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2007, September week 4, Storage news

. Megabyte's selection of storage news
Megabyte loved reading news
about the storage market
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Squeak! - the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
Squeak! - the Fastest Growing Storage Companies
Squeak! - the Top 10 Storage Software Companies
Squeak! - RAM versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
Squeak! - SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
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Editor:- September 28, 2007 - Dataram Corp announced its new UK Country Manager, Mark Scarlett. Mark will be based in Dataram's new Harrow (UK) offices and can be contacted by phone on +44 (0)20 8861 8336. Some of his past roles have included:- 5 years as New Business Account Manager at Just Rams plc, and before that Mark worked for UK VAR Summit Technologies selling servers and workstations to the financial district in the City of London. ...Dataram profile, Storage People, RAM


Milpitas, California - September 27, 2007 - SanDisk today announced that it will offer its line of solid-state drives for resale to the system integrator community through select US distribution partners - initially Ingram Micro, D&H Distributing and Bell Microproducts. SanDisk plans to broaden distribution in the U.S. and into Europe during the first quarter of 2008 to accommodate expected increases in demand for SSDs as hard drive replacements. ...SanDisk profile


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


SALT LAKE CITY - September 25, 2007 - Fusion-io emerged from stealth mode today and launched the ioDrive at DEMOFall '07.
Dataram Names New UK Country Manager

SanDisk Names SSD Channels

Coraid's AoE Wins InfoWorld Award

Fusion-io Launches PCIe flash SSD

ExaGrid Doubles D2d Backup & Restore Speed

WD Shows New External Hard Drives for Macs

Bridgeworks Spans SAS to SAN

StorMagic Waves Wand for iSCSI

Asigra Affirms that Data De-dupe is Green

New Head for SteelEye

Seagate Aims to Expand Partner Vistas

AMCC #1 for SATA Hardware RAID Controllers

3 Strikes Led to Tape Library Out

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What Lies Beneath the Storage News?..............
Editor:- October 11, 2007 - You'll often see storage news on other sites which you don't see here on STORAGEsearch.com. When the news item sounds significant, you may be wondering why?

Is the editor asleep? Or is there a more Machiavellian reason for the news drop out?

For example is the editor suppressing news from some companies - because they compete with an advertiser?

Not guilty! That kind of publication wouldn't last more than a few months for 2 reasons.

1 - most new advertisers become advertisers because they've already had a lot of inquiries coming from editorial. The pressure from that direction would be to run and hype all press releases (which is the opposite to excluding them).

2 - the most important asset that a publisher has is readers. Advertisers may come and go - but without high quality readers who really care about the subject and work hard to find out what they need, and are people who make a difference to the market by what they do - a publication is just fodder for search-engine robots - and has no value whatsoever.

Sadly a common reason for a news story not appearing is that the core statements in the press release are simply not true.

Every week I get press releases from vendors making bold claims such as:-
  • first company to launch this type of product
  • fastest product (in its class)
  • lowest cost storage product (in its class)
  • biggest customer installation for this technology
  • highest market share in market segment
Unlike a robot, or software news aggregator, I actually read all the press releases which come into this publication.

I've probably read more than 100,000 press releases related to the storage market in my 16 years as editor, and I've seen thousands of web sites in this industry. But because I care a lot about the progress of this industry and because readers are the most important resource for any publisher, I always check the facts before running this type of news story.

The simplest way is for me to search our archived storage news pages. But I can also search email going back 10 years and if that doesn't give me a good confidence level - I'll search the web for previous examples of similar claims.

When I don't run a story for this reason - I always reply to the sender of the press release saying why. That often starts a dialog which pins down the root cause as being the writer didn't know about the earlier published example.

Back in 2000 I wrote an article to help news contributors understand how to interface better with editors. I called it Why I won't publish your press release? - Press Release Errors I see every day. Then 5 years later - I added some more notes to that.

One thing I never thought I'd have to say explicitly in that PR guide is that I will never run a news tory which I know in advance is untrue.

Human nature being what it is - most of us aren't so interested in news stories about the 2nd or 3rd fastest/newest products - even though that's what usually sells in the most volume. I guess the reason may be because we like to know where the boundaries are. If something shifts the boundaries - such as a 10 terabyte 3.5" hard drive - then we're more interested to read about it than the 3rd or 4th terabyte drive.

When the incorrect claim stories come in - I always try to find if there is anything else interesting in the story that I can run with - while leaving the suspect claim itself out.

As a general rule I remove adjectives like "fast" or "leading" (company) unless they are supported by figures or hard market data in the text. So if you see those words in this publication - their value has not been diluted.

A more common reason for not running a news story is that "it's not newsworthy" or it has already been mentioned here before - and not much has changed since. Or it's the latest in a long line of me-too announcements.

Another reason for not running a news story is that the idea behind it is just complete nonsense. In this category are many product comparisons, benchmarks and badly designed surveys which are as useful as measuring the speed of a Porsche 911 driving across a freshly plowed field.

I get a lot of queries from PR writers about why I didn't run something. If I really did miss it - and if it's significant enough - I'll go back and look again.

What's important is that you should be able to rely on the information you see in these pages. And that when you see a claim about some record breaking product - someone has actually done some simple checks before making the words appear on your screen
The ioDrive is a PCIe form factor flash SSD with upto 640GB capacity and 100K IOPS performance. Fusion-io founders Rick White, CEO, and David Flynn, CTO, demonstrated the ioDrive installed in an HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure and functioning as a local storage device. The ioDrive can achieve sustained data rates of 800MB/sec (Read) and 600MB/sec (Write).

Fusion-io's ioDrive will begin shipping in Q4'07 in 40GB, 80GB, 160GB or 320GB configurations. ...Fusion-io profile, PCIe SSDs
news image  Fusion-io's  ioDrive   source PRNewsFoto/Fusion-io

Westborough, MA - September 25, 2007 - ExaGrid Systems, Inc. today announced the availability of ExaGrid 3.0. This provides up to 2x the backup and restore performance of previous versions, and scalability for a 20TB full backup, plus retention, in a single GRID system. ExaGrid has also shrunk its system footprint compared to previous versions.

ExaGrid's disk-based backup system builds on patented technology and delivers fast backup performance due to post-process de-duplication. ExaGrid writes directly to disk without any processing on the fly to slow down backups. This results in backup throughput up to 2 terabytes / hour, (583MB/sec).

Backup is only half the story. ExaGrid delivers fast restore and tape copy performance with byte-level data de-duplication which keeps the most recent backup in its whole form (unlike other solutions, which require re-assembly from small blocks and large hash tables). The result is restore throughput up to 1.5 terabytes / hour (417 MB/sec). ...ExaGrid profile


LAKE FOREST, Calif - September 25, 2007 - today at the Apple Expo in Paris, France - Western Digital introduced its My Book Studio Edition external hard drives designed for Mac computers. Equipped with multiple interfaces (USB , FireWire and eSATA) and offered in capacities from 320GB to 1TB the new drives operate without a fan to run quietly and have an elegant silver metallic finish that perfectly complements other Mac products. ESP ranges from $199.99 to $399.99 depending upon capacity. ...WD profile


Christchurch, UK - September 25, 2007 - Bridgeworks launched the Tamar FSAS4400 Fibre Channel to SAS Bridge. The Tamar FSAS4400 enables users to connect SAS enabled devices such as Disk Arrays, Tape Drives and Tape Libraries to FC SANs using the fibre channel protocol.
  • 2 x 4Gb Fibre Channel Ports
  • Ethernet Management Port
  • GUI + Command Line
  • 4 SAS ports (3Gb) Mini SAS
  • Supports all SAS devices
  • 16,000 LUNs
  • 19" rackmount form factor (cPCI and other formats available)
Bridgeworks' CEO David Trossell said - "(Our) approach to connectivity allows vendors to use one core tape or optical technology but easily provide different SAN interfaces within the same internal interconnect structure." ...Bridgeworks profile, SCSI converters

Editor's comments:-
Bridgeworks product naming convention refers to rivers. For example they've got Potomac and Tamar. Fortunately there aren't too many commercially viable storage interface choices for a SAS bridge. So there's not much risk of using up all the good names - and having to use those with negative connotations - such as Bridge on the River Kwai, Tay Bridge (Disaster) or Bear River (Massacre). That could be a Bridge too Far.


Bristol, UK - September 25, 2007 - recently founded StorMagic today announced its first product and a major customer - at Oxford University. The StorMagic SM Series is an iSCSI based software solution for SMBs which allows organisations with limited IT resources and growing data storage demands to store, share, manage and protect data through a single, easy-to-use interface. StorMagic supports Windows, Novell NetWare, Linux (RedHat, SuSE), and Mac OS X. It's available now with MSRP starting at approx $8,000.

'Finding an affordable and reliable storage software solution that would work seamlessly with our current Novell servers was challenging,' said Jon Edwards, an IT officer in the Faculty of Mediaeval and Modern Languages and the Linguistics faculty at Oxford University. 'Although pricing and ease-of-use are 2 vital requirements for most educational institutions today, we knew that we couldn't compromise on reliability either; as we look after 2 faculties at this University we need to make sure their data are always protected. StorMagic's software offered us a network-based data protection solution at the right price.' ...StorMagic profile

Editor's comments:-
as the wizard Spellerbyte knows there's a kind of magic in having the word "magic" in your company name. Other magical storage companies include - GS Magic and I/OMagic.


TORONTO, Canada - September 24, 2007 – Asigra Inc. today announced additional benefits of data de-duplication technologies for large distributed enterprises. In the de-duplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored regardless of how many or where the multiple copies reside. Data de-duplication technology rapidly decreases both data storage costs and energy usage. When applied to remote site backup, it also increases network and backup performance. Eliminating the transfer of duplicate information can reduce traffic over the WAN and on local and remote backup servers by as much as 4x. The result is faster and more reliable data recovery, with reduced energy usage that is likely to make environmentalists proud. ...Asigra profile

Editor's comments:-
I already said dedupe was green and increased reliability many moons ago. It never hurts when vendors say the same thing.


Palo Alto, California - September 24, 2007 - SteelEye Technology today named Garrett V. Gafke as President and Chief Operating Officer. Gafke joins SteelEye from RFID technology company SeeControl where, as President and CEO he expanded the customer base to 22 countries following a management buyout from Cardinal Health Company. Prior to Cardinal, Gafke held VP and senior executive roles with HP, VeriFone, CyberSource, Xuma, and Trintech where he has been responsible for 2 IPOs and 3 acquisitions. ...SteelEye profile, Backup Software, Storage People


SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif - September 24, 2007 - Seagate today unveiled a comprehensive toolkit designed to help system builders with the market transition to Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The toolkit is offered exclusively through the Seagate Partner Program. ...Seagate profile


SUNNYVALE, Calif - September 24, 2007 - AMCC announced today that Gartner Inc. named AMCC's 3ware Storage Business Unit the channel unit market share leader in SATA hardware RAID controllers for the 2nd consecutive year in 2006. Gartner Dataquest's recently published study - "Market Share: Host Bus RAID Controllers, Worldwide, 2006" reports that since 2004, 3ware has grown its host bus SATA RAID controller unit market share almost twofold. In 2006, 3ware outpaced its nearest competitor by over 45,000 units in the distribution sales channel. ...AMCC profile, ...Gartner profile, storage market analysts, RAID controllers


GAITHERSBURG, Md - September 24, 2007 - Idealstor announced today that CONNECT Computer has replaced 3 DLT tape libraries with an Idealstor 4 Bay Backup Appliance. The Idealstor system is being used to streamline backup and restore for CONNECT Computer's ASP and MSP divisions that offer hosting for client applications and servers in their Connecticut data center.

"We recently had one of our DLT tape libraries fail for the 3rd time", said Alan Wittstein, President of Connect Computer. "We had been in discussions with Idealstor as they were looking to partner with us to help them deliver their ejectable disk products here in Connecticut and New York. Rather than seeing our tape failure as a disaster, I viewed it as an opportunity. Idealstor was willing to ship us one of their 4 Bay backup systems to prove how the solution could help us in our data center.

"Their product is a Windows 2003 Server and offered us the ability to backup to 4 removable drive bays using any capacity SATA disk available. We bought a few of the new terabyte Hitachi disks to use with their removable drive caddies. We were able to quickly hook the 4 Bay up to the network via our GB backbone and even install our existing Backup Exec software on the 4 Bay and configure it as our backup server.

"We had the system set up quickly and easily configured our software to backup to the 4 Bay drives. Our backup times were cut in half and the removable disk media seemed to be a reliable alternative to sending tapes offsite. What really sold us though was the first time we had a client call to ask us to do a restore. Reducing the total time spent recovering data from 2 hours (with tape) to 5 minutes immediately showed me the ROI that this device provided. The Idealstor is also now the center of our managed off-site backup solution as ejectable disk has proven to be an easy to use and affordable offsite storage solution for our clients. We don't plan on pushing tape out to clients anytime soon." ...Idealstor profile, ...CONNECT Computer, Disk to disk backup









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