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10 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

SAN (Storage Area Networks)

see SAN image in Megabyte cartoon
Megabyte had recently seen the movie
City Slickers and was experimenting with
a new data round-up technique.
This page is focused on traditional fibre-channel SAN companies - look elsewhere for - IP SAN (iSCSI and FCIP)
the RamSan-440 is a 4U RAM SSD delivering 600,000 random IOPS - click for more info
RamSan-440 Enterprise Solid State Disk
512GB RAM SSD, 600,000 IOPS
from Texas Memory Systems
SAN training
SAN software
SAN switches
Fibre-Channel SSDs
Fibre-channel adapters
SAN History - the First Decade
SAN Applications - classic article
the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
A Storage Architecture Guide - classic article
click for info
SAN news
91% of Compellent's Customers Want to Evaluate SSDs

Editor:- June 17 , 2009 Compellent today announced results generated through attendee polling conducted at its annual customer conference.

91% of business partners and 78% of customers responded important, very important or critical when asked, “What is your level of interest in evaluating SSDs in your environment?”


2 New Storage Interface Standards

Editor:- June 11, 2009 - this month there have been 2 developments on the storage standards front.

Version 2.0 of ExpressCard - will be 10x faster than the previous version. This will mainly benefit ExpressCard SSDs.

FCoE is now a draft standard - ...read the (unreadable) T11 document (pdf). If, like me, you ever wondered what the difference was between this and the much older FCIP - this 2007 InfoWorld article explains.


Texas Memory Systems Teams with IBM to Boost Storage Performance

Editor:- June 2, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems today announced its RamSan-500 rackmount SSD system has been certified interoperable with IBM's System Storage SVC.

"IBM SVC customers have been looking for ways to improve the performance of their applications using RamSan SSD," said Woody Hutsell, President of Texas Memory Systems. "Texas Memory Systems and IBM consistently top Storage Performance Council performance benchmark audits, and both companies deliver broad interoperability for heterogeneous IT environments. So we think customers will welcome the news that the compatibility of the RamSan-500 and the SVC has been thoroughly tested and certified interoperable."


FalconStor Claims Fastest Deduped Disk Backup

Editor:- June 1, 2009 - FalconStor Software today claimed that it now delivers the fastest backup and deduplication time in the industry.

Using a 100TB test bed connected to a single cluster of 2 FalconStor VTL nodes the total time to backup and deduplicate data was under 14 hours, yielding an average of 2GB/s per second.

Physical tape production can be achieved directly through 4Gbps Fibre Channel links by exporting tapes from FalconStor VTL to the physical tape library without using a separate media server. All hardware components used for the performance test are commonly available standard parts, including standard Linux-based servers and low-cost SATA-based storage subsystems.

Editor's comments:- Record Breaking claims are often hostage to editor research. We've certainly run stories about faster backup and restores before (10TB/hour in 2003 for example) but that didn't include dedupe. Let's see if this one passes the test of reader scrutiny.


FCIA Reports on 2nd FCoE Plugfest

Editor:- May 20, 2009 - the Fibre Channel Industry Association today announced that it successfully completed its 2nd FCoE Plugfest the week of May 12th at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab.

"This year's FCoE Plugfest was timed appropriately given tough economic times we are facing today – IT decision-makers are looking for savings in numerous areas such as power, space and cooling management while preserving their existing Fibre Channel investments" says Skip Jones, chairman FCIA and director Technology and Planning at QLogic. "Last week's FCoE Plugfest proved that this new technology is ready for prime time and ready to deliver the cost-savings that customers are looking for and underscores the arrival of a new efficient data center." Storage Events, Storage ORGs


New Book on Enterprise Storage

Editor:- May 7, 2009 - EMC has published a new book (480 pages $60) - "Information Storage and Management".

The book's 40 contributing writers cover the evolution of storage technology, including traditional deployment, consolidated storage networking and storage virtualization, while also addressing the most prevalent storage technologies, including direct attached storage (DAS), networked attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), content addressed storage (CAS), and IP SAN.

Here's a quote from the intro... "Not long ago, information storage was seen as only a bunch of disks or tapes attached to the back of the computer to store data..."

Yes - I remember those bad old days (pre 1998) before people thought of storage as a single market. It sounds like an interesting book.

You can never learn too much about storage. The 9 year old classic Storage Architecture Guide is still a popular article today. See also:- Storage Training


Emulex says "No" to a future "Connecting everything®"

Editor:- May 4, 2009 - Emulex announced today it has rejected an unsolicited acquisition offer from Broadcom.

...Later:- May 5, 2009 - Broadcom extended the deadline for their offer and published a press release saying what a great deal it would be for shareholders. "Broadcom's all-cash offer is not subject to a financing condition. Broadcom intends to fund the offer with its existing cash holdings."

Emulex, in its rejection letter, had pointed to the potential value in recent design wins. Broadcom rubbished this assertion with this pithy analysis.

"... while Emulex has touted its "design wins" in its response to Broadcom and in other communications with the financial community, it has failed to demonstrate an ability to convert design wins into either revenue growth or market share. Over the last several years, including this most recent quarter, Emulex has continued to lose share to its larger competitor (QLogic)."

Editor's comments:- the FC, 10GbE and InfiniBand adapter markets used to be pivotal enabling tools for fast SANs in the enterprise server computing market. However, in recent times these network technologies have become commodities - and their prospects have waned..

As I've said before, the future of fast storage interconnects will be dominated by the requirements of the SSD market instead of the HDD market. Redeploying the intellectual property of these storage connections into closer proximity with solid state storage is something which the traditional HBA business model cannot achieve - or which takes too long.

Broadcom's mission statement "Connecting everything®" is more in line with the future vision of the computer market than the old-style duopoly of Emulex (and QLogic) which dominate a market that's going to become irrelevant.


SAN Solutions will Unveil Media Verification Engine at NAB

Editor:- April 13, 2009 - SAN Solutions announced that it will showcase the company's new Crawler media verification engine next week at The NAB Show.

In scanning file systems and indexing and verifying media across a SAN or NAS based architecture, the Crawler confirms the ongoing utility and value of stored media, and also enables the content owner to federate storage archives and use a central database to search all of its media assets.


New Real-Time Design / Debug Tool for FC / NAS OEMs

Editor:- March 25, 2009 - Absolute Analysis has announced enhancements to its range of serial data test tools - such as...
  • ability to check system behavior in the presence of latency (failure and recovery) for Fibre Channel and Ethernet protocols, including FCoE, AFDX, iSCSI, IP, IPv6, TCP
  • ability to corrupt one or more network events in real-time and simulate data loss, data corruption, protocol errors and data errors, and check device under test error recovery procedures.
"Absolute Analysis is proud to offer engineers a much-needed single solution featuring the integration of sophisticated tools for use in data communications, telecommunications, and military communications, to capture, analyze, delay, modify, and verify data at full line rate," stated Dennis Murphy, President of Absolute Analysis. "This release... enables in-line, real-time impairment testing coupled with a powerful error injector and analysis that far exceed existing industry offerings." Storage Testers & Analyzers


Compellent Inches Slowly Closer to SAN Acceleration Market

Editor:- March 23, 2009 - Compellent today announced it would demonstrate its tiered SSD technology at a user event in May 2009.

The physical layer is based on STEC's ZeusIOPS SSDs. The soft part - something which Compellent calls - policy driven Data Progression apparently " minimizes the number of SSDs required while providing the highest levels of performance for mission-critical applications."

Editor's comments:- Compellent has been slowly drip feeding press releases and blogs about its SSD plans since last October. Unlike pure rackmount SSDs which aim at ultimate performance apps - Compellent's solution looks like it's pitched at a less ambitious (but maybe larger market) of users who would be happy with the kind of performance tweak which comes from replacing 2 hard disk slots with 2 flash SSDs. See also:- Fibre-Channel SSDs


Pliant Technology Kicks off - the SSD Industry Bookmarks

Editor:- March 5, 2009 - Pliant Technology's VP of Marketing, Greg Goelz shares his SSD Bookmarks in the 1st episode of a classic new series starting today on the home page of StorageSearch.com.


DOJ Investigates EMC

Editor:- March 3, 2009 - an article today in BostonHerald.com discusses EMC's disclosure that it is being investigated by the DOJ.

These matters were disclosed in an SEC filing yesterday. ...EMC profile


Nimbus Offers Drive Agnostic iSCSI

San Francisco, CA - February 9, 2009 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced the H-class RH100 quad port 10GbE unified storage system.

It offers up to 60x hot-swappable SATA (terabyte HDDs supported), SAS (450GB HDDs), or SSD drives (7.7TB capacity if populated by supported 128GB SSDs). Drives can be mixed within the same enclosure. The RH100 includes no-additional-charge snapshot, cloning, and replication software, built-in iSCSI SAN and NAS capabilities. The RH100 has a 4GB cache and 60Gbps internal bandwidth. Nimbus says it can be up and running in just 20 minutes. ...Nimbus profile, rackmount SSDs


RAID Inc Launches 1U Rackmount SSD

Methuen, MA - January 27, 2009 - RAID Inc. announced the availability of its new 1U SSD RAID.

The Razor SSD is a 12 bay 4 port fibre-channel system using COTS 2.5" SAS SSDs in a RAID protected array. The Razor comes with RAID's patent pending StorageWatch service - which proactively monitors storage conditions in real-time. ...RAID Inc profile, rackmount SSDs


a New Way to Instantly Rollback and Resume 24/7 Windows Apps

Santa Clara, Calif. - January 20, 2009 - Asempra Technologies today introduced its Business Continuity Appliance.

Designed for Microsoft environments the 2U rackmount iSCSI / FC SAN appliance (price $30,000) provides a Terabyte of storage which can be rolled back to any recovery point (with second by second resolution) and deliver data to applications within 30 seconds of a rollback being initiated, instead of hours or days with traditional D2d or tape backup systems. And unlike clustered servers or HA storage (which merely provide data continuity) Asempra's BCS can instantly restart from your chosen "good" data set - before a virus or software corruption occurred. ...Asempra Technologies profile

Editor's comments:-
$30,000 seemed like a steep price for a disk backup / recovery system - so I asked more about it.

One of the problems with this product is terminology. It sounds like a lot of other storage solutions - but is actually a different class of storage. The technical stuff on Asempra's site is clear and you will quickly recognize if it's the right product for your type of application. Like RAM SSDs - it's not for everybody.


Brocade Enhances SAN Monitoring

SAN JOSE, Calif. - December 2, 2008 - Brocade announced today enhancements to its Network Monitoring Service.

Brocade NMS now provides 24×7 expert end-to-end monitoring about the health and status of data center fabrics to help maximize network efficiency, availability, and uptime. Moreover, Brocade NMS provides organizations with valuable information and rules-based business intelligence to maximize application availability and optimize data center resources. ...Brocade profile, storage services, storage reliability

Virtual Instruments Offers Clearer Views for SAN Traffic Analysis
Scotts Valley, Calif. - November 11, 2008 - Virtual Instruments today announced availability of its SAN Traffic Analysis Point module.

An add-on component for its NetWisdom solution, TAP (which costs $300 per port) enables real-time Fibre Channel network transaction monitoring, analysis and diagnosis. Unlike Mirror or SPAN ports, TAP devices show complete visibility of network traffic and mirror the data flowing between two network points.

Virtual Instruments' CEO, Mark Urdahl said - "IT administrators can find themselves in serious and expensive situations when the storage network experiences a problem or down time with limited visibility into the root-cause of the problem. Having Virtual Instruments' TAP device is like having a window into your SAN traffic. It provides unprecedented access to SAN transactions so that performance and troubleshooting issues can be proactively identified and resolved, allowing our customers to realize tremendous cost savings." ...Virtual Instruments profile, Storage Testers & Analyzers


Condre Markets APPLE Video Optimized RAID

Minneapolis, MN - November 5 , 2008 - Condre Storage, Inc. is selling a new APPLE optimized AV RAID - the Bullet.

Built on proven technology with a 4Gb Fibre Channel front end and SAS/SATA drives. The Bullet AV RAID scales up to 64TB capacity and is capable of up to 3 streams of (10 bit), 1080, Uncompressed HD video. MSRP is $11,999 for 12TB of Fibre Channel to SATA storage which includes 1 year next business day on site support.

"Condre Storage is excited by this unique offering for the APPLE video market. The Bullet is an incredibly fast RAID, and with 2 boxes striped together we've done over 8 streams of 10 bit, 1080/HD video", according to Condre Storage President Denny Maetzold. "Condre is proud to have a new and outstanding RAID product to complement our existing RAID product offerings. It allows our customers to offer their end users a complete video storage solution." ...Condre Storage profile, Storage VARs, Video - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com


OnPATH Unveils Industry's Largest SAN Switch

Marlton, NJ - October 21, 2008 - OnPATH Technologies today introduced its first 8Gbps Fibre Channel switch module.

The new module supports up to 12 multi-rate Fibre-Channel ports and can be scaled up to 1,536 8Gb FC ports in one non-blocking switch. ...OnPATH Technologies profile, SAN switches


New Article - FC SAN SSDs

Editor:- September 13, 2008 - Storagesearch.com today published a new article and directory on the subject of - "Fibre-Channel SSDs."

"I've tracked the SAN storage market since the first commercially launched products in 1994" said editor Zsolt Kerekes. "As the number of market-active SSD oems listed on Storagesearch approaches 90 companies I thought I should make it easier for readers to disentagle the info related to this important market segment - which was getting lost in tables deep in our SSD Buyers Guide. The new SAN SSD page lists all current vendors and also explains how this market fits into a historic context." ...read the article
Storage History
SAN OEMs and ISVs
InfiniBand / iSCSI / NAS / RAID
Aarohi Communications

Adaptec

ADIC

ADTX

ADVA Optical Networking

AMCC

ANACAPA

AnexTEK

Apple

Aprius

ASNP

ATTO Technology

Axxana

BakBone Software

BMC Software

BiTMICRO Networks

BlueArc

Bridge Technology

Bridgeworks

Brocade

Bus-Tech

Cepoint Networks

CipherMax

Ciprico

Cisco Systems

Cloverleaf Communications

Compellent

Computer Associates

CreekPath Systems

Crossroads Systems

Curtis

Cutting Edge

Datalink

DataCore Software

DataDirect Networks

DATAllegro

Dell Computer

Dot Hill

DTS

Elipsan

EMC

Emulex

Enhance Technology

EqualLogic

European Storage Concept

ExaGrid Systems

Exavio

Excel/Meridian Data

FalconStor Software

FCIA

Fibrenetix

Fujitsu

Gateway

Gresham Computing

Hitachi Data Systems

HP

IBM

Imperial Technology

Incipient

Infortrend

Inline

Intel

IntelliPath

InterSAN

Intransa

iQstor Networks

JMR Electronics

Kazeon Systems

LeftHand Networks

Legato Systems

LightSand Communications

LiveVault

LSI

Marner Storage Technologies

Medea

MicroNet Technology

MPC Computers

MTI Technology

Mountain View Data

NEC

Network Appliance

NetConvergence

Netreon

Nexsan Technologies

Nishan Systems

NSI Software

Nortel Networks

nStor

N-TEC

Okapi Software

Onaro

ONStor

Overland Storage

Pillar Data Systems

Plasmon

PMC-Sierra

PolyServe

Procom Technology

Proware Technology

QLogic

Qualstar

Quantum

Rave Computer

Rorke Data

iStor Networks

SANavigator

SANBlaze Technology

Sanbolic

SANcastle Technologies

Sanera Systems

SANgate Systems

SANRAD

Sans Digital

SAN Solutions

SAN Valley Systems

Seagate Technology

SENCOR

SGI

SkyStorage

SNIA

Solid Access Technologies

Solid Data Systems

Spectra Logic

STEC

Storage Engine

StorageQuest

StoreAge

Storewiz

Sun Microsystems

Superior Data Solutions

Systex

Taejin Infotech

TD Systems

TechnoMages

Texas Memory Systems

Third I/O

Thomson multimedia

Tiger Technology

Tivoli

Transtec

TrelliSoft

Ultera Systems

Unisys

User Groups

Vicom Systems

VMETRO

Volicon

Wasabi Systems

Western Scientific

Winchester Systems

Xiotech

Xyratex

Zetta Systems
still can't find it? check the acquired, dead & renamed list
fibre channel
Fibre-channel adapter cards
Universal Solid State Disk USSD 200 from Solid Access Technologies with SAS, FC, SCSI or custom interfaces
performance/price leading
SAS, FC & SCSI enterprise solid state disks
from Solid Access Technologies
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Z's Laws - Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance
A reader asked me a very good question.

"Is there an industry roadmap for future flash SSD performance?"

That prompted other questions like...
  • How fast are flash SSDs going to be in 2009?, 2010? or 2012?
  • What are the technology factors which relate to flash SSD throughput and IOPS?
  • How close will flash SSDs get to RAM SSD performance?
There wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay scattered all across this web site and in my many one on one discussions with readers about the market...
But I agreed there should be a single place on the web where these answers could be found.

Forget Moore's Law. That gives you the wrong answer, and this article explains why. ...read the article
.
Are MLC SSDs Safe in Enterprise Apps?
This is a follow up article to the popular SSD Myths and Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many RAM SSD makers) precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.

This new article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed into hard disk form factors.
which technology to choose? - read the article It starts down a familiar lane but an unexpected technology twist (which arrived in my email while writing this article) takes you to a startling new world of possibilities. ...read the article
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Teralyte removable disk to disk backup for SMBs
ejectable disk to disk backup for SMBs
Teralyte from Idealstor
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the Fastest Solid State Disks

Speed isn't everything, and it comes at a price.
But if you do need the6speediest SSD then wading through the web sites of over 90 current SSD oems to find a suitable candidate slows you down.

And the SSD search problem will get even worse.
the Fastest Solid State Disks
I've done the research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from storage news and direct inputs from oems. ...read the article,
.
click to read article by Xtore
NAS, DAS or SAN? - Choosing the Right Storage Technology for Your Organization - article by Xtore

It's 8 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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More articles about SANs

H
ere are some more articles we published on STORAGEsearch related to storage area networks.

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