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Category: storage

  • A-DATA Launches Highest Capacity SSD For Laptops and Netbooks












    The race to drive up flash memory storage capacity has a new champion in the form of A-DATA Technology.

    The Taiwanese company has just announced the highest capacity of SSD in the industry at CeBIT 2009 – the 512GB XPG 2.5" SSD.

    Designed for notebook and PC enthusiasts, the memory module maker says it is aimed at users seeking both a fast transfer rate and high capacity SSD.

    With a fast transfer rate up to 230MB/s and 160MB/s read and write, the 512GB XPG 2.5" SSD certainly delivers.

    It has an adopted standard high speed SATA II interface and comes equipped with a tough but lightweight case.

    Although the world’s second largest vendor of memory modules, it is normally overshadowed by companies such as Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and Western Digital in the flash memory capacity stakes.

    512GB XPG 2.5" SSD’s features include:
    1. Read up to 230MB/s Write up to 160 MB/s
    2. Interface: SATA I/II
    3. Operating Temp.: -10°C~70°C
    4. Shock Resistance: 1500G/0.5ms
    5. MTBF: 1,500,000 hrs.
    6. Dashing, durable, lightweight Aluminum casing

    Specification:
    1. Dimension: 100.0*70.1*9.2 mm (LxWxH)
    2. Weight: 85+/



  • Are optical Discs a Viable Option For Enterprise Storage?







    The majority of corporations are faced with issues about storage. While storage is not difficult, it must be easy to archive and be available when needed.

    In the past, tapes and cassettes have often been used to store data. These tapes are often stored in a secure permanent offsite location.

    Tape media on average lasts about 30 years and is more durable than disk but tapes take up a lot of space. Now there is a new option for storing data, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Pioneer has announced that it has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with mega storage capacity of about 400 GB or about 25 GB per layer.

    This is a major improvement from the past because multi-layered optical discs have not always been able to relay signals clearly from each layer.

    Pioneer has solved the problem of cross talk from adjacent layers using the disc production technology found in the DVD field.

    Pioneer predicts that the future of storage in much denser forms will continue to evolve as the science of optics is better studied.

    Ultra Density Optical (UDO) discs are third generation optical disc designed for very high-density storage of video data.

    Currently available Ultra Density Optical discs have an estimated shelf life of 50 years.

    They have been introduced into the market and found to be reliable and durable for short-term use. Currently the UDO is used by banks, health care facilities, and financial corporations.

    Pioneer said in a recent statement released from Japan that the growing storage needs of many corporations is expected to drive the demand for higher capacity discs.

    The company also mentions that buying just one high capacity optical disc is equal to buying numerous other commercially available discs. This way, resources can be conserved and put to better use.

    The experts meanwhile are not impressed. David Hill, an analyst at Mesabi Group argues that such technology may be more "suitable for storing video and archiving at the consumer level".

    Likewise, Greg Schulz, an analyst with Storage IO, mentions that for years there has been talk about holographic storage.

    However, he adds: "If you are holding your breath for that, you had better get a scuba tank."

    So far the optical disc storages have not proven their worth in a commercial market and there are many kinks that have to be sorted out.

    However, most experts do agree that Blu-ray at both ends of the market, and in specialized verticals such as video, is improving data storage and preservation.

    Despite the great advances in hardware capabilities, the dinosaurs of data storage – the disk and tape – that were long ago proclaimed dead, continue to be pertinent because they are constantly being improved, cost a lot less and are durable.

    For the future, most experts predict that data storage will be achieved by a hybrid of RAM based or some kind of flash based solid state memory, perhaps even a touch of holographic technology.

  • Hitachi GST Takes Another Shot At Consumer Storage Market

















    Hitachi GST is making a fresh attempt at entering the consumer storage market after its first abortive attempt in 2007, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Brenden Collins, Hitachi’s vice president of product marketing, dismisses the earlier attempt as one that "didn’t take off that well".

    The latest move follows in the wake of Hitachi GST’s decision to acquire Fabrik Inc, which makes G-Technology external hard drive systems for Macintosh computers and SimpleTech systems for PCs.

    While the financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been revealed, the Fabrik deal has been announced.

    It is interesting to note that hard drive competitors Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. and several other storage players including EMC Corp, seem to find the acquisition route an ideal means of entering the consumer storage product market.

    Fabrik has renamed its Mozy product as Fabrik Ultimate Backup and has sold its option with SimpleTech systems.

    The newly named product continues to provide its users with the 2GB free space and has retained the charge at $4.95 per month for unlimited online backups.

    The company has also entered into a partnership with ArcSoft Inc for local backup software, so competing with EMC’s Iomega and Retrospect.

    The drag-drop-store in Apple Mac or external devices feature for G-Technology has also been enabled.

    Hitachi GST plans to run Fabrik as a standalone business and will allow all its partnerships continue even where the Fabrik partners compete with Hitachi’s external disk storage partners.

    Brian Babineau, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, told Search Storage that such partnerships and relationships are becoming commonplace in the storage industry.

    "There’s a new class of products emerging," he said. "You’re starting to see a blend of enterprise functionality, simplified and masked, as well as redundancy built in.

    What’s interesting about these deals is to see how the simplified consumer solutions can then move upmarket."

    Wolfgang Schlichting, IDC’s Research Director is concerned that Hitachi should not upset its traditional client base in the process of acquiring Fabrik.

    "Hitachi is one of the last remaining hard drive manufacturers without its own branded external solution.

    "They have to be careful not to upset their traditional client base, but that’s also the case with the other hard drive manufacturers."





  • DataCore San Software Boosts Server Virtualization Support







    The latest versions of DataCore’s SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualization software were under preview at the recent VMWorld Europe 2009.

    The products are due to be shipped later this month with 64 bit software architecture and various new features for virtual servers, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    The company says SANSymphony is geared at enterprises aiming to virtualize their storage area networks, while SANmelody is for small Fiber Channel and iSCSI SANs of up to 32 TB.

    The virtual disk pooling, synchronized mirroring for high availability, load balancing, thin provisioning and other advanced features are exciting and will be welcomed by enterprises using the software.

    The 64 bit controller software supports large cache on the physical server up to a theoretical limit of 1 TB as against the earlier versions which supported only 20 GB cache.

    Jack Fegreus, CEO of Southborough, Mass.-based OpenBench Labs, points out that a terabyte of cache is "at the far edge of reality for most normal sites today", but given Moore’s Law, "1TB of cache may well be average".

    Today many organizations use as much as 256 GB of cache on average.

    This increased cache implies that there will be a denser consolidation of servers into virtual machines and performance of VM backups may improve by minimizing I/O to disk.

    The Transporter Option that comes with SANmelody and SANsymphony can also perform conversions between physical and virtual servers.

    This feature is significant as a server can be converted from a physical Windows box to a Microsoft Corp.Hyper V Image and then to a VMware ESX image.

    It can then be converted back to a logical unit Number (LUN) mapped to a physical server. This feature could be an advantage to people who are running multiple virtual servers with different operating systems.

    Themis Tokkaris, systems engineer with Arizona-based pest control company Truly Nolen, says that "it is also an open idea", adding: "If I’m not happy with ESX in the future, I’m not stuck with it."

    DataCore SAN offers its users the option of using a new free plug-in for VMWare Inc’s Virtual Infrastructure Client.

    James Price, vice president of product and channel marketing at DataCore SAN, claims that it will offer "cleaner visibility and easier to understand mappings and paths".

    He further points out that the upgrades will provide a way to reclaim free capacity on volumes using thin provisioning.

    DataCore SAN is not alone in this storage virtualization space.

    Many of the features offered by DataCore, such as 64 bit support, thin provisioning and so on, have been included in the packages of other vendors.

    Symantec Corp, Double-Take Software Inc and others offer 64 bit support for the data protection space.

    Compellent Technologies Inc also offered free space recovery for thin provisioning about a year ago. DataCore SAN’s offer, however, combines these features into a server-centric approach and appears to have set the trend for the future of networked storage solutions.

    However, Fegreus says DataCore’s combining these features into a server-centric approach looks like the wave of the future for networked storage as integration increases between SANs and servers.

  • Restorepoint Winner of Storage-biz.news' Product of the Year Award


    Tadasoft’s RestorePoint integrated hardware and software back-up solution is the winner of storage-biz.news’ Product of the Year 2008 award.

    With 45 per cent of the nominations, the solution for network administrators was the clear winner in a field that included Fujitsu, Dell, Compellent, Brioo, Akorri and cloud storage specialists Asankya.

    RestorePoint automatically backs-up and stores the configuration of your network devices and restores it when needed.

    The solution has established itself as a vendor-independent appliance and Tadasoft says it is the first product to address this "commonly overlooked" issue.

    Its simplicity is a major selling factor – it is managed from one convenient central location with an easy to use web interface.

    In collecting the most votes RestorePoint also got some strong endorsements from readers.

    One voter described RestorePoint as "unique", stressing the appliance-based solution’s ability to automatically backup configs from multi-vendor devices.

    "It will also alert the admin if any change has been made to the config and detail this change," said the storage-biz.news reader.

    "The admin can then on the fly roll back the config by restoring the master copy template or one of the other back ups from a previous hour/day/week/month."

    Another factor that garnered support was the fact RestorePoint supports numerous devices, including Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, Blue Coat, Proofpoint and HP Procurve.

    While cost and ease of use were highlighted, one voter pointed to RestorePoint’s ability to increase network management productivity.

    "It can also help towards gaining or maintaining the complex PCI DSS compliance standard," said the voter.

    Among the other nominations, Dell-EqualLogic’s PS Series of virtualized iSCSI SAN were singled out for attention.

    They were described as the clear leader in the midrange (1-500TB) iSCSI SAN space – a market that includes EMC, NetApp, IBM and Hitachi.

    Areas where the PS Series impressed included ease of use, flexibility, performance and overall value.

    Compellent’s SAN was also highly recommended, not least for its space reclamtion offer and being the only SAN in the market with Automated ILM.

    Storage-biz.news would like to thank everyone who took the effort to nominate a product and to cast a vote.

  • Nexsan Launches iSCSI SAN Aimed at Standalone or Virtualised IT Environments


    Nexsan has introduced its first iSCSI SAN, which has been specifically designed and priced to give SMBs and SMEs a new value-alternative in implementing the protocol.

    The Nexsan iSeries is intended as a complete, easy-to-implement, enterprise-class SAN that is ideal for use in standalone or fully virtualised IT environments.

    It is available in two configurations which include additional storage expansion to meet customers growing data storage requirements.

    Bob Woolery, Nexsan’s senior vice president of marketing, said the iSeries gives customers flexibility and value.

    "We’ve designed the iSeries to give customers a solution with all the storage services, data protection and scalability they need at a price they can afford," he said.

    "And, we’re giving our channel partners a new value alternative in this growing market segment. We’ve truly changed the game with value."

    The iSeries offers iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS configurations from the same system and provides up to 1PB of storage.

    It also includes a complete suite of easy-to-use enterprise storage services, including virtualisation.

    Woolery said the iSeries was being sold for a single up-front price to affordably accommodate a company’s increasing storage needs.

    "This holistic approach simplifies pricing, removes hidden costs and licensing fees associated with competitive products and smoothly accommodates an organisation’s IT requirements as they change," he said.

    Other benefits offered by the Nexsan iSeries include:

    • Virtualised storage for flexibility and intelligent automation of routine tasks
    • High performance for running multiple demanding applications from a single high-density system
    • Simultaneous use of SAS and/or SATA disk drives in the same storage chassis for application flexibility and low-cost scalability
    • VMware-certified, ensuring high performance in both physical and virtual environments
    • Easy to deploy and manage with wizard-based setup, administration and central management of volumes, snapshots, HA/data replication, mirroring and data migration
    • High-performance with up to four RAID engines per storage system
    • Nexsan’s AutoMAID™ energy-saving technology reduces energy costs by up to 60% without compromising application performance
    • Key application support: storage pooling, virtual servers, archiving
    • High-speed, highly responsive – hyper transport bus, real-time OS, enterprise-class network chip set
    • Fully redundant and designed for 99.999% availability
    • Available immediately through Nexsan’s global network of authorized value-added resellers.

  • Seagate Targeting Datacenter Power Consumption


    Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, according to the company’s CEO Steve Luczo.

    While not going into detail, he told InfoWorld that the disk drive maker has a competitive advantage in that field.

    Steve Luczo, CEO Seagate

    Luczo also said the storage market will bounce back from the global economic downturn sooner than other sectors because of the growing requirement for storage at both the business and consumer levels.

    He said that while IT departments could make storage efficiencies in the short-term they would eventually run out of options and have to look at new solutions.

    This could be within the next two to three quarters.

  • Hyperstone Launches New F4 Flash Memory Controller


    Hyperstone has introduced a new F4 Flash Memory Controller for high performance CompactFlash Cards(CFC) and Solid State Disks(SSD), writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    The memory controllers are intended for embedding into firmware to provide high reliability, endurance and rigorous fail safe features for Single Level Cell(SLC) and Multi Level Cell(MLC) based Flash Memory Solutions.

    The design is based on Hyperstone 32 bit RISC core including instruction set extensions optimized for Flash handling.

    Hyperstone’s core architecture provides both fast RISC processors for data and control functions along with powerful DSP unit for efficient algorithm execution.

    The designs use less silicon and are more power efficient with minimum software complexity.

    The Flash Memory controllers are fully compliant with CompactFlash 3.0 and compatible to 4.1 specifications.

    The controllers also offer Fast ATA supporting PIO mode 6, MDMA mode 4, UDMA mode 4 in True-IDE mode and UDMA 5 possible in fixed board implementations.

    They are designed to sustained read up to 50 MB/s and random read up to 40 MB/s; sustained write exceeding 40 MB/s with interleaving and random write up to 9 MB/s.

    The controllers have two Direct Flash Access(DFA) channels including Sector Buffers and interleaving capabilities. They support connections of up to 16 flash memory chip enables at the rate of eight per channel.

    The Error Correcting code is capable of correcting 4 symbols in a 512 bytes sector with additional CRC.

    The rate of data transfer is up to 80 MB sector.

    Host data transfer rate in UDMA mode 4 is 66 MB sector; in PIO mode 6, it is 512 bytes sector with additional CRC. Data transfer in the MDMA mode 4 is 25 MB sector.

  • How Is The Economy Affecting the US Storage Sector?


    Despite the global economic downturn it appears the US storage sector will continue to remain as busy as ever.

    The need to store increasing volumes of digital files – and to provide continuous access to them – seems to be keeping the industry buzzing with activity, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    Most organizations are poor editors of digital information.

    The tendency is to retain everything and add to storage rather than spend the time and effort in weeding out and disposing of digital information that is irrelevant or redundant.

    Moreover, finding time and human resources for such second tier jobs is difficult.

    There is also the latent conviction that the new US federal court rules and other state and national regulations may require a business to produce the data at some future date.

    So, enterprises are more likely to retain the data for legal reasons than they were in the past.

    Benjamin Woo, of IDC Storage, takes an optimistic view of the outlook for the storage industry.

    "Despite the downturn in the macroeconomic conditions, our consensus is that in the short to medium-term, storage is the most resistant to macroeconomic changes," he said.

    "While there is no doubt that there will be some form of pull-back on storage investment, many of the large financial institutions, especially JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – but also Wells Fargo and Barclays – will need to commit, or in the case of Chase, maintain, substantial IT and storage investment in the next six to 12 months, for integration of their acquired banks."

    Woo said that, while most companies will go into a capital conservation mode in the long term, they too must consider subscription storage models that are offered by online storage providers.

    The indications are that the slowing down of the economy will have its impact on the storage market initially but it will rally over time.

    The optimistic assessment in the industry is that IT organizations will move from building infrastructure to modifying infrastructure and efficiency improvement.

    This, in turn, will revitalize the storage market.

    Moreover, as companies struggle to survive, the cross currents of legal actions will tend to increase, and storage products that cater to legal discovery will drive the growth in the storage market.

    Greg Schulz, founder and Senior analyst of the StorageIO Group, said the focus will be on storage technologies "that can do more in a smaller footprint – that footprint being power, cooling, floor-space, and time in a given density.

    "This means servers [will be needed] that can do more work in a smaller space, storage for active data that can do more IOPS or bandwidth or files or e-mails or videos streamed per watt in a given footprint.

    "Or, for inactive and idle data, more capacity in a given footprint and cost point [will be desirable]."

    What will really happen, will be decided in the womb of time.

    However, there appears to be a general conviction that the storage industry’s optimism is not misplaced.

  • Nanotechnology Will Be An Integral Part of Future Storage Technology


    Michael E.Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation once remarked: "In 1974, I was making 5 Megabyte disk packs – the biggest at that time in the world.

    "At the same time, IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and other Computer professionals said no one would ever need that much storage."

    Today organizations are constantly running out of storage space and grappling with ever increasing size requirements in data storage, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    It is predicted that magnetic storage technology will soon become obsolete and hard drives will reach their paramagnetic limit in a few years.

    The search for newer and more efficient means of data storage has sparked extensive research into nanotechnology and its potential in the data storage space.

    One such invention is the ferroelectric molecular optical storage nanotechnology by Thomas. Another is the recent breakthrough in self-assembling nanotech devices that provide user with amazing storage options.

    Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst have achieved a breakthrough in the creation of self-assembling nanotech blocks with immense potential to scale up indefinitely.

    These blocks consist of tightly packed polymer chains that were previously considered impossibile.

    Significantly, the polymer chains are different from each other and when bunched together, these molecules arrange themselves into a grid to form a block of co-polymer.

    The team used sapphire crystal to create the vast fields of blocks.

    The crystal does not break down when scaled up to form a large number of blocks.

    The facets of the sapphire are cut and heat treated to facilitate the formation of nano-scale sawtooth ridges, which resolve the problem of scale as the copolymer is formed on these ridges.

    The resultant arrangement of molecules can store electronic data as bits at the rate of 10 terabits per square inch or 1,250 gigabytes of data in an area that is only the size of a large postage stamp.

    This represents a storage density that is more than 15 times the capacity that is available in the market today.

    This technology is at a nascent stage but holds out promise. It is the first step in the direction of proving the hypothesis that it is possible to store large volumes of data in nano spaces.

    This breakthrough is exciting and interesting as it will address many of the issues relating to the increasing storage requirements of the modern world where electronics is being inducted into different aspects of our life.

    Conventional storage devices are proving inadequate and cumbersome.

    Moreover, this breakthrough also has several other implications.

    • It will revolutionize the semiconductor chip processes.
    • It will bypass the minimum size limits for photolithography and enable the production of transistors and chip interconnectors that will reduce the demand for power hungry processor chips.
    • It may also enable the creation of energy efficient photovoltaic cells.

    In other words nanotechnology will be an integral part of all future technology and gadgets and will be the power that operates them.