Business News Holding

Category: storage

  • Report Aims To Demystify "Hype and Rhetoric" Around Green Data Storage


    Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it’s often hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact.

    A new report from Forrester Research suggests, however, that adopting an environmentally responsible approach to storage can help to make it more efficient, reducing capital and operating costs at the same time.

    Entitled Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency it says that poor measurement capabilities, high switching costs, and overall buyer conservatism have limited green considerations from having significant influence on purchase decisions.

    Its author, Andrew Reichman, says the report is intended to highlight the approaches that make the most economic sense.

    "In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but have little measurable influence on the bottom line are unlikely to receive funding, so sorting through the claims and identifying benefits that are achievable in the near term is key to a successful green strategy in storage."

    He goes on to say that given the current economic climate, there are green storage approaches that are likely to see higher adoption. Among them:

    • Dense drives, such as SATA and FATA, are the greenest storage technology going and can have a tremendous impact on the green and financial bottom line
    • Thin provisioning can reduce the overall footprint of usable data and dramatically increase storage utilization, which is often low because of large upfront allocations that often sit idle
    • Deduplication eliminates redundant copies of data. Forrester expects significant focus on these capabilities, which significantly reduce the amount of disk space required to save a given amount of data, from vendors in the near term.

    An abstract of the report is available here.

  • Adaptec Announces Support For VMware vSphere


    Adaptec has announced that its newly launched Series 5 Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) RAID Controller Family will be providing support for VMware vSphere.

    The VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program member’s controller family is supported natively via an in-box driver, ready for immediate installation.

    VMware vSphere is the industry’s first cloud operating system. It allows datacenters to be transformed into simplified cloud infrastructures.

    Scott Cleland, director of marketing at Adaptec, said that by supporting VMware vSphere, Adaptec can further extend the value of its Series 5 Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) RAID Controller Family into customers’ next-generation datacenters.

    He said this helps customers to manage large collections of infrastructure — including CPUs, storage and networking — as a seamless, flexible and dynamic cloud environment.

    "Virtualization and cloud computing environments are constantly changing and adapting to meet the demands of growing enterprises," he said.

    "VMware vSphere provides the most feature-rich solution available today to meet and exceed these growing needs."

  • EMC Unveils Virtual Data Centre With High End Storage


    EMC Symmetric VMax is the latest breakthrough technology from EMC. It provides for a virtual data center with high end storage and scales up to 2 PB of usable protected capacity, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Unlike alternate arrays, it equips its customers with an ability to consolidate workloads with a comparatively small footprint.

    These systems will be available immediately.

    Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO said: "The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore.

    "Virtualization’s ability to maximize resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening in the storage world.

    "EMC is leading the way with the biggest breakthrough in new high-end storage design in nearly two decades, enabling storage customers to deploy a flexible, dynamic, energy-efficient information infrastructure and get the maximum value for their investment."

    The new architecture can be deployed with flash, Fibre channel and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives.
    Virtualized and physical servers are supported including open systems, mainframes and system hosts.

    The Virtual Logical unit number (LUN) technology moves data to the right tiers and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) types at the right time.

    Virtual provisioning efficiently allocates, grows and reclaims storage.

    The Extended distance protection replicates data over distances and achieves zero data loss protection.

    Information centric security systems with advanced RSA security technology have been built in to keep the data safe; reduce risk and improve compliance. The high end storage array uses multi core processors to lower power costs and IOPS per dollar.

  • WD Ships 2 TB Hard Drives With Greenpower Technology


    WD has expanded its enterprise family of hard drives to include the next-generation 2 TB capacity.

    The company says it is the largest and only 2 TB enterprise-class hard drive shipping today. Combining 64 MB cache, dual processors, and increased areal density, the RE4-GP hard drives yield twice the processing power – and produce a 25 per cent performance improvement – over the previous generation.

    Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD’s enterprise storage solutions business unit, said its GreenPower technology platform is the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute.

    He said the drives reduce average drive power consumption by up to 50 per cent over currently available competitors’ drives and are ultra-cool and quiet, all while delivering solid performance.

    "Energy efficiency is a primary concern for our customers who continue to look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint without compromising reliability or performance," he said.

    "WD’s RE-GP drives enable them to meet their customer’s system requirements for storage capacity, reliability, performance and cost by integrating an enterprise-class drive that simply consumes less power than traditional hard drives."

    The new WD RE4-GP 2 TB hard drive are intended for use with storage-hungry applications, such as:

    • cloud-computing infrastructure
    • large-scale data centres
    • data archive and tape replacement systems
    • commercial video surveillance
    • digital video editing houses

  • Sandisk Sees Growth In Mobile Devices


    Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.

    The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing – as were prices.

    Eli Harari, Sandisk’s CEO, speaking in its first quarter earnings this week, said he expected demand for NAND to continue to grow particularly for mobile and portable computing platforms.

    He said this would help absorb the industry supply growth projected for second half of 2009 and ensure price stability.

    Pointing to the changes currently taking place in the mobile market, he compared them to those experienced by the Internet in its early days.

    He said these would also have important implications for Sandisk’s mobile storage business.

    Apple’s iPhone and its App Store, RIM’s Blackberry Market, the adoption of Android by smartphone makers, as well as Nokia and Microsoft’s plans were all mentioned as playing a role in fuelling the demand for flash memory.

    "The opportunity for us is these devices will have to be content with wireless bandwidth and coverage limitations, making off-line, local caching of increased amount of data, central to devices’ usability," he said.

    "Paradoxically, the promise of always-connected devices in cloud computing is resulting in the ever greater need for local storage on the devices themselves."

    Harai said Sandisk was seeing increasing demand from "major players" in the mobile ecosystem for its mobile storage solutions, including Mobile Card, embedded iNAND and solid state drives for notebook PC’s.

  • Samsung Launches "Industry First" Self-encrypting SSDs


    Samsung Electronics has unveiled what it claims are the first hardware-based self-encrypting solid-state drives.

    To be available in 256-, 128- and 64-GB versions, the SSDs provide full-disk encryption using Wave Systems’ technology, which activates and manages the encryption.

    Dell has already said that it will use the drives in its next laptops.

    Despite the improved security, Samsung maintains the SSDs’ performance is not affacted.

    It says the encryption provides better security than the software alternative, because encryption keys and access credentials are generated and stored within the drive hardware, making it more difficult to hack.

    Each Samsung self-encrypting SSD will come bundled with Wave’s EMBASSY Trusted Drive Manager, which provides pre-boot authentication to the drive and enrolling drive administrators and users.

    Jim Elliott, memory vice president, Samsung Semiconductor, said the SSD drives offered business users the best of performance and security in a single drive.

    "Samsung has combined the tremendous performance advantages of solid state technology with integrated hardware encryption for drives designed especially for today’s ‘road warrior’ professionals," he said.

  • Cisco Reveals More Details On UCS Platform


    Cisco has revealed more details on its Unified Computing System (UCS) for virtualized data centers a month after it was first announced.

    Company executives used a live Internet TV broadcast to provide further insight into pricing, processing power and memory capacity.

    The networking company’s UCS is a mainstream data center computing platform that promises to seamlessly integrate processor, storage and network systems in a virtualised architecture.

    It offers medium and large enterprises a single architecture that links all data centre resources together, so overcoming the "assembly-required" nature of distinct virtualisation environments.

    Starting in the second quarter of 2009, Cisco plans to offer complete systems of up to 320 compute nodes housed in 40 chassis, with data flowing across 10 gigabit Ethernet.

    When first revealed in March, details on the UCS were limited, largely because the system is based on Intel’s Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 series of server chips, which wasn’t released until March 30.

    This week, Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for the Cisco Server Access Virtualization Group, and David Lawler, vice president of product marketing for the Cisco Server Access Virtualization Group, provided some more details

    They revealed performance-test results that show UCS performs either first or second in benchmark tests against competing systems in trials conducted by VMmark and SPEC, which will have full results available soon.

    Cisco also added new details around its Memory Extension Technology, a core component of UCS, which Cisco said enables the CPU to access four times the amount of memory compared to typical blade systems.

    The company said its memory extension can cut memory costs by 33 per cent to 60 per cent in 64-GB, 96-GB and 144-GB deployments, while expanding available memory to 192 GB and 384 GB.

    They said this solves the problem of users running out of memory before running out of CPU availability.

  • Replication and Cloud Computing Are Inseparable


    Cloud-based computing is coming of age. The practice is emerging as a computing model that offers flexibility in infrastructure and investment.

    The core of this service is utility that is backed by loosely coupled infrastructure that is self healing, geographically dispersed, designed for user self service, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    The infrastructure is instantly scalable and adjustable to the ebb and flow of business. The services are accessible across IP based networks and all management issues are handled by the cloud provider.

    Users can demand raw compute or storage capacity resources or full blow application services instantly.

    Cloud storage is seen as a solution to the ever present need for cost effective storage.

    Cloud based systems provide easily accessible, affordable disaster recovery options for large enterprises that need to implement off site protection for new projects.

    Small and medium enterprises find this highly affordable and an interesting alternative to expensive investment in storage hardware.

    Recovery point and recovery time objectives of small, medium and large enterprises can be met by cloud storage providers who make available storage space on a pay as you go basis while taking on the management issues of such secondary location storage infrastructure.

    Amazon Web Services, with EC2 Compute Cloud, and GoGrid, with GoGrid Cloud Hosting, are some cloud storage service providers who make compute cycles and storage capacity available on immediate deployment basis.

    The replication creates copies of the enterprise data on these sites and allows the key applications to be restarted and run at the remote location in the event of disaster. Interestingly there will be no capital expenditure—only operational expenditure—till the disaster recovery happens.

    The replication technology is available in storage arrays; network based appliances and through host based software.

    Array based replication and Network based applications require similar setup at both the source and the target locations. Host based replication on the other hand use block based replication approaches or file based approaches to replicate virtual machines in real time.

    Host based replication can also be combined with cloud based infrastructure at a nominal cost for extending protection further down the hierarchy in the organization. The replication can also happen real time.

    Replication and cloud computing have certainly matured and are being considered as an effective alternative to local backup.

    Eric Burgener, a senior analyst and consultant with the Taneja Group research and consulting firm, said replication and cloud computing can also be considered as an alternative to local backup.

    Eric Burgener, Taneja Group

    "Disk-based backup has a lot to offer companies, including faster backups, faster restores, and more reliable recovery (relative to tape-based infrastructures)," he said.

    "If you’re considering moving to disk, don’t overlook the fact that it gives you access to replication technology.

    "For data sets that require stringent RPOs/RTOs, replication can be used to kill two birds with one stone: data is quickly and easily available for file- and even system-level restores from the remote location, but the fact that the location is remote provides the resilience demanded by a DR plan."

  • Double-Take Announces Workload Optimization Products


    Double-Take Software is building on its current data protection repertoire by taking on the challenge of workload optimization, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Workload management encompasses the hardware, the operating systems, applications and data that underpin an organization’s IT-backbone.

    Southborough, Massachusetts-headquartered Double-Take has designed a workload optimization suite to cater to workload portability, backup and availability needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software, said the move was to align the business to best meet its customers’ evolving technology needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software

    "Our new Workload Optimisation suite exemplifies Double-Take Software’s focus on providing highly functional, non-intrusive software to an overloaded IT department looking to reduce costs," he said.

    "It represents our affordable approach to meeting customers’ migration, availability, backup and recovery needs."

    There are four products that make up the new suite:

    • Double-Take Move – as the name suggests, moves workloads between physical and virtual hardware within data centers for hardware refreshes. It can also move data across locations for data center migrations and consolidations
    • Double-Take Flex – is for managing workloads by booting from iSCSI SANs running on any kind of hardware
    • Double-Take Backup – backs up workloads continuously and recovers them on demand to new physical or virtual machines using CDP capabilities
    • Double-Take Availability – makes sure that critical IT workloads are available when disaster strikes for recovery and business continuity. It allows real time replication and failover for protection of individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads that run on VMWare ESX or Microsoft Hyper V

    Goodermote said all other Double-Take flagship products are built around the new workload optimization suite with new functionalities and licensing options.

    He said users can now migrate, backup, protect and flexibly operate physical and virtual workloads across the enterprise whatever the Operating system, hardware or location.

  • HealthNet's New Venture Venyu Targets SMB Storage and Security


    Amerivault and Network Technology Group Inc data storage providers are to join forces to create Venyu Inc.

    The new venture will provide commercial grade, customizable solutions for data storage with disaster recovery, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Both Amerivault and NTG are owned by HealthNet Services Inc (PHNS).

    The two entities joining forces were purchased by HealthNet Services for a combined USD $167 million.

    Venyu will be based out of Baton Range and will be a wholly owned subsidiary of PHNS.

    It will provide data backup, disaster recovery and managed data center services to small and medium sized businesses.

    Its progressive portfolio also includes online data backup, physical and virtualized recovery solutions, managed hosting, SaaS, and co-location services.

    Scott Thompson, CEO of Venyu, said it would address client concerns about security and privacy, including focusing on providing solutions and progressive ways to safeguard mission critical data against disaster.

    He said the company aimed to provide secure, reliable and scalable backup and storage solutions that require minimal maintenance, leaving clients free to pursue their business.

    "We’re focused on virtual disaster recovery," he said. "If you have five servers, we will take a snapshot of the data residing on them and keep a virtual instance of them in our own facility."

    Thompson said Venyu is also focused on handling increasing volumes of customer data and is looking for ways to service customer needs in this arena.

    "We’re not really as far along as we need to be storage-wise, I think. SSD [solid-state drive] is coming along, but I want to know what is the next fundamental thing that we’re going to do in the storage arena to help this problem, because the volumes of data that we’re talking about – tape can’t do this.

    "You can’t get this done on tape. I don’t care how large the jukebox is. The exponential growth of data that we’re talking about is not going to be able to be managed on tape. We have to do this through disk of some kind whether solid state or rotational."