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Category: storage

  • Optimism Seems High in the Storage Efficiency World

    Optimism remains high in storage efficiency world despite recession and talks of possibly impending depression. The focus seems to be on doing more with less and optimizing on existing capacities.

    Nick Broadbent, UK Managing Director of DataCore Software says: 
“Virtualisation and hence consolidation has transformed all that with IT managers able to meet the business data growth needs by re-utilising external storage solutions already in their network.”

    Joyce Putscher, In-Stat analyst feels that there is a significant shift towards higher capacity models. He says, "While the overall market is maturing, growth is shifting towards higher capacity models… The 1.5TB+ segment is forecasted to see the highest growth, exceeding 100 per cent CAGR."

    Data deduplication, 6 GB’s SAS, FCoe, Virtualization, automation, optimization and cost savings seems to be the mantra that is doing the rounds.
    Deduplication is seen as a means of generating a quick return on investment and several vendors are pushing the technology this week.
    Storage capacity optimization appliances for primary and backup storage also have generated a lot of interest.
    Data reduction solutions from Hifn, backup acceleration options for virtual tape libraries, data reduction technology for cloud form Nirvanix and Ocarina are significant in this scenario. Virtualization and automation gained favor and disaster recovery advisor from Symantec was unveiled. NetApp has announced new storage and data management features for VMWare for virtual desktop environments. SAS attracted attention for its high performance, low cost solution, while ATTO announced FastStream SC 8200 controller and 3PAR unveiled its InSery F-Class Storage Servers. Data Robotics announced its DroboPro.

    In this backdrop there the venture funding announcement from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Dell ventures and Focus Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Valhalla Partners and HarborVest Partners, further signals that the interest in the Storage sector has not died down. Fusion_IO received a whopping $47.5 million and Sepaton netted $15.5 million.

    All this keeps optimism high and market watchers agree that while the Storage industry seems to be slowing down due to the recession the slow down is minimal and not very alarming. It is true that external disk storage system numbers are being affected by market conditions, but storage efficiency technologies are picking up. Sean Haffey, storage product manager at FSC, says that there is no doubt that the external disk market is slowing. “When things were booming 18 months ago it was a question of how fast you could go to market,” he said. “Now it is a case of how efficiently you can run.

  • Drobo Goes PRO, Let Your Data Grow


    DroboPro is the latest storage array that has been released by Data Robotics. The earlier versions of the device were known as Drobo External Storage Device. This version of the storage array is designed to manage itself. It is bigger, stronger and more capacious. It has 8 bays and is targeted for use by small businesses and creative professionals.

    Drobo Pro is similar to the earlier versions in looks. It supports up to 16 TB of storage and features the proprietory BeyondAID technology which was the mainstay of its predecessors. The technology permits a number of hard drives of varying capacities to be aggregated into one volume for redundancy and data protection. It cannot be used with networks. However, the subtle changes that distinguish this product are that it has integrated power supply and fully supports dual drive redundancy. Users can also switch between single and dual drive redundancy from a user friendly dashboard. The time that will be taken to shuffle the data around is displayed while we wait for the process to complete. This device is compatible with a 3U rack mount attachment that will have to be purchased separately. Hotswap is possible up to one drive at a time in single redundancy mode and two drives in a dual redundancy mode.

    The array has a USB 2.0 port, twin Fire Wire 800 sockets and gigabit Ethernet jack. The FireWire supports both 800 to 400 adapters. The Ethernet jack cannot be used to set it up for NAS. It is there to take advantage of iSCSI that is a fast interface that is used with severs and workstation rigs. OS X users get a homegrown iSCSI driver free.

    Data Robotics has clearly indicated that it prefers that the DroboPro should be used for direct attached storage with an option to connect it to a Windows Home Server or a networked computer if network access is essential. It is also possible to do professional video work on Drobo Pro.

    Tom Loverro, Director of Product Marketing at Data Robotics says: "One of the beta testers, who is well known in the video editing and animation community, is editing on DroboPro using Final Cut Pro with three video streams of 720p using Apple’s ProRes with no problems. That’s not to say you can do 5 streams of uncompressed 4K on DroboPro though — that sort of situation obviously calls for a different type of solution. But I do think we address 75% of the video editing market with this product according to our research."

    The price of the completely empty Drobo Pro is $1299. Pre stocked options cost $1599-$1949 and the top of trees version costs $3999 with 16 TB capacities. Existing Drobo Pro customers will receive a discount of $200 on the MSRP as an appreciation of their loyalty. The product has been shipped on April 7th.

  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce Public Beta Launched


    Amazon Web Services has announced the public beta launch of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data.

    Amazon Web Services are a collection of remote web services offered by Amazon.com. It is using the Apache Hadoop distributed computing technology (open-source, Java software framework) to make it easier for users to access large amounts of computing power to run data-intensive tasks. This time Amazon used Hadoop, which is already being used by such companies as Yahoo and Facebook, for new cloud computing initiative.

    Amazon Elastic MapReduce utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
    Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, users can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as they like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. It’s important advantage is that users pay only for what they use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.

    How does it work ?
    Amazon Elastic MapReduce automatically spins up a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce framework on Amazon EC2 instances, sub-dividing the data in a job flow into smaller chunks so that they can be processed (the “map” function) in parallel, and eventually recombining the processed data into the final solution (the “reduce” function). Amazon S3 serves as the source for the data being analyzed, and as the output destination for the end results.

  • WD Enters Solid-State Drive Market With Acquisition Of SiliconSystems


    Western Digital has completed a USD $65 million cash acquisition of leading solid-state drives supplier, SiliconSystems.

    SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors.

    Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.

    These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008.

    John Coyne, president and CEO of WD, said its worldwide infrastructure and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships.

    He said SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

    "The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established USD $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives," he said.

    "SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."

    Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

  • Optimizing Virtualization On Single Architecture: Dell Announces ISCSI SAN Storage Arrays


    Dell has announced that as part of its data center strategy it will focus on combining servers, storage and services optimized for virtualization in a single architecture.

    As a step in this direction Dell has come out with a new series of EqualLogic iSCSI SAN with fast processors, more cache, additional Ethernet ports and support for solid state disc drives, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    The series of storage arrays is named PS6000 and will be available in five models – PS6000E, PS6500E, PS6000X, PS6000XV and PS6000S.
    This product is distinguished by its speed.

    The redesigned controllers, faster processors and a fourth Gigabit Ethernet port for connectivity is expected to be 9.1 per cent faster than its predecessors for sequential write workloads and 29 per cent faster for sequential read workloads.

    The arrays can be scaled up to 16 TB.

    Dedicated controllers for SSD drives for PS6000S have been added to scale the performance linearly.

    The SSD is 50 GB and is available in 400GB and 800 GB dual controller configurations. The array is designed for low latency, high IOPS applications.

    The expanded management software suite that has been unveiled along with this hardware complements the PS6000 launch.

    This software supports RAID6, Microsoft Hyper-V Smart Copysnapshots and enhanced integration for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, VMware and Citrix XenCenter.

    The technology aims to use storage resources efficiently in a networked environment.

    It effectively exploits hypervisor resources in virtual machines.

    The SAN headquaters is a centralized dashboard that helps administrators monitor performance and events of dozens of PS Series groups.

    This technology is available free of cost and under warranty or service agreement.

    The arrays are priced at USD $17000, while the SSDs are priced at USD $25000.

    The series is available from Dell and its PartnerDirect, Channel partner.

    An IDC report says that Dell EqualLogic holds 31% of the iSCSI San Market as on date.

  • FLASH SSD: More Viable in Enterprise Storage Market


    Until recently, the idea of using solid-state disk (SSD) flash drives in an enterprise storage subsystem would have been deemed ludicrous.

    Ray Lucchesi, president of Silverton Consulting, however, says that recent trends in NAND technology have made SSDs more viable in the enterprise storage market.

    In 2009 the flash SSD storage market will see even faster products appearing on the shelves, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    That prediction is based on the additive factors that are at work in the storage market—architecture and semiconductor process technology.

    Historically manufacturers did not see any point in integrating very fast architectural features in to flash SSDs as they were expensive and the market for the product was small.

    The improvement in architectural technologies for speeding up performance and IOPS has since been developed by OEMs for specific marketable products and their potential is clearly exploitable in the Flash SSD design.

    The SSD market has also reached a critical mass.

    Lucchesi said the technology has now become economical enough to favorably compare to traditional disk drives — at least in a price-performance context.

    In addition, he said many seemingly insurmountable shortcomings have been resolved.

    The architectural features that would come into play in the construction of Flash SSDs would be:

    • parallelization of the internal media arrays
    • improved media management technology
    • faster media controllers
    • faster host interface controllers
    • hypbridizing on board memory technologies

    The scale up of the technologies would require significant investment in IP. A lot of trial and error will become visible as OEMs throw products at the market.

    In this context it is interesting to note that it is expected that a single 3.5" form factor flash SSD will be able to deliver speeds of 2000 MBs of sustainable reads and writes.

    The Flash SSD through put and IOPS performance is predicted to be a multiple of the performance for a single disk, based on the proven scalability of the SSD RAID arrays.

    Expectation is also high that the asymmetry of sustained read to write IOPs will improve from 10 to 1. (However, there is apprehension that it will never achieve parity.)

    If this expectation is fulfilled, flash SSD arrays will become a viable choice for many Enterprise speed-up applications.

    While the latency in Flash SSDs is not expected to scale in the same way as throughput, the read access times are expected to improve.

    This is attributed to the fact that flash SSDs have not yet been optimized for latency. However, in the future the Flash SSD may increase in density and a read write cycle may become more complicated on chip process.

    Calibration, error correction and address translation may be done by controllers between the memory arrays and the host interface controller or card data bus.

    The flash may still evolve as a separate species that looks completely different from the typical RAM.

    On the whole, the improvement will be revolutionary and evolutionary and by 2013 flash SSD would have reached a point where architecture of an ideal SSD will be well established.

  • Storage Management Priorities: the Need of the Hour


    Most industries acknowledge that increasing IT Storage needs is a fact of life even in the face of economic downturn.

    Newer and more efficient ways of optimizing existing storage facilities are being explored as budgets are tight and capital outlay has been squeezed, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems, says: "In this economy, it will be important for IT professionals to stick to the fundamentals and focus on ROA and the ability to break even quickly."

    Major Storage investment priorities for IT Professionals in 2009 have been identified and listed unequivocally.

    Virtualized Storage services already in place require optimization. The direction of thinking seems to be virtualization of external storage and combining it with lower cost tiers of storage and thin provisioning.

    The stress is on curtailing data growth, while maximizing current investments, to get quick returns.

    The drive is to exploit the 70-80 per cent capacity that remains largely unused in existing storage.

    Unstructured data growth remains a persistent problem.

    Data storage optimization would require dealing with unstructured data on a war footing.

    The imperative is to archive unstructured data and map resources back to the bottom line of information needs.

    Tiered and priority ordering of information is identified as an essential activity that will help identify data that can be moved and archived without affecting critical data access.

    Consequently, the archiving solutions features being sought include simple process management, reduction in TCO and mitigation of risk.

    Active archiving solutions that are being put in place, have been recognized as integral to organization management initiatives and two tier storage systems are being moved to archival tier.

    Closely associated with the above processes is the data de-duplication process. Market conditions rule that duplicate data comes at a cost and de-duplication will save costs and improve productivity.

    Additionally, data compression and reduction in number of data backups are seen as methods to save costs.

    It is expected that as the year 2009 advances more and more companies will turn their attention from optimization and archiving needs towards Risk Mitigation and savings that can be had form power and cooling costs.

    Green, clean data centers will be seen as a real and urgent requirement.

    The need to stay ahead of energy issues will be dictated by upcoming regulations of EMEA and increasing purchasing requirements in the USA.

  • Hitachi Beats Competitors with Fastest Midrange Storage System


    Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced that its next-generation midrange storage platform, the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 Family, achieved overall best-in-class Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark results for a midrange storage system.

    In SPC-1 benchmark testing, the Hitachi AMS 2500 achieved the fastest throughput results among all midrange storage competitors with dual controllers.

    It had a throughput result of 89,491.81 SPC-1 IOPS and an 8.98 millisecond average response time.

    Mike Walkey, senior vice president of channels, Hitachi Data Systems, said that with key business applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP or any other online transactional processing application, the AMS 2500 allows users to more effectively scale their workloads at a best-in-class price point.

    The Hitachi AMS 2100 achieved among the best SPC-1 Price-Performance ratio in its class at $5.95/SPC-1 IOPS.

    Walkey said it brought high performance to a new affordable price level and allowing customers to realise a lower total cost of ownership.

    He said that with companies scrambling to find ways to manage data growth without increasing storage expenses or performance penalties, this price-performance ratio reiterated Hitachi’s efforts to help customers establish a path towards optimising their storage environment.

    This results in greater return on their storage asset investments and lower overall power and cooling consumption.

  • Cloudera Aims To Capture Data Center Market With Hadoop Cloud Solution


    A startup software dealer is bringing cloud-computing technology used by the likes of Yahoo, Facebook and Google to regular enterprise data centers.

    Silicon Valley-based Cloudera plans to make big data-processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, said Hadoop is a cloud-computing technology used to store and process petabytes of data on systems consisting of hundreds or even thousands of servers.

    "Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now," he said.

    IDC speculates that the global IT expenditure on cloud services will expand approximately threefold in the next 2-3 years, when it is estimated to total USD $42 billion and account for close to 9 per cent of revenues in five important market sectors.

    IDC also predicts that expenditure on cloud computing will pick up pace throughout the next 2-3 years, and will most likely secure 25 per cent of IT spending growth in 2012.

    This is expected to grow the following year and capture at least a 1/3rd of the market.

    David Smith, Gartner’s vice president, thinks that cloud computing still has some way to go and the competition is just starting.

    "Cloudera is not the only company supporting Hadoop. HP is doing a lot of work with Hadoop, as is Yahoo," he said.

    However, there is a major difference between Cloudera and the others like Yahoo.

    Cloudera is set up as a specific one-stop shop for the free Java software structure that presently sanctions the cloud.

    Christophe Bisciglia, Cloudera’s founder and former manager of Google’s Hadoop cluster, said that listening to the community, he consistently hears that Hadoop installation, configuration, and deployment needs to be easier.

    "That’s the primary reason why we built the Cloudera distribution for Hadoop," he said.

    "But furthermore, a distribution fosters community growth by providing a common platform to share code, experience and, most importantly, innovation."

    Cloudera’s latest Web-based configuration tool will facilitate enterprises to produce custom-tailored packages that meet their exact wants.

    In addition, Cloudera is making a preconfigured VMware image liberally offered for assessment and use with the company’s complimentary online teaching.

    "The Cloudera distribution of Hadoop gives you the same tools you already know to provide standardized packaging and automatic configuration," said Bisciglia.

    He said that Cloudera’s sharing of Hadoop has always been founded on a established code of reliability.

    "We enable users to limit upgrades to major project milestones built on code that is tried, trusted, and proven reliable," he said.

    Finally, there will always be a few users who will need assistance in setting up and using the software for some critical adventures and this is where Cloudera will make up the money.

    "These enterprises need a company to stand behind the package, and help them find and fix problems when they come up," said Olson.

  • Storage Market Slows, Modest Growth Forecast


    Well, it was only a matter of time. The data storage market has slowed down – and much more than anticipated, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    IDC revealed last week that global external disk storage systems’ factory revenues dropped by a half per cent in the fourth quarter.
    This is the first quarterly drop for data storage in more than 5 years.

    According to IDC, EMC, HP, Dell and Hitachi did grow a little in the last quarter, as expected.

    However, IBM, NetApp and Sun Microsystems all posted year-over-year sales declines.

    In the 4th quarter, external system revenues dropped slightly to USD $5.3 billion, while the total disk storage system market dropped 5.9 per cent to USD $7.3 billion chiefly due to limitations in server system sales.

    The other big decline was seen in the total disc storage system capacity, which peaked at 2,460 petabytes, a growth of only 27.3 per cent, but this was down by 50 per cent compared to the growth rate in the past.

    Natalya Yezkhova, IDC research manager for storage systems, said: "Because of the global economic crisis, the last quarter of 2008 was tough for the disk storage systems market, resulting in a market decline from the same quarter last year."

    She said that high-end storage sales were upset by a chill in the end-user expenditures and longer acquisition cycles.

    But some low-end and midrange storage sectors have continued to sale well, "as end users broadened their search for storage solutions in these lower-cost segments to satisfy their increasing storage needs while optimizing investments in storage infrastructure."

    EMC continues to hold the leadership with its external systems market share lead of nearly 23.3 per cent of revenue in the fourth quarter, followed by IBM and HP, with 15.7 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.

    Dell did not fare well and ended the quarter in the fourth position with a 9.3 per cent share.

    Hitachi and NetApp followed with 7 per cent growth, while Sun had 5.2 per cent.

    In the Open SAN market, which only grew 2.2 per cent, EMC was again in the lead with 24.2 per cent of the market.

    IBM followed next with 16.5 per cent.

    The NAS market has grown steadily and recorded a 8.6 per cent rise.

    Again, EMC led the pack with 43.8 per cent, followed by NetApp at 24.1 per cent.

    The sum network disk storage market (NAS combined with Open SAN) grew a modest 3.6 pe cent to USD $4.1 billion in revenues.

    EMC again claimed a 28.6 per cent revenue share, followed by IBM at 14.5 per cent.

    So what are the expectations for the rest of 2009?

    Enterprise Strategy Group and IDC both speculate a modest growth of 2-3 per cent for both the data storage industry overall IT spending.

    In an industry, which has always seen green, adjustment to single digit profits may not sit well for many people.