|
 |
 |
|
||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
What's New With SAS?
In a recent online poll of InfoStor readers (including
end users, VARs, and systems/storage integrators),
43% said that SATA drives will account for the majority
of their disk drive purchases over the next six months,
and 28% cited Fibre Channel drives. Somewhat
surprisingly, 25% said that SAS drives will account for
the majority of their drive purchases. Not bad for an
interface that has only been around for about two
years.
Disk drive market predictions from research firms
paint an even rosier picture for SAS. For example, IDC,
which bases its estimates on data and projections
from the disk drive manufacturers, expects SAS to
account for almost half (48%) of all enterprise drive
shipments this year, up from 35% last year. And IDC
expects SAS to garner a commanding 70% market
share by 2011.
Of course, SAS has a number of inherent advantages:
It's the heir apparent to parallel SCSI, and SAS
systems support both high-performance SAS drives
as well as low-cost, high-capacity SATA drives,
allowing users and integrators to mix-and-match "best-
of-breed" devices and create "in-the-box" tiered
storage (although that capability is hyped in marketing
material more than it's deployed in actual end-user
scenarios).
Increased adoption of SAS drives and subsystems is attributable to a number of other factors as well, including the following: * Although hindered in the beginning by relatively high prices and low capacities (73GB and 147GB), a number of disk drive manufacturers have begun shipping 300GB, 500GB, and 750GB drives, albeit in limited quantities and at relatively high prices. And Seagate has begun shipments of 1TB SAS drives (the Barracuda ES.2 series); * Due to the popularity of blade servers, one trend that is expected to create a surge in SAS drive shipments is the use of SAS as a fabric in blade configurations, as well as in rack enclosures; * Although relatively few users/integrators actually mix SAS and SATA drives in SAS subsystems, the trend to do so will pick up, because vendors have solved issues such as vibration problems. "Not many users are mixing drive types in the same enclosure today, but there is a lot of interest in doing it," says Mike Karp, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). * First-generation SAS drives have data-transfer rates of 3Gbps, but some manufacturers-such as LSI-are already shipping 6Gbps components. And 6Gbps SAS will offer a number of new features. Also, the SAS road map extends to 12Gbps transfer rates; * Early SAS adapters had a relatively low number of ports, but vendors such as Adaptec are shipping SAS adapters with as many as 28 ports; and * The trend is away from 3.5-inch SAS drives to 2.5- inch small-form-factor (SFF) drives, which provide better power efficiencies and space savings. |
|||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
at 2008 Storage Industry Awards
Nexsan, a leading provider of energy efficient, long
term disk storage, collected top honors in two Green
Storage categories at this year's Storage Industry
Awards held at the Tower Hotel, London.
Nexsan's SATABeast disk-based fixed content storage
product with AutoMAID was awarded the Green
Product of the Year. AutoMAID is Nexsan's own
enhancement of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disk)
technology that places disk drives into several levels
of energy savings without compromising application
performance. This powerful combination of high
performance with energy saving capabilities enables
users to lower the cost of owning storage.
In cooperation with Channel partner NCE Computer
Group, Nexsan also picked up the Green Project of the
Year award as the storage backbone of an overall 100
TB plus solution provided to the Honda F1 racing
team. Honda opted to consolidate its storage with
virtualization software operating in tandem with the
Nexsan SATABeast and AutoMAID. The energy
savings made possible by Nexsan's SATABeast with
AutoMAID was a perfect fit with
Honda's "myearthdream" campaign aimed at raising
awareness of environmental issues.
The "Storrie" Awards are based on votes from readers of Storage Magazine, the UK's number one IT storage magazine. "With these two 'Storries', Nexsan has been recognized again as a leading innovator in green storage," said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing at Nexsan. "With a design focused on saving energy without compromising application performance, Nexsan products have moved beyond the "on or off" MAID implementations of other storage solutions, which can take several to many minutes to wake up, to offer several levels of energy savings enabling the disk system to be "on", save energy and maintain application performance." Nexsan's latest innovation in green storage, the SASBoy the industry's first green SAS storage solution with MAID 2.0 was announced last week. |
|||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
Certified Support for VMware Site Recovery Manager
LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of highly
available iSCSI SANs, announced today its support for
VMware Site Recovery Manager. VMware Site Recovery
Manager is a pioneering new product for disaster
recovery management and automation. Part of
VMware's industry-leading suite of management and
automation products for the data center, VMware Site
Recovery Manager simplifies business continuity
planning and testing, and reduces the risk and
complexity associated with implementing disaster
recovery. LeftHand Networks' certified Storage
Replication Adapter allows customers to deploy a
complete disaster recovery (DR) solution that
automates DR for systems and storage across
virtualized environments.
"VMware and LeftHand Networks are making disaster
recovery rapid, reliable and affordable," said Parag
Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "With the
interoperability between LeftHand's storage solutions
and VMware Site Recovery Manager, customers can
automate the testing and recovery of both applications
and data recovery within VMware virtualized
environments."
Organizations are increasingly faced with stringent recovery time objectives, success rate objectives and compliance requirements, all while continually seeking reliable and innovative disaster recovery solutions that can keep pace with the business expectations placed on IT organizations. LeftHand Networks' SAN systems equipped with the Storage Replication Adapter and combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager provide customers with an integrated and completely automated disaster recovery solution. The combined recovery solution leverages the competitive advantages of LeftHand Networks' Remote Copy capability, including: * Capacity-efficient remote copies of the data that increase the speed of recovery and maximize the utilization of the SAN. LeftHand Networks' Remote Copy leverages Advanced Thin Provisioning so that no excess reserve capacity is required in the disaster recovery site. * Optimal usage of network / WAN resources for predictable quality of service and performance. LeftHand's Remote Copy includes bandwidth throttling so that shared WAN resources are used optimally for the replication of data while not adversely impacting other traffic on the WAN. * Fast and easy failover and failback of the data in the event of a disaster. LeftHand Networks' Remote Copy includes incremental failover and failback capabilities managed via a simple Wizard interface. Unlike many storage vendors, once the primary data center is restored, failback of the data only requires the transfer of the incremental changes that occur subsequent to the original failure event. The LeftHand Networks Storage Replication Adapter is available as a free download from LeftHand Networks' and VMware's websites beginning May 31, 2008. A single LeftHand Networks Storage Replication Adapter is compatible across LeftHand Networks' entire suite of iSCSI SAN solutions. |
|||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
of Adaptec's Snap Server Business
SAN DIEGO - June 30, 2008 - Overland Storage, Inc.
today announced that it has acquired
the Snap Server NAS business from Adaptec Inc.,
including the brand and all assets
related to Snap Server networked and desktop storage
appliances. The acquisition extends Overland's vision,
reach and strategy for delivering end-to-end data
protection to its customers and partners with the
addition of best-in-class NAS and replication
solutions. The net purchase price was $3.6 million,
with $2.1 million paid in cash upon closing of the
transaction, and the remainder to be paid in 12
months.
The Snap Server product line broadens Overland's
capabilities by adding distributed NAS while also
strengthening central and remote office data
protection. Snap Server leads the NAS market with
more than 200,000 units shipped. The acquisition will
enable Overland to address the $1.2 billion SMB NAS
market, which according to IDC continues to grow by
at least 15 percent annually. The features and
functions of the Snap Server product line position it
well to target the three fastest growing market
segments: distributed NAS, centralized data protection
for remote sites and backup to disk.
This acquisition enables Overland to provide its
customers and partners with much-needed NAS
functionality that complements the company's well
established REO disk-based backup VTL, NEO
and ARCvault tape automation products along with
ULTAMUS RAID general-purpose SAN storage. The
addition of the Snap Server business is important to
Overland in a number of ways. First, it adds a best-in-
class distributed NAS offering to the company's
product portfolio, helping Overland achieve its goal of
providing "end-to-end data protection solutions" to
SMB customers and distributed enterprises. Second,
the acquisition immediately adds approximately $18
million in annual revenue to the company's run rate,
which should provide Overland with the ability to
leverage its existing sales force, marketing resources
and infrastructure. Finally, the acquisition contributes a
significant amount of proprietary intellectual property
(IP), which should strengthen the company's intrinsic
value, along with a strong and cohesive development
team to promote further growth of the Snap Server
product line.
Snap Servers featuring NAS functionality-specifically, Snap Server 650, Snap Server 520, Snap Server 410, Snap Server 210 and Snap Server 110-provide expandable capacity from 1TB to 88TBs with a combination of SATA and SAS drives. In addition to these products, Overland also acquired the proprietary Snap Server GuardianOS operating system and all licenses, patents, inventories and fixed assets relating to the Snap business. Overland will assume all Snap customer support obligations. Also, the Milpitas, Calif.- based Snap Server team of approximately 50 people will be joining Overland, including sales, marketing, engineering and support. All existing Snap Server customers will continue to receive full service and support. |
|||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
New e-Discovery & Legal Hold Capabilities
OCEANPORT, N.J. - June 25, 2008
Responding to the need for organizations to preserve
and protect their information when litigation is
reasonably anticipated, CommVault today announced
the availability of an advanced Legal Hold feature set,
extending the capabilities of the eDiscovery features in
the CommVault Simpana 7.0 software suite.
CommVault's Legal Hold capability spans both
archive and backup stores to help ensure information
is preserved. By maintaining a legally defensible audit
trail, these features allow customers to reduce the
risks associated with non-compliance with
regulations such as the US Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure (FRCP) for eDiscovery as well as
preserving the evidentiary integrity of content for court
submission.
With powerful features and no need for additional
licensing to enable a wide-ranging eDiscovery toolkit,
the Legal Hold capability uses a comprehensive,
automated approach to search and retrieve data from
backups, archives or any Electronically Stored
Information (ESI) - such as emails and files - and
retain a subset of the data for long-term accessibility.
CommVault Legal Hold helps customers defensibly
preserve responsive information that may already be
under multiple retention policies. CommVault's Legal
Hold also embraces object level holds, beyond file-
based, for a granular level of recovery for both vaulted
backup sets and archives at the message or
document level.
Post-hold considerations are also supported within
the Legal Hold feature set, allowing post-hold data
and content to be retained or removed as required.
Industry Demand for Legal Hold Solutions Calls for
Sophisticated Features and Combined Archive and
Backup Stores
A legal hold is a process used by an organization to
preserve all forms of relevant information when
litigation is reasonably anticipated.
Unlike traditional Legal Hold technologies which treat
archives as a single entity and only tag messages
located inside the archived storage pool,
CommVault's Legal Hold feature spans both backups
and archives, preserving data in all storage pools
based on normal retention policies.
Not limited to legal action, users abiding by internal
governance rules can also leverage the Legal Hold
feature set for adherence to company policies that
mandate the retention and disposal of certain
documents and information.
As a result of CommVault's unique Singular
Information Management approach to Legal Hold,
specific features and benefits are made available to
customers including:
Advanced search result views which allows users to
utilize annotation tags and organize search results;
Powerful filters that enable users to quickly identify
and reduce the number of files and email messages
needed for review to make better legal decisions,
meet deadlines and avoid sanctions;
Giving users the ability to save queries and control
how results are displayed. This allows relevant items
to then be easily designated for Legal Hold where
collections are defined by case-specific retention
rules; and
Flexible post-hold management capabilities allow the
reclassification, consolidation and/or timely
destruction of held content, regardless of
infrastructure.
CommVault's groundbreaking Simpana software is a single product with application modules for Data Protection, Archive, Replication, Resource Management and Search-all built from the ground up, on a single code base and platform. This efficient, scalable design quite literally changes the way information is protected, archived, managed, and accessed. The Result? Singular efficiency, flexibility, and scalability other products can only dream about. |
|||||
|
||||||
| by Scott Cooper |
Enterprise Functionality/Scalability at Mid-Range Prices
Preserve your initial storage investment with Spectra
Logic's TranScale T-Series libraries. By utilizing
interchangeable components, their libraries easily
transform and scale (TranScale) to protect your
storage investment as your organization-and data-
grows. Designed with enterprise-level functionality at
mid-range prices, the TranScale T-Series libraries
feature unmatched storage density, integrated
encryption, power-usage monitoring, and the ability to
add disk-based backup alongside tape-all inside the
same library unit. Ideal for growing mid-range
organizations, Spectra's TranScale T-Series meets
your storage capacity and feature needs now and in
the future.
Spectra TranScale T-Series Libraries can:
- Start with 50 tape slots and scale up to as many as
680 slots.
- Scale up to as many as 24 drives.
- Don't stop there. With the TranScale architecture, you
can upgrade to a larger TranScale T-Series Library
and preserve your investment by continuing to use the
expensive library components.
- Interchange the:
- Power Supplies
- Drives
- Interfaces (QIPs)
- Robotics
- TeraPacks
- Add SATA-based RXT media, instantly adding VTL to
your backup strategy.
- Support mixed media, within a single enclosure, of
any combination of LTO, SAIT, and SDLT tape
technologies, and mobile RXT VTL media.
Technical Features - Spectra TranScale T-Series BlueScale 10 environment is the library's core intelligence. - BlueScale technology is backed by a decade's work in data protection with tape and disk libraries. Its intelligence provides the Spectra T-Series current innovative features, as well as its ability to support new technologies as they evolve. The BlueScale environment supports: - Integrated BlueScale Encryption that supplies hardware-based encryption through our QIP or LTO-4 hardware and total key management (including LTO- 4), with no external hardware or software. - Partitioning through Shared Library Services (SLS) without external hardware or software. - Capacity on Demand (CoD), which lets you add capacity as you need it and when you need it, simply by logging onto the Spectra Logic Web site and requesting a key that you use to enable new slots. - Hot-swap drives and controllers, redundant components, and high-density modular design Guaranteed on-time support, including an assisted self-maintenance (ASM) option and AutoSupport WORM-compatible media, with LTO, SAIT, SDLT, and RXT disk. - Support for integrated removable RXT RAID VTL Observatory, Remote Library Controller (RLC), and graphical touch-screen front panel to simplify library management and use. - Connectivity with Fibre Channel and SCSI drives Compatible with all major operating systems, backup software packages, and standard data center racks Ground-breaking BlueScale EnergyAudit power monitoring feature. |
|||||
 |
|
|||||
