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| Storage news |
CommVault Slashes 90% Off
Backup Time
OCEANPORT, N.J. -
November 29, 2007 - CommVault today announced that it has slashed the
time it takes to do full backups and restores for Crutchfield Corp.
from 48 hours to 5 hours compared to a previous solution from Symantec.
Selling electronics directly to consumers technology plays a major role at
Crutchfield where a 14-person IT
infrastructure team oversees 120 Microsoft servers running Windows 2003, SQL
Server 2005, Exchange 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server 2007. The company also
supports a growing storage environment comprising
EMC
SANs and 8 terabytes of
storage that's increasing each year.
After a storage growth spurt overtaxed the company's existing
backup and recovery foundation, Crutchfield decided to deploy best-of-class
disk-to-disk-to-tape hardware and more robust data protection software.
The
evaluation of competing software alternatives coincided with a deployment of
Microsoft SharePoint, which added item-level recovery of SharePoint files to its
top selection criteria. As one of the first vendors to support this level of
granular backup and recovery for SharePoint, CommVault was selected over
Symantec Veritas NetBackup and EMC Networker, both of which would have required
Crutchfield to rebuild an entire SharePoint system offline from
tape for restores. In
contrast, CommVault's first SharePoint recovery took less than an hour.
Crutchfield also leverages CommVault's on-the-fly tape encryption to
ensure complete compliance with Payment Card Industry regulations while its "set
it and forget it" operation and system-state backup feature have virtually
eliminated administrative overhead.
...CommVault Systems
profile
Micron Joins the SSD Pack
Boise,
Idaho - November 28, 2007 - Micron Technology, Inc., today entered the
growing SSD market by announcing its RealSSD family of products.
Offered
in 1.8" and
2.5" form factors,
with upto 64GB capacity, Micron's
USB /
SATA SSDs are
designed for computing, enterprise server and networking applications. Micron
is now sampling these products with mass production expected by the end of 2007.
"SSDs are becoming the new storage medium, fundamentally altering
the way data is stored," said Dean Klein, Micron VP of memory system
development. "The storage market is ripe for innovation, and it's an
opportunity Micron is embracing given our expertise in NAND. We know how to
manage NAND flash to work best with controllers, allowing us to develop an
optimized SSD solution for every application."
...Micron profile
Editor's
comments:- that brings the number of active
SSD oems up to 60, and the
number of 2.5" SSD
oems to 28. That may seem like a lot - but you ain't seen nothing yet. If you
look at how many oems make RAID
systems for example and consider that the SSD market will soon be bigger
in revenue than the RAID market is today - you can see where this is going.
USB 3 Spec Anticipated 1H 2008
BEAVERTON, Ore - November 28, 2007 - The USB
3.0 Promoter Group is looking for additional contributors to its initial
draft of the group's proposed specification with a goal to have it completed by
the first half of 2008.
SuperSpeed USB will create a
backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug-and-play
capabilities of previous USB computer connection technologies, ports and
cabling. The personal USB interconnect is targeting to deliver over 10x the
speed of today's connection and will be optimized for lower power and improved
protocol efficiency.
...Later:- the 1st USB 3 storage devices were announced for
imminent shipment in 2009
Q4.
Toshiba Samples 6th Generation Car Drive
IRVINE,
Calif - November 27, 2007 - Toshiba Storage Device Division today said
it is sampling its 6th generation automotive-grade hard disk line which
includes a single-platter 80GB 4,200 RPM ATA-7 offering.
Toshiba has shipped more than 7 million automotive-grade HDDs since introducing
the industry's first automotive-grade HDD in 2001 and has 85% market share in
the automotive-class HDD segment.
"Car navigation systems built
around fast, high-capacity HDDs
are getting more popular in the Japanese and European markets, a trend that is
soon expected to come to North America" said Toshio Magome, senior
director, Techno Systems Research.
New opportunities are emerging globally for HDDs in cars as China
begins to rapidly deploy navigation solutions, and the US and European markets
gain momentum in integrating high-end infotainment solutions to add
differentiation to top-of-the-line models.
Editor's comments:-
Toshiba sampled their previous (5th) generation 40G auto drive in
January 2006.
Seagate was a latecomer
to the auto market with its first product, the EE25 unveiled in
June 2005. If you
talk frankly to electronic component suppliers - they all hate dealing with the
car market.
Although you might think that the car market represents a
big market opportunity (in units) for
flash SSD oems -
car oems are notorious for the chisel and dime way they treat their
suppliers. Ideally carmakers want to buy near
military grade
electronics for peanuts. The yawningly long design lead times in the auto
market (compared to computer or telco related markets) means that leading edge
storage products designed into a car are obsolete by the time the new car model
rolls out of the factory. While SSD oems have better customers in other markets
- the storage in your car will always be generations smaller (in capacity)
than the storage in your notebook.
Despite that - other storage
companies targeting the embedded auto market includes memory chipmakers -
Atmel,
Cypress,
Freescale,
Renesas Technology
and STMicroelectronics.
Some flash SSD oems also target high value segments in the civilian vehicle
market including:- Adtron,
BiTMICRO and
Hagiwara Sys-Com
, although SanDisk
appears to have exited the auto market slots pioneered by
M-Systems.
Article Speculates About Google Storage Services
Editor:-
November 27, 2007 - an article today in the Wall Street Journal online
speculates that Google may soon offer a fee based online storage
service.
Add the word "Google" to any story and it makes
it a bigger story. There was no comment either way on
Google's own press
pages. If Google did enter this market it's more likely to aim at
consumers rather than corporate customers. I can't see Google going much beyond
point and click "services". They won't offer the support needed by
enterprises to reload operating systems, applications and data onto bare metal
servers in the event of a disaster. Google's business models are more about
leveraging data using software, than throwing bodies at a solution. ...Google profile,
online backup and storage
Audavi Ships 250GB HardTape
San
Jose, CA - November 26, 2007 - Audavi Corp today announced the
addition of a 250GB capacity cartridge to its HardTape family of portable rugged
storage devices.
The 250GB cartridge, based on 2.5-inch
hard drive technology
has a 50MB/s sustained data transfer rate. Rugged enough to survive a 2-foot
drop onto concrete, the HardTape cartridge is an excellent alternative to
tape for client data
backup and disaster recovery, medical image storage, and security video
recording. HardTape is significantly faster than "burning"
CD/DVD disks for data
back-up and archive applications. HardTape cartridges can move easily from
system to system using a bay or cable connection through any of the standard
interfaces (USB,
FireWire,
SCSI,
SATA). Featuring a
black anodized aluminum case for additional durability, HardTape cartridges are
pocket-sized and weigh about 8 ounces. ...Audavi profile
Mtron Consumer SSD Costs 30% Less
SEOUL,
South Korea - November 26, 2007- Mtron Co., Ltd announced today that
they have launched a new SSD product aimed at the consumer market.
Mtron's 2.5" 32GB SATA SSD MOBI provides read speed upto 100MBps,
write speed upto 80MBps and random access time of 0.1 ms. It will be priced
around $650 which is 30% cheaper than current Mtron SSD products for
industrial servers.
Steve Jeon, CEO of Mtron, said, "Most of SSD demand was in
industrial market for high-end servers and storage. However with the price of
flash memory dropping about 40% every year, there will be a new demand in
consumer SSD market as early as next year. Therefore Mtron has launched Mtron
SSD MOBI in order to establish Mtron as the worldwide leader in the new consumer
SSD market."
...Mtron profile
Editor's
comments:- last week
Tom's Hardware
published a review of Mtron's SSD performance compared to other (slower)
flash SSDs and hard drives. When industrial oems launch consumer versions of
their products they get a higher yield because the ambient temperature range is
not so severe - more devices work. That leads to lower manufacturing costs. You
also get a better designed product than in the converse situation - when a
consumer oem dips its toes in the industrial market.
Solid Data Systems Names New CTO
SANTA CLARA,
Calif - November 26, 2007 - Solid Data Systems, Inc. today announced
the promotion of SSD solutions expert Mark Hayashida to the position of
Chief Technology Officer.
In this role, Mr. Hayashida will head
the growing Professional Services Organization, integral to the company's
strategic initiative to bring greater awareness and knowledge of SSD
architecture and benefits to market.
A veteran of Solid Data for 9 years, Hayashida oversees all pre-sales
engineering, and is responsible for insuring effective customer architecture
solutions.
"Mark is the industry's leading architect in the use
of SSDs and has designed
innovative architectures for leading Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T,
Charles Schwab and Southern Company," said Wade Tuma, CEO of Solid Data. "Mark
has the expertise to quickly evaluate and optimize systems to take cost
effective advantage of the benefits of SSD technology. Mark is the author of
many of our technical
whitepapers and brings great depth and knowledge to the team."
Hayashida's appointment follows the growing industry trend of
replacing large RAID arrays
with SSD arrays in core, high transaction rate applications. With the
ever-increasing transaction rates in applications for ecommerce and online
transaction processing such as Internet banking, online insurance, real-time
billing and electronic trading, enterprises find SSDs provide cost-effective,
terabyte-scale storage for fast access and data manipulation of large databases.
SSD-based architectures also provide greater power efficiency for today's "green"
world, due to the fact that SSD arrays themselves use substantially less power
than traditional RAID arrays, as well as enabling substantial server
consolidation.
...Solid Data Systems
profile, Storage People
MercuryNews.com Reveals Thoughts of Seagate's CEO
Editor:-
November 25, 2007 - MercuryNews.com published an interview with Seagate's
CEO.
It rambles around a lot of subjects including flash, backup,
plant closures and green cards for PhDs.
Patent May Suit High Reliability SSD OEMs
MINNETONKA, MN - November 23, 2007 -ECC
Technologies, Inc. announces that its parallel Reed-Solomon error
correction designs and US Patent are immediately available for licensing.
PRS encoder and decoder designs allow parallel I/O storage devices to
be designed with automatic, built-in backup (fault-tolerance). PRS applied to
flash SSDs (for
example) enables SSDs to be designed that can tolerate NAND Flash chip failures.
PRS can also be applied to Hard Disk Arrays. Potential licensees can read
about the PRS technology applied to
SSDs and to
HDDs on these
preceding links. ...ECC
Technologies profile,
storage reliability
Editor's
comments:- in the early days of a fast growing technology market most
vendors are too busy growing their revenue by selling products to customers.
But when markets get big enough or growth rates slow down - another round kicks
in - of harvesting money from those who succeeded in the market - but didn't
protect themselves properly with patents.
When I was a young engineer
several designs of mine did get patented. In one particular company I remember
being asked to leaf through some 10 year old logbooks of my predecessors to find
some prior art to help nullify a competitor's potential attack. I always
preferred doing things my own way - so I grumbled at being asked to delve into
these dusty old files. But I did find what my boss was looking for. | |
 |
I'm too old to
do that chimney stunt
this year thought
Megabyte hopefully
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| "Inside the brain of
the SSD - a nerve ending tugs to say - forget your other priorities pal - the
power rail is going down. " |
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss | | |
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