| SAN news |
New Integrity Tool for Old
Tape Archives
Editor:- January 18, 2010 - Crossroads Systems
today announced
details of ArchiveVerify - a new monitoring option for its
ReadVerify Appliance
that safeguards the future readability of data
backed up on
tape.
“In our experience, the Achilles’ heel of a data recovery
strategy is often the uncertainty of the data’s readability, and this
single point of failure can render then entire restore process useless,”
adds Bernd Krieger, Managing Director, at Crossroads Europe.
Editor's comments:- Crossroads was originally a specialist in
the SAN router business.
In recent years it has done a lot of work in the area of
storage reliability.
I've read lots of their whitepapers which describe their research and products
addressing data integrity. Although there has been a historic trend for users
to migrate away from
tape to disk backup - many super users of huge
tape libraries (with the
biggest archives) will be the last to migrate away - due to logistics and cost.
It's those kind of users who can benefit most from automated tools or services
which increase the data integrity they achieve and cut down media waste and
unrecoverable events.
New Directory for AoE Storage
Editor:- January 15,
2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new directory for
AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet)
Storage.
$9 million Funding Round for flash SSD Enabled SAN Backup
Editor:-
November 18, 2009 - Axxana
announced it has
secured $9 million Series B
investment led by Carmel Ventures.
Axxana's existing investors, Gemini
Israel Funds and the serial entrepreneur
Moshe Yanai,
also participated in the round.
The funds will be used to accelerate
the adoption of The Phoenix System - the first "Black Box" Enterprise
Data Recorder which was demonstrated at EMC
World in May 2009.
"Axxana's EDR brings a disruptive solution that is well poised
to transform the entire storage replication market and create a whole new
category within it," said Ronen Nir, Partner at Carmel Ventures. "We
are impressed with Axxana's strong founding team and their achievements so far,
including impressive endorsement by leading storage vendors worldwide."
Editor's comments:- Axxana's solution is a lossless data
recovery system which sits on the
SAN and records data into a
rugged flash
SSD-enabled, locally situated, data survival box. Although Axxana talks
about it "complementing" other types of data protection - such as
offsite / online backup
my gut feel is that if the product shows itself to be usable and
reliable in a wide
range of environments - it will set a new standard for
backup which will
supercede anything possible with rotating
disk backup systems or
tape.
The
clearest explanation is in
Axxana's datasheet
(pf) from which I've taken these snippets.
"Axxana's solution
combines concepts used in airplane Flight Data Recorders (Black Box) with newly
developed materials and technologies to create a hardened "Enterprise Data
Recorder" storage system capable of withstanding extreme conditions to
preserve business data in the event of a disaster... The Phoenix system was
designed to survive calamitous events such as Earthquake, Weather, Floods, Fire,
and the consequences of a terror attack. The system was successfully tested and
meets international standards for various threat scenarios."
ASAPs Webinar
Editor:- November 10, 2009 - Dataram is running a
webinar next week (November 18) -
Navigating
the Maze of Solid State Storage Solutions.
The company says
viewers will discover - "How to better gauge your storage traffic to
identify bottlenecks and areas where solid state storage can provide a day 1
positive ROI."
Editor's comments:- as I said earlier - StorageSearch.com
will soon publish a new guide to ASAPs (Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of
storage) - and I'm rounding up content and comments on this subject. But the
webinar, above, takes place before our new guide will be published.
Expect 16GFC by 2011 - says FCIA
Editor:- October
20, 2009 - the Fibre
Channel Industry Association announced its has completed the technical
work on
16Gb/s
Fibre Channel (16GFC) - which provides a natural value migration from 8GFC.
Product
roll-outs are anticipated in 2011 according to FCIA Chairman - Skip Jones.
Editor's
comments:- I first published a directory of Fibre-channel adapters way back
in 1994. The first FC connected storage array product listed in that
was the
SPARCstorageArray
from
Sun Microsystems.
It's reassuring that users in the FC market can anticipate another
level of performance evolution - but FC is no longer a growth market. So this
could be the last post for FC - just as
15K RPM
was the end of the road for hard disks.
For dispersed systems
ethernet based storage (NAS)
long ago became the dominant network storage connect - while for local use and
higher performance InfiniBand
and PCIe have taken
hold in distinct functional pockets.
Dataram eliminates waits for the SSD Hot Shot / Hot Spot Engineer
Editor:-
September 28, 2009 - Dataram
launched the
XcelaSAN
- a fast 2U
rackmount flash SSD with 450,000 random IOPS performance (assuming 50/50
R/W and 4k blocks), and upto 8x 4Gbps FC ports - aimed at the
SAN application
acceleration market. Pricing starts at $65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB
internal flash, of which 128GB is effectively used as a cache.
"It
is now well understood that the benefit of a solid state infrastructure for
compute-intensive environments is higher application performance with less
equipment and lower operational costs," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief
Technologist. "The question is no longer 'How can I benefit from solid
state storage?' but 'How do I best implement solid state in my existing
infrastructure?' With XcelaSAN, we enable organizations with performance
intensive applications to seamlessly add a dynamic, intelligent solid state
storage tier to their existing SAN environment."
Editor's
comments:- At 1st glance this product looks like many others which have
aimed at the traditional market of SAN users. But its revolutionary design opens
a new market which has been inaccessible to traditional
FC SSD vendors.
Dataram's product includes proprietary software - which does away with the need
for an SSD expert engineer to identify hotspots and relocate critical data. The
company says the XcelaSAN will automatically learn and self optimize during the
1st few hours of operation - and it will maintain application speedups even
when applications and loads change - which is not possible with human tuned
systems.
The search for a self tuning agnostic SSD software layer
which sits between a SAN server and conventional rotating disk bulk storage has
been the Holy Grail of SSD oems for over a decade. None have actually achieved
it - till now. Although many vendors have developed semi-automated tuning kits
and strategies for common applications - they require considerable expertise on
the part of the applications engineer to make them work well. That has slowed
down the adoption rate of SSDs in many midsized organizations which don't have a
big enough installed base to attract the start SSD talent to look at their
problems. And it's also why SSD accelerators, have not been viable as a
reseller product.
When I spoke to Dataram's CTO, Jason Caulkins, I was
impressed by the depth of marketing thinking behind the new product launch.
Dataram realized that simply launching a me-too SSD box would have an
uncertain outcome in a market that's already so crowded. And Dataram's corporate
memory goes back over 30 years to pioneering SSDs for minicomputers which
they launched in
1976. But
all memory companies know that in the future SSDs will use more memory than
traditional markets - such as server or pc motherboards. So it's important to
stake out ground in the SSD market.
I asked - where did the technology
come from? Jason said some of it came from Dataram's acquisition of
Cenatek - where he had
already been thinking about the SSD business model problem for many years. With
much bigger resources available after Dataram's acquisition - he's had teams of
software engineers working on the XcelaSAN concepts and licensed essential glue
where needed.
Will it work? Dataram says the XcelaSAN has been tested
and working in customer sites. Product shipments in the US start in the next
quarter. And the product is storage agnostic - meaning the customer can replace
their SAN arrays at a future date and retain the acceleration speedup. XcelaSAN
seems to offer a viable route for mid-budget user enterprises - who have
been neglected by SSD vendors for economic reasons - to join the march of the
SSD Revolution.
Is it competitive? - If you use my quick and dirty
magic number for SSD sever accelerators - (write IOPS divided by cost per TB) -
it's in the same order of magnitude as leading PCIe SLC flash SSD cards - so
it's definitely worth a look.
ATTO Demos 6,400MB/s HBA at IBC
Editor:- September
10, 2009 - ATTO
Technology is
demonstrating
its 6Gb/s SAS HBAs
and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs this week at IBC
in Amsterdam .
Demos include a quad-channel card that delivers the
fastest available Fibre
Channel data transfer rate of 6,400MB/s. Storage Events,
Record Breaking
Storage
TMS Acquires SAN IP from Incipient
Editor:- September
8, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems
has expanded its IP base with the
acquisition of data
management patents and source code from Incipient.
"The
patents and software provide Texas Memory Systems with a new set of tools for
virtualisation and storage management that complement our solid state storage
systems," said Woody
Hutsell, President at Texas Memory Systems. "The newly-acquired
technology will accelerate our development of new high-performance storage that
meets the demanding and complex needs of our enterprise customers."
Texas Memory Systems has not acquired any interest in Incipient, Inc. Both
companies remain independent.
EMC Acquires Kazeon
Editor:- September 1, 2009 -
EMC today
announced it has
signed a definitive agreement to
acquire privately-held
Kazeon Systems.
Core to Kazeon's
eDiscovery
attractiveness is its ability to handle data that resides anywhere in the
enterprise environment - including content on laptops, desktops, content
management repositories, email archives and file shares.
RAID Systems Get 2TB WD Drives
Editor:- September 1,
2009 - Dot Hill
and Pillar Data Systems
are in the 1st wave of companies who have recently started volume
shipments of RAID systems
using 3.5" 2TB 7,200 RPM hard drives from Western Digital.
The
new drives were announced in
April 2009.
Unplugging Sun's Customer Base
Editor:- July 31,
2009 - an article in
Infoworld
says Sun Microsystems' customers are being targeted by IBM and
HP who are preying on customers' doubts about Sun's long term
hardware strategies under Oracle's ownership.
Author
Jon Brodkin writes
- "Sun customers were already showing a willingness to switch" - even
before these targeted
Sun-away
campaigns. ...read
the article, SPARC Product
Directory
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 |
| Storage History
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| There
are
hundreds
of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
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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. |
 | |
| 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, | |
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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
Here are some more articles we
published on STORAGEsearch related to storage area networks.
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