of 3MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for
the entire 6 year duration of the project.
...Isilon Systems
profile
Buffalo Compresses Size of NAS Boxes
AUSTIN,
Texas - April 8, 2008 - Buffalo Technology today launched the dual
drive LinkStation Mini - a consumer NAS product with 2 integral 2.5" hard
drives.
The product measures only 1.57 x 3.22 x 5.31 inches and
weighs 1.1 pounds. ESP for a 1TB units is $699.
...Buffalo Technology
profile
AMD Announces Design Kit for Storage Bridge 2.0
ORLANDO,
FL - April 7, 2008 - At the Storage Networking World conference AMD
announced availability of the first Reference Design Kit for the SBB 2.0
specification based on the AMD Athlon processor.
AMD expects
this will help storage vendors deliver low power, high performance, entry-level
networked storage systems while helping reduce time-to-market. AMD also today
announced 3 new, low power AMD Athlon dual-core processors for embedded system
designs. ...AMD profile
STORAGEsearch.com Reports NAS on the Rise
Editor:- April 1, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top subjects
viewed by storage searchers in March.
The top 5 subjects were:-
(1)
-
Disk to disk backup - no
change
(2) -
Solid state disks - up 1
place
(3) - NAS - up 4
places
(4) -
Hard drives - down 2
places
(5) -
2.5 inch SSDs - down 1
place
Overall pageviews grew 10% compared to the year ago
period. For marketers who are interested in
SEO - the
top incoming search word "SSD" occurred 4x more often than in
the year ago period. More info about the top 20 subjects and articles can be
viewed on the market
research page
Index Engines Names New VP of Sales
Holmdel, NJ -
April 1, 2008 - Index Engines today announced the appointment of Tony
Fusarelli as VP of Sales.
Fusarelli is a seasoned executive
with over 25 years of experiencey.
Recently, Fusarelli served as VP of sales for
Tacit Networks,
which was purchased by Packeteer as a result of its success. Prior to Tacit
Networks Fusarelli was VP of Sales at Lumeta
where he was responsible for tripling the company's revenue in less than 2
years. Fusarelli has also held executive sales positions at
Visara International,
General
Signal Networks and INRANGE
Technologies.
...Index Engines
profile, Storage People
PivotStor Launches Email Appliances
SAN DIEGO -
March 11, 2008 - PivotStor today introduced its new EP-Series email
management appliance.
At a starting price of less than $1,300 the EP-Series of
disk based
NAS appliances enables
companies to grow and fully protect and manage their email while ensuring
compliance with a full range of regulations. Configurations range from 50 to
2,500 mailboxes (and upto 3 billion email messages a year). Form factors
include:- desktop, 1U and 2U rackmount.
...PivotStor profile
Iomega Says No to EMC
SAN DIEGO -
March 10, 2008 - Iomega Corp announced today the receipt of an
unsolicited non-binding indication of interest from EMC Corp, in which
EMC indicated that it is prepared to offer to acquire the outstanding common
stock of Iomega.
Iomega's board of directors met on March 9, 2008,
and unanimously determined that the proposal from EMC would not reasonably
constitute a superior proposal.
...Iomega profile,
...EMC profile
Editor's
comments:- a few years ago I predicted that the
long term threat
to EMC, NetApp etc comes from
NAS becoming a
predominantly consumer / SMB market. Acquiring Iomega would have been a cheap
way for EMC to dip its toes into unfamiliar water - where budgets and vendor
ties are more shallow.
The best hope for the biggest storage box
vendors like EMC, IBM etc is to stay in the controlled climate of the
datacenter - and siphon off some of the torrents of cash that will be spent on
solid state disk
accelerators.
iSCSI Grew 4x Faster than NAS Market
FRAMINGHAM,
Mass - March 6, 2008 - Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues
grew 9.8% year-over-year in Q407 totaling $5.3 billion, according to
IDC.
Capacity shipped grew 56.3%.
Network disk storage grew
16% but the hot spot was
iSCSI with 70% revenue
growth.
For the full year,
EMC maintained its lead in
the external disk storage systems market with 22% revenue share, followed by
IBM and
HP.
Dell,
Hitachi, and
Network Appliance
ended the year in a statistical tie to round out the top 5. In this group
Network Appliance and Dell posted the strongest year-over-year revenue growth
during 2007, with 19% and 17% growth, respectively.
...IDC profile,
Market research
Editor's
comments:- for most of us (whose bonuses aren't linked to these numbers)
there's been no significant change in overall revenue growth in this part of the
storage market for many quarters. So you might say - what's new?
One
thing I'd say - is note the growing gap between the
hard disk market
which is growing nearly twice as fast as the "external disk systems
market". That's due to a black hole in consumer products which is sucking
in disks as fast as anyone can make them. And maybe due to lower margins in the
enterprise storage market due to competition from what IDC lumps together as "others"
- who have been trimming some of the fat off the top 5's oligopoly.
Another
thing, which IDC comments on is that the doom and gloom from the worldwide
financial markets doesn't seem to have slowed down this market.
SeaChange Eliminates Spinning Disks in the On-air Chain
March
3, 2008 – SeaChange International today introduced its
Broadcast Flash Memory Library FML200, a flash memory-based ingest and
play-to-air solution that sets a new benchmark in reliability and economy.
With no moving parts, the breakthrough server is 100x more reliable and consumes
10x less power than spinning disk-based counterparts, greatly mitigating
failures, rebuilds, replacements and other disk-related threats. The system can
eliminate spinning disks in the on-air chain and is immediately available for
television operators worldwide. SeaChange will demonstrate the FML200 at
NAB2008 in April.
...SeaChange
International profile
Adaptec Launches 28 Port RAID Adapters
HANOVER,
Germany - March 3, 2008 - Adaptec Inc. today unveiled the first RAID
adapter family offering up to 28-ports.
With 24 internal and 4
externalports Adaptec's 52445 PCIe
RAID controllers
($1,595 MSRP) enable up to 256
SATA or
SAS drives to be
seamlessly connected to a single system.
...Adaptec profile
PowerFile's Archive Facilitator Picks
Jukebox Hits
SANTA CLARA, Calif -
February 26, 2008 - PowerFile Inc. today introduced the Archive
Facilitator which automatically discovers, classifies and moves fixed content
to the company's (optical) Active Archive Appliance.
Typically unstructured data represents 70% of the information being
stored on expensive primary storage and up to 80% of that data has not been
accessed or modified in more than a year. As a result some organizations are
turning to active archiving to better align data with storage based on business
value. PowerFile's
Archive
Facilitator is scalable and and manages tens of terabytes per appliance
and hundreds of terabytes per enterprise deployment. ...PowerFile profile,
Optical Libraries
HyperIP Acceleration Software Scales to
Wire Speeds
MINNEAPOLIS,
MN - January 28, 2008 - NetEx today announced a new faster version of
its HyperIP software technology that deliver near-native wire speed
performance of 800Mb/s on a COTS Intel appliance.
NetEx customers can purchase the HyperIP data acceleration solution
on an industry standard platform at 1.5 Mb/s and then add performance as needed
up to 800Mb/s all in the same appliance with no hardware upgrades required.
...NetEx profile
StorageMaster Offers Real-time Content
Delivery
ATLANTA,
GA - January 24, 2008 - Concurrent Computer announced today the launch
of its new StorageMaster product line.
The target market includes
broadcasters who need very high-speed storage and retrieval, critical data I/O
capability and advanced data prioritization. The StorageMaster regional file
server allows service providers to centrally house and rapidly transport
specific content (faster than real-time) to remote locations, even down to the
node level.
"Concurrent's on-demand platforms must store and
stream thousands of hours of video content for hundreds of thousands of
end-users, but, in the end, you are still dealing with digital data,"
explains Bob Chism, Concurrent's CTO.
...Concurrent
profile
QNAP Includes Enterprise Features in
Entry Level NAS
Taipei, Taiwan -
January 21, 2008 - QNAP Systems, Inc. today unveiled its 4-bay TS-409
Pro Turbo NAS for business users.
The TS-409 is a hot-swappable
HDD design with RAID 0/ 1/ 5/ 6/ 5+spare disk redundancy and remote
replication functions.
According to QNAP's VP Shawn Shu, "The
hot swap design and the advanced RAID are the dominant features of TS-409 Pro
that are rarely provided by other entry-level
NAS suppliers. The RAID 5
and RAID 6 support, Online RAID Level Migration and Capacity Expansion features
are an important breakthrough in NAS for business and SOHO users."
...QNAP Systems profile
Seanodes Gets Funding for Shared
Internal Storage
Boston, Mass - November 6,
2007 - Seanodes today announced the closure of a $6.5 million funding
round that will propel the company's expansion of its Shared Internal Storage
concept to customers worldwide.
Seanodes software allows customers
to reclaim unused internal disk space within existing application servers and
make that capacity available as a high performance virtualized storage pool,
eliminating the need for costly and complex conventional
SAN and
NAS products.
...Seanodes profile,
Squeak! - Venture Capital
Funds in Storage
Intel Launches Cool NAS Server for the
Home
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - November 6, 2007 - Intel Corp today announced a new NAS
storage platform for the home.
The
SS4200x
supports upto 4x 3.5"
hard disk drives in a "customizable
and consumer-friendly shell design" and is available with or without
software. For example the fully loaded Intel SS4200-E includes software from
EMC to create a flexible
NAS appliance. It is also
an ideal platform for Windows Home Server. The new products will be available
in December, starting at $500. ..Intel profile
Editor's
comments:- in the 1990s Sun
Microsystems introduced the world to pizza box servers and storage.
You'll recognise what inspired Intel's new box design next time you save
left over chile in your freezer.
Google Launches New Search Appliance
MOUNTAIN
VIEW, Calif - October 10, 2007 - Google Inc. today announced a new
version of its search appliance hardware.
Search results and
security haven been improved. More than 10,000 companies now rely on
Google
enterprise search appliances.
"When we launched the first
Google Search Appliance 5 years ago, we had a vision to make search inside of
business as simple and effective as searching on Google.com," said Dave
Girouard, VP and general manager of Google Enterprise. "By combining
Google's deep knowledge in search with more understanding and control for
environments behind the firewall, we are helping businesses keep pace with the
velocity of information." ...Google profile
Coraid's AoE Wins InfoWorld Award
SAN
CLEMENTE, CALIF - September 27, 2007 - InfoWorld has named Coraid's
AoE Tools as a winner in its 2007 BOSSIE Award for Best of Open Source in
Storage.
"Open Source Software has moved into the mainstream," said
Steve Fox, Editor in Chief at InfoWorld. "InfoWorld's inaugural Bossie
Award winners represent mature, flexible, and reliable solutions that
increasingly define the segment."
AoE
has become a de facto standard in Ethernet storage area networking, offering a
simple alternative to iSCSI
or Fibre Channel SAN. AoE
has over 1,000 active users with very large storage systems ...Coraid profile | |
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Megabyte's
5 Year Prediction for the NAS Market
As the market for networked
consumer storage in 2011 will be bigger than that for NAS in the enterprise
consumer storage companies and products (with much lower price points and cost
of sales) will take over what is now regarded as the low and medium levels of
the market which are (in 2006) occupied by Network Appliance, HP and EMC.
The
consumerization of network storage may be a more aggressive and dramatic process
than the consumerization of the PC was for the computer industry in the 1980s
and 90s.
If international markets remain open then most, if not all, the
world's leading NAS manufacturers by 2011 will be based in China, Taiwan or
Korea. The lowest cost place to manufacture NAS will be in proximity to, or in
the same factory as, the lowest cost place to manufacture the drives. The
ground breaking investments for those super storage plants of the future have
already begun.
Standardization will mean there will be much less
opportunity for US NAS manufacturers to supply services or higher pricing based
on brand strength. Although new markets will be created for very high
performance storage systems to deliver the backbone functionality that will be
required by the demands of the online digital tv market - it is possible that
those needs will be met by server farms of single board computers with onboard
embedded solid state disks,
and that for most organizations the notion of the "big storage box"
may be as irrelevant as the concept of the mainframe is today - for large
internet companies like Google.
NAS market shifts may lead to a scramble to acquire high end
storage switch and
router storage technology - which will become the central cores in enterprise
storage environments.
One safe bolthole for the NAS industry will be
long term archive storage. Because it's unlikely that the media used for online
enterprise storage (which will overlap with consumer products) will comply with
the needs of data regulators.
note:- the above article was first
published here in
December
2006 | |
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NAS, DAS
or SAN? - Choosing the Right Storage Technology for Your Organization -
article by Xtore
It's 5 years since we published the
Storage Architecture
Guide a classic reference written by the world's first network storage
company Auspex. The new overview article from Xtore places the main storage
connection strategies in a current context. Here's an extract.
"Another
important consideration for a medium sized business or large enterprise is
heterogeneous data sharing. With DAS, each server is running its own operating
platform, so there is no common storage in an environment that may include a mix
of Windows, Mac and Linux workstations. NAS systems can integrate into any
environment and serve files across all operating platforms. On the network, a
NAS system appears like a native file server to each of its different clients.
That means that files are saved on the NAS system, as well as retrieved from the
NAS system, in their native file formats. NAS is also based on industry standard
network protocols such as TCP/IP, FC and CIFS. " ... read the article,
...Xtore profile | |
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| SSD
Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
 | |
| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 412G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) - Delivering Flexibility to
the Data Center
"SAS gains a performance advantage through its
support of multiple initiators, or the ability to support I/O requests from more
than one controller at a time. With dual ports and multiple initiator support,
SAS RAID arrays can implement dynamic load balancing, allowing I/O requests to
be evenly spread across multiple controllers, leveraging the full processing
power of all of them. Without this capability, the I/O requests can become
skewed, and overload one controller, while the others may not be at full
capacity. SATA technology does not support this capability."
...read the article,
...LSI Logic profile,
...Maxtor profile,
Serial Attached SCSI | |
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Flash
Memory vs. Hard Disk Drives - Which Will Win? - article by Semico Research
There's
a confusing picture in many consumer products like phones, cameras and music
players in which one day it seems that the storage function is done by flash
and next day another company announces they're doing the same thing with
miniature hard disks.
Is there any sense to this seemingly random
choice?
This article uses pricing trends, technology trends and
unique market analysis insights to show that users and oems may be able to
reliably predict which storage devices will be most cost effective depending
where you are on the future history curve. ...read the article,
...Semico Research profile,
Hard disk drives,
Flash Memory,
Market research,
Solid state disks | |
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10 Ten
Tips for a Successful RAID Implementation - article by Infortrend
Editor:- In the 20 years since I first worked on
RAID I've read and
published countless articles about this subject.
So what can a new
RAID article tell you?
Plenty of practical stuff - from a modern
perspective. ...read
the article
, ...Infortrend
profile | |
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the Impact
of Compliance on Archival Storage Strategies - article by Plasmon
It's
difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to
the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the
problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should
destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they
stay deleted?
Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you
run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the
data recovery
industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that
Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is
dispersed and disposed of in different types of media.
This article
summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market
technologies. ...
read the article,
...Plasmon profile,
Optical Libraries | | |
