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storage news - May 2003storage historyhow fast can your SSD run backwards? SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" How Bad is the Fallout from Choosing the Wrong SSD Supplier? |
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| Parvus
Protects Hard Disk Drives from Shock/Vibration SALT LAKE CITY - May 14, 2003 - Parvus Corporation today announced the availability of its IDE Drive Boot, an innovative solution that enhances the reliability and durability of data storage for 2.5-inch ATA spinning media hard drives used in PC/104 embedded computer systems.
Made of Silastic® silicone rubber, Parvus' IDE Drive Boot effectively isolates harmful shock and vibration energies that normally limit the use of many conventional magnetic disk drives in mobile and/or rugged embedded computing applications. The product enables a 2.5-inch hard drive (which are commonly used in laptop computers) to be securely and safely mounted on Parvus' PC/104 CompactFlash & IDE Adapter, which provides a primary or secondary IDE controller to run the disk drive. The IDE Drive Boot includes mounting holes and a nylon retention bracket for properly securing the hard disk for high shock/vibration stress. The product also comes with a 16-bit PC/104 header that fits within an opening in the boot to pass though all PC/104 bus signals from Parvus' CompactFlash & IDE Adapter board to other system components in a PC/104 card stack. The advent of this protective boot enables the CompactFlash & IDE Adapter to provide an embedded system with the benefits of removable, non-volatile CompactFlash memory together with the large storage capacity of a traditional spinning media hard drive, despite rigorous shock/vibration requirements. In fact, Parvus has successfully implemented the IDE Drive Boot in custom integrated systems for the military, which have undergone environmental testing for compliance to the MIL-STD-810 standard. ...Parvus profile, Military & Rugged Storage Fibre Channel SAN Market Grew 3% in 2002 STAMFORD, Conn. - May 14, 2003 - Worldwide Fibre Channel SAN components hardware revenue totaled $1.47 billion in 2002, a 3% increase from 2001 hardware revenue of $1.43 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. "While the Fibre Channel industry experienced slower growth than in previous years, any increase is a show of strength in what was another difficult year for storage products and companies," said James Opfer, research vice president for Gartner's storage research group. "In 2002, the market continued to experience extraordinary market consolidation as the four leading vendors increased their revenue share to 85% of the market total." Brocade continued to maintain the No. 1 position in Fibre Channel component hardware revenue with its 2002 market share of 34% up from 32% in 2001. Emulex reclaimed the No. 2 position with a 23% revenue increase. QLogic showed the strongest growth in 2002 as its revenue increased 24%. The worldwide Fibre Channel switching products hardware market revenue reached $847 million in 2002, up 6% from 2001 as the market made a transition to 2 Gbps products. Brocade remained the dominant supplier, accounting for 59% of revenue. McDATA represented 30% of revenue while QLogic remained the No. 3 vendor with 5% of the market Worldwide Fibre Channel HBAs totaled $570 million in 2002, an increase of 1% from 2001. Emulex was the clear leader with 48% of the market, followed by QLogic with 32% market share. Hewlett-Packard, supplying products for internal use, was the No. 3 vendor. ...Gartner profile Editor's comments:- the SAN market did well to get any revenue increase at all during a year when many analysts were saying that it would be overtaken soon by NAS. Vendors like Spectra Logic have recently demonstrated that for backup applications iSCSI offers nearly the same end to end performance as fibre-channel SAN but at much lower cost. As second generation iSCSI products start appearing on the shores this summer the NAS surf will pick up speed. Fibre-channel will continue to be used, but SAN installations will increasingly be viewed as islands surrounded by a sea of NAS, and it's unlikely that the SAN market will ever again see more than single digit growth. EVault, and KKL Enter into Strategic Reseller Agreement Los Angeles, Calif. - May 14, 2003 - EVault Inc. today announced it has entered into a strategic reseller agreement with Kraft Kennedy & Lesser, Inc. (KKL), one of the nation's top technology integrators for law firms and legal departments. Under the terms of the agreement, KKL will integrate and support EVault InfoStage data protection and recovery software and its EVault Protectsm online service. KKL is also a subscriber of EVault Protect for its own internal backup needs. "Improving data protection processes and overall reliability is a core IT objective for which law firms are continuing to invest resources," said Peter Lesser, Managing Director, KKL. "Being able to offer EVault's technology in this area is a key differentiator and illustrates our commitment to providing best-of-breed solutions." The EVault-KKL partnership solidifies EVault's position as the leading provider of data protection and recovery services in the legal sector. With recent customer wins among prestigious law firms including Dewey Ballantine, McCarter & English and Allen Matkins, EVault currently boasts more than 100 legal customers throughout North America. ...EVault profile, ...KKL Imperial Announces WhatsHot SSD Tool EL SEGUNDO, Calif. - May 14, 2003 - Imperial Technology today announced WhatsHot, a new software product that tracks file usage by individual file name and outputs information that can be used to optimize data placement in storage infrastructures. "Given industry estimates that 50% of all data inquiries are directed at less than 10% of total data, it's amazing that contemporary Unix and Microsoft operating systems don't track file usage. It certainly makes business sense to know which files are essentially Hot Files and to optimize the storage infrastructure to maximize access to those critical files," said Robert David, CEO and President, Imperial Technology. "WhatsHot does exactly that. WhatsHot effectively illuminates the file interaction between server and storage, and enables administrators to take proactive actions that result in infrastructure productivity gains." WhatsHot is comprised of a simple and non-invasive software agent that resides on the server to collect real-time file access statistics. Once a brief snapshot is complete, WhatsHot provides a concise report that illuminates key file usage parameters including total file usage, time per access, percent file contribution of total workload, and average access size per file. It's a tool for empowered administrators to precisely determine file placement on maximum performance storage (Hot Files), moderate performance cost effective storage (Warm files), or high capacity storage (Cold files) devices. WhatsHot is a powerful administrative tool that uses actual real-time empirical data to monitor and measure file usage metrics and joins Imperial's recently announced Serv2Stor software as a foundation for Imperial's growing productivity enhancing suite of software deliverables. WhatsHot for Sun Solaris is available immediately with additional operating environments scheduled for later this year. Editor's comments:- in my editoral column October 2002 I said lack of suitable software tools was a factor slowing down the widespread adoption of SSD technology. "Part of the problem is that it takes knowledge about where the bottlenecks are in your system and that can change with every new release of your application software. Although it's economic to buy the hardware side of the solid state disk accelerator solution, the soft side still relies heavily on human experts to make the speedup work. Without expert tuning you won't get the full benefit of the expensive hardware, and in a worst case scenario might not get any benefit at all." - Today's announcement by Imperial offers the promise of a software flashlight which will embolden users and show them where to unlock the potential of SSD acceleration technology. 6 years later: - in September 2009 - Dataram became the 1st SSD oem to embed auto tuning software inside the SAN SSD itself. Recovering Your Business from Administrator Induced Data Loss Editor: - May 14, 2003 - a new article is published today in the SPARC Product Directory - written by Ron Austin at ActionFront Data Recovery - it's called "Recovering Your Sun Hosted Business from Administrator Induced Data Loss" The article describes the true story of how one company which ran their business on a Sun server, hit a crisis when their administrator accidentally wiped their live data and their disk to disk backup. Although the customer had support contracts in place, none of the suppliers of the constituent parts (Sun Microsystems, EMC, Veritas and Oracle) were able to help them. This is a cautionary tale of what can so easily go wrong, and what the customer did to avoid going out of business. ...read the article, ...ActionFront Data Recovery profile EMC CLARiiON Named "Most Valuable Product" Hopkinton, Mass.- May 13, 2003 - EMC Corporation today announced that the CLARiiON CX series of networked storage systems received the Most Valuable Product award at this year's Storage World Conference. The popular CLARiiON CX series was overwhelmingly selected by end-users, industry analysts and online voters as Most Valuable Product in the "Disk and Disk Subsystems" category over all other entries, including Hitachi Data Systems' 9980V and Network Appliance's FAS900 series. EMC's high-end platform series, Symmetrix DMX, was introduced in February and was therefore too new to be considered in the contest. "Storage World's inaugural MVP Awards recognize the storage networking industry's best products," said Daniel Delshad, Conference Chairman. "The response from our voters was tremendously strong for CLARiiON CX. It's a clear indication that an upgradeable product line combined with robust yet easy-to-use software offers customers an incredible value proposition." ...EMC profile QLogic to Implement Microsoft's RADIUS in SANbox2 Switches ALISO VIEJO, Calif. - May 13, 2003 - QLogic Corp. today announced plans to enhance security in its award-winning SANbox2 line of switches by implementing the IETF standard Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol, which is implemented in the Internet Authentication Service component of Windows 2000/2003 Server OS. QLogic is working with Microsoft to broaden industry usage of Microsoft's RADIUS implementation. "Microsoft is pleased to work with QLogic and the storage industry to proactively drive enhanced and simplified storage security management," said Rakesh Narasimhan, General Manager of the Enterprise Storage Division at Microsoft Corp. "With a standards-based approach, customers gain a more cost-effective and reliable means of securing SANs." "Security is a primary concern in our product development process," said Frank Berry, vice president of marketing, QLogic Corp. "Bringing SAN security into the fabric will greatly simplify life for IT professionals in small, medium and large enterprises." ...QLogic profile WD Delivers World's Fastest SATA Drives to Retail Stores LAKE FOREST, Calif. - May 13, 2003 - Western Digital Corp. today announced that the Company's Enterprise Serial ATA WD Raptor hard drives are available now in retail stores and at its online store. In addition to a 36 GB WD Raptor hard drive, the retail kit (MSRP $249) includes a SATA interface host adapter, a SATA interface cable and Quick Install Guide. This retail kit brings enterprise-class reliability and speed to those end users who prefer premium components for their state-of-the-art computer systems. WD Raptor Enterprise SATA hard drives, which were introduced earlier this year for business applications, are the world's fastest Serial ATA drives and feature specifications of: 10,000 RPM; 5.2 milliseconds average seek time; 1.2 million hours MTBF and five-year warranty. "We have received a groundswell of interest from those upper-end users who seek the very best in computing equipment," said Richard Rutledge, vice president of marketing for Western Digital. "The class of end-users who has traditionally embraced enterprise-class SCSI hard drives for their computing systems is now turning to Serial ATA for its increased performance and reliability. This new interface is designed for power users who enjoy video editing, digital audio applications or high-end gaming and want to push their overall system performance to its limits." ...Western Digital profile, the Fastest SSDs Renesas Ships 500 Millionth Smart Card Chip LONDON and ORLANDO, Fla - May 12, 2003 - Renesas Technology Corp. has shipped its 500 millionth smart card chip to manufacturers around the world. The devices are all microprocessor-based chips that are used in a range of smart card applications, including GSM SIM and USIM cards, financial and other banking cards, and health and ID cards. The company is the world's number two smart card IC manufacturer, shipping 400 million chips in the last three years and recording a 20.3% growth in unit shipments over the last year. Renesas is continuing to invest in its growing smart card business. The company is working to meet the demands of the worldwide financial community since gaining a significant foothold in the banking market in 2002. ...Renesas Technology profile CATC and Dashcourses Announce Joint Educational Initiative Santa Clara, Calif. - May 12, 2003 - CATC today announced a joint marketing relationship with Dashcourses, Inc. Together the two companies will promote InfiniBand, USB and PCI Express™ technologies through collaboration on Dashcourses' advanced three day training workshops. The training courses have been developed to assist engineers and developers better understand the communications protocols, decrease product development times and speed delivery to market. CATC will provide Dashcourses with its powerful InfiniBand, USB and PCI Express expert protocol analyzers and exercisers for use in their workshops as well as assistance in developing lab scenarios and exercises. Dashcourses offers one-day protocol overview courses as well as multiple day architecture workshops with hands-on lab sessions. During the lab sessions, the students will use the CATC analyzers to perform protocol analysis and debugging of live InfiniBand, USB, and PCI Express devices and systems. "The CATC analyzers and exercisers will significantly enhance the experience students gain with InfiniBand, USB, and PCI Express. Students will be able to create live networks and record, analyze, and debug packet-level traffic," said Marianne Cherney, president and founder of Dashcourses, Inc. "The CATC analyzers give students the chance to see first-hand the concepts discussed in the workshops and, at the same time, show interoperability with other equipment used in our classes." "CATC believes that this partnership will significantly improve the quality of education available to engineers and IT professionals and contribute towards the promotion of these protocols and their capabilities," said Dan Wilnai, president and CEO of CATC. "By providing students with the industry's top analyzers and exercisers, students will be able to learn how these different devices communicate with each other and then effectively apply these popular tools in their own product development." ...CATC profile, ...Dashcourses profile Snap Server 4500 Offers 720GB in 1U London, UK - May 12, 2003 - Snap Appliance today introduced the Snap Server 4500, a departmental NAS system that delivers cost-effective storage in a 1U form factor. The Snap Server 4500 will initially be offered in two capacities: 480GB for US$4,295, 720GB for US$5,795. The 4500 supports Active Directory Service (ADS), UNIX NIS, SNMP, and either network or local backup for simple management in any environment. The 4500's Linux-based GuardianOS™ offers an enterprise-class feature set typically found in more expensive solutions. For backup and recovery, the 4500 includes Snapshot technology to provide consistent, point-in-time copies of data without administrator intervention or time-consuming restores from tape. Data replication is enabled by server-to-server synchronisation software, which allows one or more Snap Servers to synchronise content with other Snap Servers for fast disaster recovery. Integrating award-winning eTrust Antivirus software from Computer Associates, the 4500 is the first NAS product in its class to provide lifetime protection against virtually all forms of costly virus attacks. Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, RAID protection and hot swappable disk drives contribute to high reliability of this system. "Gartner Dataquest recently ranked Snap Appliance as the No. 1 NAS Vendor by Unit Shipments for the third straight year. During the last three years, we have shipped over 110,000 Snap Servers - more than all the other NAS vendors combined," says Eric Kelly, CEO, Snap Appliance. ...Snap Appliance profile iQstor Delivers Automated SAN for SMBs Newbury Park, Calif. – May 12, 2003 – iQstor Networks, Inc. announced the general availability release of their iQ1000 Storage System, developed to deliver automated SAN solutions with enterprise-level features for SMBs at a cost-effective price point. The iQ1000 Storage System delivers a wide range of enterprise level data service features including storage virtualization, snapshot, mirroring, remote replication, and policy-based storage provisioning affordable for the mid-tier market, enabling storage administrators to benefit from greater ease of integration and improved cost-efficiencies as they manage their storage growth requirements. "The mid-tier market segment is underserved by existing storage solutions, and with the iQ1000 we will provide a compelling answer to those businesses that need an enterprise level solution in today's economy," Jason Lo, president and CEO, iQstor Networks, said. "The iQ1000 will allow many of the mid-tier companies to build larger, more flexible and more cost-effective enterprise-level storage area networks, and the integrated and automated iQ1000 storage solutions will allow IT professionals to simply deploy powerful and optimized network infrastructures for competitive advantage." The new Fibre Channel iQ1000 Storage System provides an intelligent storage building block of 15 drives in a 3U rackmount form factor, scaling up to 120 drives (17.5 TB) supported per storage subsystem. Ensuring high availability by utilizing fully redundant, hot swappable components for disk drives, power supplies, cooling modules and storage system components, the iQ1000 also features dual active SP100 storage processors with transparent fail-over support to further increase availability. Integrated RAID level (0, 1, 3, 5 and 1+0) provides data protection and helps keep business critical applications running. The iQ1000 subsystem supports four host connections and 2 FC-AL disk loops at 2Gb/second, and provides centralized administration to increase productivity and reduce costs. iQstor's iQ1000 Storage System is available from today through reseller channel partners. Pricing starts from $25,200. ...iQstor Networks profile TeraCloud Announces SRM Utilities to Support NAS Bellevue, WA - May 12, 2003 - TeraCloud Corporation announced today SRM Utilities to support NAS Environments. These enhancements, combined with new joint development relationships to support Network Appliance, EMC, and Auspex NAS devices, demonstrate TeraCloud's continued commitment to innovation and leadership managing distributed storage resources, now spanning SAN and NAS environments, across the heterogeneous enterprise. Delivered via TeraCloud's latest storage management suite, SpaceNet 3.0, this consolidated management view of enterprise-wide storage provides an efficient means to protect data, intelligently provision and monitor differing types of storage hardware, increase application availability, and optimize the use of IT personnel. While advances in NAS technology have provided IT management with a growing number of flexible options for catering to application-driven storage, this increased flexibility comes a price - increased complexity. TeraCloud's SpaceNet reduces this complexity by implementing a five-step approach to managing storage, independent of hardware and OS: identify, monitor, analyze, manage, and facilitate appropriate best practices. TeraCloud's new NAS Utilities and its comprehensive approach to managing storage will ease much of the complexity of implementing, administering and optimizing NAS by automating the analysis of current application demands and their relative storage use. By adding NAS support for filesystem space use, quotas, qtrees, volumes and RAID groups to its storage management solutions, TeraCloud delivers value to its customers by enabling more accurate storage assessment, more appropriate and efficient storage and resource sharing, and more accurate chargeback. ...TeraCloud profile Infineon and Micron announce RLDRAM II Specification Boise, ID and Munich, Germany - May 12, 2003 - Infineon Technologies AG and Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the release of the complete specification for reduced latency DRAM II (RLDRAM™ II) architecture. Operating at speeds of up to 400 MHz, RLDRAM II products are the second-generation, ultra high-speed double data rate SDRAM that combines fast random access with extremely high bandwidth and high density targeting communication and data storage applications. Datasheets for the 288Mb RLDRAM II devices are now available online. RLDRAM architecture is designed to meet the memory requirements of today's high-bandwidth communication applications. The device's eight-bank architecture is optimized for high speed and achieves a peak bandwidth of 28.8 gigabit per second using a 36-bit interface and a 400 MHz system clock. RLDRAM II boasts a low latency and random cycle time (tRC) of 20ns providing a higher data throughput. Additional advantages of the RLDRAM II feature set include; on-die termination (ODT), multiplexed or non-multiplexed addressing, on-chip delay lock loop (DLL), common or separate I/O and programmable output impedance and a power efficient 1.8V core. These features provide designers with increased design flexibility, balanced READ and WRITE ratio and the elimination of bus turnaround contention; as well as a simplified design-in process. "RLDRAM II devices are an excellent solution to enable high-speed Ethernet and next-generation networking system designs to achieve up to 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps data rates," said Deb Matus, Micron's DRAM Marketing Manager for Networking and Communications. "We continue to see more and more support for this technology throughout the market. Applications using RLDRAM products include networking, consumer devices, graphics and L3 Cache." ...Micron Technology profile, ...Infineon Technologies profile LSI first to demonstrate SAS initiator-to-target functionality MILPITAS, Calif. - May 9, 2003 - LSI Logic today announced active validation of the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface protocol by demonstrating both initiator and target mode functionality. The company executed complete SAS I/O read/write sequences with full data validation. LSI Logic SAS products will be based on the Fusion-MPT™ architecture to simplify and speed development. In January, LSI Logic announced SAS product initiatives with Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu and Hitachi to co-develop SAS storage solutions. Discrete initiator and target SAS hardware were used to execute the SCSI frame transactions across the Serial Attached SCSI wire. SCSI reads/writes with buffer compare were used along with a SAS protocol analyzer to validate the interface protocol and data integrity. "This development milestone takes us a step further along the path to silicon deployment," said Dan Roehrich, director of hardware development for LSI Logic Storage Standard Products. "We enjoy a market-leading position with the current SCSI generation, Ultra320, and implementing SAS controllers, boards and expanders represent the next evolutionary stage for enterprise server and high-performance workstation products. We're on target with our development plans and are committed to providing customers with a well-tested, proven product that will enable quick time-to-market solutions." The SAS connectors, cables and electrical interface are compatible with Serial ATA (SATA), giving future users the choice of populating their systems with either SAS or SATA hard disk drives. This evolution of SCSI technology is seen as a natural next step in maintaining the industry's most robust and proven interface, and will allow enterprise customers to continue to leverage their existing investment in SCSI while gaining a 3Gb/s serial data transfer rate. ...LSI Logic profile BakBone Software Releases NetVault 7 POOLE, UK - May 9, 2003 - BakBone Software announced today the release of the latest version of their flagship product, NetVault 7. NetVault 7 provides improved scalability, increased automation and enhanced administrator productivity for the enterprise market while providing a lower TCO and ease of use in NAS and SAN centric storage environments. BakBone claims that no other product in its class matches NetVault's ease of deployment. It requires no professional services to install or deploy, helping to manage costs while ensuring the rapidest implementations to meet customers data protection goals. NetVault 7 is scalable and robust for the largest enterprises, yet flexible enough for small businesses - all within the same product. "NetVault 7 represents a significant milestone in our company in many ways. We believe it is the most advanced data protection offering available in the market today. NetVault 7 combines rich features with unprecedented ease of use and speed to deploy. It represents the vehicle with which we will be driving increased market share and revenue growth," said Keith Rickard, president and CEO, BakBone. NetVault 7.0 is available now on UNIX, Linux, NT and Windows 2000 platforms. Pricing starts at $695. A free 45-day fully featured demo is available on BakBone's web site. ...BakBone Software profile Microsoft Will Support All Major Writable DVD Formats In Future NEW ORLEANS - May 8, 2003 - Microsoft Corp. today announced at the 12th annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) that it will provide built-in operating system support for all major writable DVD formats in future versions of the Windows® desktop operating system. This support will include DVD-RAM, DVD-RW/-R and DVD+RW/+R formats. Comprehensive support for writable DVD formats adds to support Microsoft already announced for the DVD+MRW (Mt. Rainier) format as well as support available for the DVD-RAM format in Microsoft® Windows XP. "We are committed to making it as easy as possible for our customers to write to and play DVDs on their PCs," said Tom Phillips, general manager of the Windows Hardware Experience Group at Microsoft Corp. "With support for all the major writable DVD formats, users will find it much easier, less costly and more efficient to back up personal data, transfer files between PCs and share personally edited video on DVD-Video." The support will enable users with a compatible drive to work with any of their existing writeable DVDs used as a data storage medium. Users will not need to download any additional drivers to ensure compatibility with their DVDs. ...Microsoft profile | ||||||||||
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