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storage news - 2006, February week 1 |
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| NetApp Expands
Disk to Disk Product Line Sunnyvale, Calif. - February 7, 2006 - Network Appliance, Inc. today announced new disk-to-disk backup and security solutions. New products include:- the single-head NearStore VTL600 and the dual-head NearStore VTL1200. NearStore VTL is a dedicated, enterprise-class storage appliance that emulates physical tape libraries, stores large capacities of backup data on disk, and automatically copies data to physical tape under backup application control within any open systems storage environment. NearStore VTL systems scale from 4.5TB to 168TB; integrate seamlessly with backup software from industry leaders BakBone, CA, CommVault, HP, Legato, Symantec, Syncsort, and Tivoli; and work with tape libraries from ADIC, IBM, Quantum, StorageTek, and others. In related data protection news, Decru, a NetApp company, today announced Decru DataFort E-Series Version 3.0 firmware for IP-based storage environments. The new firmware further extends the Decru unified storage security platform by incorporating CIFS, NFS, and now iSCSI onto a single appliance. ...Network Appliance profile, Disk to disk backup, article:- Virtual Tape: Can You Afford to Ignore It? HP Acquires Another Storage Software Company PALO ALTO, Calif - February 7, 2006 - HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire OuterBay. With OuterBay's technology, HP can help organizations to more effectively manage database growth and improve database performance by up to 80% - a critical capability in today's business environment where database information is in constant use. The technology additionally will enable HP to expand its solutions for customers deploying Oracle, SQLServer, and Sybase databases as well as major enterprise applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP and PeopleSoft. ...HP profile, ...OuterBay profile, 346 acquired & gone away storage companies Exanet Sets NAS Benchmark Record HERZLIYA, Israel - February 7, 2006 - Exanet today announced the results of the latest benchmark of its fully-scalable ExaStore data center storage system. In the industry-standard benchmark, run according to guidelines set by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, the ExaStore system set an industry record of 143,880 SPECsfs operations per second for a two-node cluster, with an overall response time of 1.47ms. This is the highest performance achieved by any NAS vendor. Exanet also released its "dollars per operations per seconds" figures, based on the benchmark results and Exanet's list price for the benchmark configuration. According to this calculation, the ExaStore system, in its two-node high-performance cluster configuration, achieved $2.35 per SPECsfs ops. Based on its scaling achievements in earlier benchmarks, Exanet expects its four-node and six-node high-performance configurations to scale linearly to approximately double and triple the two- node performance, respectively. Clive Surfleet, Chief Strategy Officer at Exanet, said, "The 'dollars per operations per seconds' metrics is related to data access speed, and to the number of users who can be supported by a storage system of a given size. This information is of tremendous help to users seeking the most suitable storage offering for their organization, and is often difficult to obtain. Exanet is the first company to publicly announce its price performance results." ...Exanet profile, Record Breaking Storage Infineon's MarComs Chief Departs Munich, Germany - February 7, 2006 - Infineon Technologies announced today that Rainer Westermann, Corporate Vice President Communications, will be leaving the company. Westermann has been responsible for the entire corporate communications at Infineon including PR, Marketing Communications, Government Relations and Internal Communications. Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart, CEO and President of Infineon Technologies, will take over his duties temporarily. ...Infineon profile, Storage People, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow... the Problem with Storage Marketers Editor's comments:- Westermann became marcoms chief at Infineon in October 2004 Solid State Disks in the Rocky Mountains Fremont, Calif. - February 7, 2006 - 3t Systems announces its partnership with BiTMICRO Networks, Inc. "We recognize the benefits of deploying BiTMICRO's E-Disk solid state hard drives to speed up demanding enterprise applications," says Dan Ganousis, VP of Sales and Marketing for 3t Systems. Since its establishment in 1994, 3t has grown to become the largest private employer of IT consultants in the Rocky Mountain region. Clients include Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, E*TRADE, Great West Life Insurance, Commercial Federal Bank and the Colorado State University. ...3t Systems, ...BiTMICRO profile, solid state disks WD Passport USB Drives Grow to 120G LAKE FOREST, Calif. - February 6, 2006 - Western Digital Corp today announced that its WD Passport Portable USB Drives are now available with 120GB capacity. WD Passport Drives were recently named one of the "Ten Coolest Products" by USA Today Now: Personal Technology magazine. With no need for a separate power supply (for most systems) these drives are outfitted with 5,400 RPM quiet-running WD Scorpio 2.5 inch EIDE hard drives. Estimated pricing for the 120GB model is $199. ...Western Digital profile, USB storage, Hard disk drives DataFRAME 440 iSCSI SAN includes Hot Spare HDDs Nampa, Idaho - February 6, 2006 - MPC Computers today announced the DataFRAME 440 SAN. The DataFRAME 440's 3U form factor supports 16 hot-swappable 250GB or 500GB SATA II hard drives, with up to 8TB of storage per enclosure. The new product offers greater RAID performance and flexibility than earlier models from the company including support for hot-spare hard drives. The DataFRAME 440 also features hot-swappable hard drives, hot-swappable power supplies, and redundant cooling for maximum uptime and reliability. Additionally, users have the choice between (upto 6) iSCSI or dual Fibre Channel network connections. LeftHand Networks' SAN/iQ management software is integrated in the DataFRAME so that as physical disk space is used up, it will alert the IT administrator to add additional capacity, which can be done seamlessly without server down time. ...MPC Computers profile, Rackmount Storage Industry Collaborates on Remote Direct Memory Access February 6, 2006 - Leading technology companies, including IBM, Neterion Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Universal Network Machines today announced that they have joined forces in the OpenRDMA project to support the open source software for Remote Direct Memory Access over TCP/IP and Ethernet networks. Promoting a transport-independent RDMA solution, OpenRDMA software will support network fabrics other than Ethernet. RDMA technology enables high-performance server clustering and eliminates the burden of excessive memory copies when communicating between servers. ...Neterion profile Hitachi Hard Drives Used in LG DVD Recorder SAN JOSE, CA - February 6, 2006 - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today announced that LG Electronics will use Hitachi Deskstar hard drives in its new RH7800 series of DVD-HDD Recorders. The RH7800 series use 160 GB hard drives for storing up to 220 hours of digital video content, including television programs, movies, music and photos. Hitachi Deskstar drives were chosen for their substantial capacities, ability to handle multiple video streams simultaneously, quiet acoustics, low power requirements and overall reliability. LG relied on Hitachi's "Smooth Stream" technology to enhance the video streaming functionality in its new DVD-HDD Recorders. Based on the ATA-7 AV Streaming Feature Set standard, Smooth Stream enables the RH7800 to control the drive's error recovery process, optimizing the drive to capture multiple video streams simultaneously. Hitachi was the first hard drive vendor to integrate ATA-7 technology capability into its product line. ...Hitachi profile, DVD drives Availl Accelerates Shared WAN File Performance ANDOVER, MA - February 6, 2006 - Availl Inc. announced it has shipped a new version of its software for consolidated backup across wide area networks. The new release scales to thousands of users and hundreds of sites across multiple continents. It also consolidates real-time server backup for both hot databases and unlimited files into one unified architecture, for any moment-in-time retrieval capability. "When I spoke to colleagues at other large engineering firms about how they supported remote offices, I didn't like what I was told," said Eddie Greene, IT manager of Alliance Engineering, an engineering firm with offices in both Virginia and Maryland. "These were major companies, and they were relying on one-way updates to or from remote sites between 2 am and 4 am. I knew that we could never work that way. We have more than 160,000 files requiring approximately 60GB of disc space, with many users creating files and accessing, modifying and referencing the existing set of files across sites. Availl was the only vendor I found whose solution gave local access times, even on large AutoCad files, with real-time file locking. We avoid those PDM system nightmares I heard about from colleagues, and our users work at local network speeds at all offices without conflicts that occur when other colleagues are accessing the same file." Availl's technology sends only byte level differences as the files change, then compresses and encrypts them. Availl guarantees real-time file version coherence so that that users always open the latest version, even if it is being modified at another site. Availl WAFS for CAD and other file access is priced starting at $3,995 for the first two servers. Availl Continuous Data Protection is priced from $995 per server. ...Availl profile Nimbus and Chelsio Aim for Fastest iSCSI Storage Sunnyvale and San Francisco, CA - February 6, 2006 - Chelsio Communications, Inc. and Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. today announced a partnership to incorporate Chelsio acceleration technology in an upcoming line of iSCSI storage systems from Nimbus. The new iSCSI storage systems (which will be available in the first half of 2006) are expected to deliver the industry's highest performance IP SANs. ...Chelsio profile, ...Nimbus profile Editor's comments:- Chelsio offers a 10GbE iSCSI accelerator, but another architectural contender in the iSCSI performance race is iSCSI over InfiniBand. There's no doubt it will be a competitive market. In September 2005 - iVivity announced a 400,000 IOPS record breaking iSCSI benchmark on 10GbE achieved by their storage network processor. On Chip Error Correction Speeds Up Flash Geneva - February 6, 2006 - STMicroelectronics today unveiled details of an advanced 4 Gigabit NAND Flash memory that achieves a world record throughput of 36MB/s, some 50% greater than the best results achieved to date. The device, which is to be described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in a paper authored by researchers from STMicroelectronics and Hynix Semiconductor, incorporates a powerful embedded error-correction processor that can detect and correct up to five errors per page to ensure high reliability and fast data throughput while simplifying the design of the memory system. Current practice with NAND Flash memories is to implement the error correction as an algorithm executed by the system processor. However this typically results in a throughput penalty that is typically several megabytes/s. The ST device employs a radically different approach in which a sophisticated ECC processor is embedded within the Flash memory. The dedicated processor implements the error correction technique called BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem) that is widely used in WLAN applications where multiple data transmission errors need to be reliably detected and corrected. The embedded ECC processor is based on an innovative architecture that optimizes the ECC computations for byte-oriented, serial readout memory applications such as MP3 players and USB keys, minimizing silicon area, latency and power consumption. As a result, the ST device achieves a read throughput rate of 36MB/s, significantly greater than the best previously reported rate of 23MB/s before error correction. ...STMicroelectronics profile, Storage Events STORAGEsearch.com's Readership Grew 53% STORAGEsearch.com's Readership Grew 53%Editor: - February 6, 2006 - STORAGEsearch reports on readers' changing interests in January. In January 2006, readership grew 53% compared to the year ago period. The top 3 subjects viewed by readers (out of 70 storage categories on our home page) were:- Commenting on the results:- Zsolt Kerekes, publisher, said "Storage has become a fast changing market where it seems that the roles for different technologies, once cast in stone, are now dissolving. Navigating through the rubble of fallen storage empires our mission is to lead our readers safely to the new storage frontier. I'm delighted that the high growth in our readership in the past year confirms that so many users and vendors have confidence in what we're doing." For more information on the top subjects, most popular articles etc see Market research Engenio Achieves Solaris Ready Certification MILPITAS, CA - February 6, 2006 - LSI Logic Corp today announced that storage systems from its Engenio Storage Group are now certified Solaris Ready within the Sun Cluster Open Storage Program. By meeting these requirements, customers can be assured that Engenio storage products are fully interoperable with the Solaris 10 OS. This certification allows customers to design a storage infrastructure utilizing Sun Cluster software and Sun Fire Servers that takes advantage of the high availability of Engenio storage systems for mission critical applications. ...Engenio profile, Sun, SPARC, Solaris news Addonics Converter Can Rescue Data off Dead iPOD SAN JOSE, CA - February 3, 2006 - Addonics Technologies today announced a Toshiba 1.8-inch to 2.5-inch IDE connector, which allows users to connect the drive to any computer including the hard drive found on the Apple iPOD. The new Toshiba 1.8" to 2.5" IDE connector allows users to attach this small 1.8" hard drive just like a 2.5" hard drive. It can also be connected to the standard 40 pin IDE cable common found on any desktop computer, server, and most industrial PCs by adding the Addonics 2.5" to 3.5" converter kit. You now can easily read or write onto this tiny hard drive using almost any system. With the new Addonics converter any Toshiba 1.8-inch hard drive can also become a read only drive by using the standard IDE Write blocker, which makes it an appropriate solution for forensics applications. The write-blocking feature prevents accidental and intentional destruction of data and preserves evidence for computer crime/security investigations. The Addonics 1.8-inch to 2.5-inch IDE connector also allows iPOD owners to connect the hard drive inside their iPOD as a regular 2.5" hard drive to other computers. With the connector, an iPOD user who has defective iPOD can export data off the drive. The connector can be combined with the Addonics Pocket ExDrive enclosure, which allows the Toshiba 1.8-inch drive to be used an external hard drive or as a removable hard drive. Users can connect the enclosure to USB, Firewire, SATA or CardBus/PCMCIA by attaching an Addonics USIB interface cable. ...Addonics profile, Removable disks, Hard disk drives Samsung Launches New Notebook Drives SAN JOSE, Calif. - February 2, 2006 - Samsung Electronics Ltd. introduces four new 2.5-inch hard disk drives specifically designed for intensive notebook and enterprise computing applications. Samsung's latest addition to its SpinPoint family of hard drives includes the M60 SATA Series featuring the 100GB HM100JI ($170 Estimated Street Price) and 120GB HM120JI ($200) and the M60 Series featuring 100GB HM100JC ($150) and 120GB HM120JC ($180). The new drives operate at 5,400rpm spindle speed and provide cutting-edge shock protection capability through an advanced mechanical platform and able-bodied cover design engineered to minimize the intensity of external shock transmitted to the most critical components of the drive. Samsung claims that the new M60 drives provide notebook users with some of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives in the industry. ...Samsung profile, Overview of the Notebook SSD Market Is AoE Protocol an Alternative to iSCSI? SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. - February 2, 2006 - Coraid Inc. and Rocket Division Software Inc. today announced the release of Windows support for the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) disk storage protocol. Coraid claims that AoE delivers a simple, high-performance, low-cost alternative to iSCSI for networked block storage by eliminating the processing overhead of TCP/IP. The new AoE Windows driver works with 32/64 bit Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 systems, and provides a simple user interface to mount disks on the network. RDS has added the AoE Windows Driver to its well-recognized iSCSI software products. AoE gives Windows users the ability to directly access disks on the network as if they were locally attached - providing the benefits of storage area networking at a fraction of the cost of a typical Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN. "We are able to offer excellent performance without a heavy processing load on the Windows client system. This is a big advantage for any network storage protocol," stated Anton Kolomyeytsev, CEO of Rocket Division Software. The Windows driver is now available for download. ...Coraid profile, ...Rocket Division Software profile Computer Associates changes name to CA ISLANDIA, N.Y. - February 1, 2006 - CA (formerly called Computer Associates) today announced it has legally changed its corporate name to "CA, Inc.", effective today. The ticker symbol for the Company's common stock will remain the same. The name change aligns the Company's corporate name with its refined positioning and brand promise to unify and simplify the management of enterprise-wide IT. ...CA profile, renamed storage companies Editor's comments:- It's fashionable for big companies to have small names:- for example IBM, HP, Dell, GM. To extrapolate this trend the world's biggest 26 companies should aspire to have recognizable names which consist of single letters - "A", "B", "C". Laggardly companies will have to make do with letters from other alphabets - such as "Þ". Numbers will be in hot demand - and there will be legal battles over the ownership of the desirable "1". ... No doubt that will keep many of the world's most highly paid marketing managers busy for years. See also:- Marketing Nomenclature, and the Naming of Names Imation Supplies LTO to Sun SANTA CLARA, CA and OAKDALE, MN - February 1, 2006 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Imation Corp today announced a strategic agreement related to current and future storage products. Sun and Imation will work toward the development and launch of an extension to the existing Sun StorageTek T9840 drive platform. Imation becomes an approved supplier to Sun StorageTek for branded LTO-2 and LTO-3 tape cartridges. Sun and Imation will investigate alternative recording media technologies, including Imation's Ulysses technology (which packages a SATA 2.5-inch disk drive in an LTO Ultrium cartridge form factor) for potential future integration into Sun's automated tape library product line. ...Imation profile, ...Sun profile Tugboat Enters Online Notebook Backup Market Powell River, Canada - February 1, 2006 - Tugboat Enterprises Ltd has launched its latest product Nauticus to protect laptop owners in case of theft of laptop computers and notebooks. Nauticus is an affordable automated on-line, off-site back up system that stores user data in secure facilities with built-in redundancy. The monthly price is $9.95 for the first 500MB and 1 cent per megabyte thereafter. A free 15 day trial version (50M) is available for users to test the service. The privacy laws of Canada provide excellent protection of corporate documents in this off-site storage system. "While it's true that our off-site data storage product Nauticus can and is sold to desktop and network users," said Tugboat CEO Judi Tyabji Wilson, "we have discovered through the sale of our successful data rescue program Lifeboat that laptops users are the most vulnerable to loss of data. These are the two groups with the most to lose when data is stolen, or lost due to software malfunction. It is unfortunate that so many CEOs and government department heads don't insist that proper off-site backup is done and data recovery software is available. Some take the attitude that it won't happen to me, and when it does they have little or no recourse." Nauticus requires an internet connection and supports the Windows family of operating systems including Windows 95/98/ME, Windows 2000/XPWindows, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 (Server and workstation), and Windows 2003. ...Tugboat profile, data recovery, online backup |
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