NetApp
Acquires Onaro
Sunnyvale, Calif -
January 3, 2008 -NetApp today announced a definitive merger agreement
to acquire Onaro.
"80% of all IT operational issues
such as application outages, performance problems, and downtime result from
unwitting change" said Tom Georgens, executive VP at NetApp. "Customers
tell us they are being asked to commit to almost impossible levels of service to
avoid these problems, which drain precious resources... With the addition of
Onaro, our ability to provide the underlying modular storage architecture as
well as policy-based storage management software will help enterprises commit to
escalating service levels..." ...Onaro profile,
...Network Appliance
profile, Storage
Services
Seanodes Gets Funding for Shared Internal
Storage
Boston,
Mass - November 6, 2007 - Seanodes today announced the closure of a
$6.5 million funding round that will propel the company's expansion of its
Shared Internal Storage concept to customers worldwide.
Seanodes
software allows customers to reclaim unused internal disk space within
existing application servers and make that capacity available as a high
performance virtualized storage pool, eliminating the need for costly and
complex conventional
SAN and
NAS products.
...Seanodes profile,
Squeak! - Venture Capital
Funds in Storage
Why Sun will Shine with a New Lustre
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - September 12, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today said
it will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s
intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System.
Sun intends to add support for Solaris OS on Lustre and plans to
continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware
platforms.
...Sun Microsystems profile,
Acquired storage companies
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't heard of this company before. A sure sign that they
were heading straight for the
gone away storage
companies list without any deviations on route. Here's what I picked up from
their web site present and
past.
The
Lustre
product description (pdf) says - "the Lustre architecture was first
developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project in 1999."
The company's website started in about 2001 amd they released Lustre 1.0 in
2003. By
2004
had a product ready for a bigger market.
Strangely enough Solaris
support isn't listed as a strong feature in their recent
roadmap. So why does Sun
want this technology? - Well - even if you're not in the supercomputer business
- some technologies which start there eventually trickle down to the rest of us.
"Zero single points of failure" - mentioned on their home page - is a
good enough reason. As I wrote in my
7 year storage market
predictions (2005) storage
reliability is going to become a major headache in enterprise storage in the
next 5 years.
See also:- Robin
Harris's blog which explains the business background to CFS - "why
aren't they rich?"
DataCore Storage Virtualization Gets Virtual
FORT LAUDERDALE,
Florida - September 10, 2007 - DataCore Software, today announced
support for implementing its storage virtualization and SAN management solutions
as "virtual servers" – running on many different server
virtualization platforms, such as those from VMware, Xensource, Microsoft and
Virtual Iron.
DataCore storage virtualization software works with
nearly all storage hardware and can serve that storage to Windows, MacOS, Linux,
UNIX, Solaris, AIX, and Netware servers, whether physical or virtual.
"The release of DataCore's SANmelody, Traveller and SANsymphony as virtual
servers... underscores what has been a dominant reality for over 6 years –
that storage servers are today identical to all other servers in that they exist
primarily as storage applications running on ever more standard hardware"
said DataCore's CTO and Chairman Ziya Aral.
...DataCore profile,
Storage Software
Secure Information Sharing Architecture for .GOVs
Washington
- July 10, 2007 -
Cisco, EMC and Microsoft today announced a new
technology alliance targeting government users based around Secure
Information Sharing Architecture.
Historically, information
protection technologies have been enforced system-by-system, creating islands of
protected data. Some government agencies are having trouble providing role-based
access to sensitive content within their own organizations, and the problems
become much more difficult when sharing sensitive content across different
agencies.
By utilizing SISA, government agencies can more easily set
up security-enhanced, virtual networks for different authorized users and
communities to access sensitive files stored in different information protection
systems. SISA will enable new scenarios for cross-government information
sharing.
...Cisco profile,
...EMC profile,
...Microsoft profile,
SAN,
Storage Security
Aberdeen Reports on Storage Virtualization
BOSTON,
MA – April 19, 2007 – more customers are turning to storage and
server virtualization to ease data center headaches according to an end-user
survey recently conducted by Aberdeen.
Among the
benchmark report's key findings is that 50% of the overall respondents either
are evaluating or plan to adopt server virtualization, while 47% either are
evaluating or plan to adopt storage virtualization within 6 to 18 months.
Furthermore, results concluded that 31% of the overall respondents have deployed
server virtualization and 28% have installed storage virtualization. ...Aberdeen Group profile,
Market research,
article:- Storage
Virtualization Means More Than One Media,
article:- Virtual Tape:
Can You Afford to Ignore It?
Survey Says Fibre Channel SANs are Underutilized
SAN MATEO, Calif - January
24, 2007 - SANRAD Inc. announced findings from new research conducted
by Simon Management Group that highlight average SAN utilization among
Fibre Channel users at only 75%.
The study reveals the
prohibitive cost of Fibre
Channel as a key reason many users are unable to justify connecting the
remaining 25% of storage to their servers. The report confirms the interest in
iSCSI for solving the problem of SAN under-utilization and validates SANRAD's
solid position in addressing this opportunity.
Simon Management Group surveyed network and storage managers at
enterprises with annual revenues of $500M and above, to assess the value
proposition of using iSCSI
with existing Fibre Channel SANs.
SANRAD claims its architecture gives customers a cost-savings of more than 90%
over standard FC connectivity because it utilizes iSCSI and standard Ethernet
networks to connect servers to FC SANs.
...SANRAD profile,
...Simon Management Group,
Market research
| |
| . |
| String Bean Software Announces iSCSI WinTarget | | |
|
 |
Quorum - High
Availability and Workload
Management appliance from
Themis Computer
Manage upto
50 servers in real-time, any application,
any server with 1 simple
interface. | |
| . |
| Squeak!
- SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does the
fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It was
certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
 | |
| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 160G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
 |
NAS, DAS
or SAN? - Choosing the Right Storage Technology for Your Organization -
article by Xtore
It's 5 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 | | |
