- SanDisk auto-syncs flash drive files online
- Sun to countersue Network Appliance
- Dell takes storage fight to SMBs
- EMC ports data de-dupe to VMware
- FalconStor virtualizes CDP
- Entering the Digital Dark Ages?
- Amazon peddling storage
- Google infinite storage plan leaked
- EMC adds to high end array line
- HP aims for small business with new backup options
January 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
SanDisk auto-syncs flash drive files online
Seeking to assuage the file-loss fears of USB fob-dependent PC users, SanDisk has announced Cruzer Titanium Plus, a 4GB USB flash drive that automatically backs up files to an online data store, thanks to a partnership with Israel-based startup BeInSync.
Priced at $59.99, Cruzer Titanium Plus mirrors documents, photos, digital music and videos to BeInSync's online backup service. The service, which taps Amazon's S3 storage services infrastructure, is free for the first six months, after which a subscription fee of $29.99 per year applies.
The service allows Windows 2000-, XP-, and Vista-based Cruzer Titanium Plus users to sync files whenever the USB drive is plugged in to an online PC. Changes to the USB drive store that are made while offline are automatically mirrored once a connection to the Internet is re-established.
Files deleted from the USB drive linger in the cloud for up to 30 days, or until the BeInSync 4GB backup capacity has been reached.
The move is part of a growing trend toward providing mobile workers greater levels of storage assurance using the familiar USB drive idiom. Rover Technology Fusions recently paired up with IBM to extend CDP (continuous data protection) capabilities to laptops by way of a 2GB credit-card-size USB drive.
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 2, 2008 03:23 PM
October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun to countersue Network Appliance
Sun Microsystems, responding to a lawsuit it faces from Network Appliance over Sun's ZFS (Zettabyte File System), plans to countersue, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in his blog on Wednesday.
While stressing he has no interest in suing Network Appliance, Schwartz said Sun has no choice but to respond in court.
Later this week, Sun plans to request a permanent injunction to remove Network Appliance filer products from the marketplace and seek monetary damages. Half of these proceeds would be earmarked for efforts to promote free software and patent reform, with money going to the Software Freedom Law Center and the Peer to Patent initiative.
Network Appliance filed suit in September claiming ZFS violates the company's patents. Previously, Sun said Network Appliance had been using some of its own technology acquired when Sun bought StorageTek. Sun demanded royalties from Network Appliance.
Network Appliance could not be immediately reached for a response to Sun's plans on Wednesday afternoon.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 24, 2007 03:47 PM
September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Dell takes storage fight to SMBs
Striding toward the podium to The Fabulous Thunderbirds' "Tuff Enuff," Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell laid down a gauntlet of sorts this morning at a launch event in San Francisco calling out the storage industry for failing to address storage concerns particular to SMBs.
"You can blame the storage vendors in the industry and say they really haven't met the unique needs of small and medium-sized companies, even as their storage needs have become more complex," Dell said to a crowd of around one hundred SMB organization representatives.
Describing a bleak low-end storage ecosystem of consumer-focused devices and overpriced enterprise-based solutions stripped down to SMB price points, Dell and Darren Thomas, general manager and vice president of storage at Dell, outlined the company's strategy for delivering simple, capable, and affordable storage solutions to smaller organizations in the face of the data deluge currently besieging IT.
Dell's proposed solution, the PowerVault MD3000i, is an iSCSI-based SAN, which Dell believes better suits smaller environments than competing offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, built around the more expensive FC (Fibre Channel).
[For InfoWorld's full review of Dell's PowerVault MD3000i, see "Dell bulks up storage appliance."]
Putting what the company calls "server family values" to work, Dell hopes to leverage its installed base of PowerEdge server customers by offering a familiar interface and drives that are swappable across server and storage environments.
"If you've seen a PowerEdge server, you know what an MD3000i looks like before taking it out of the box," Thomas said.
According to Dell, the combination of interface familiarity and iSCSI gives the company a unique advantage in both removing the need for dedicated IT people at small organizations and optimizing the performance of the virtualized environments increasingly favored by midsize companies.
Coupled by Dell's PowerConnect series of switches, the PowerEdge/PowerVault combination presumably gives Dell the ability to offer SMBs a one-stop datacenter solution.
Dell's recently launched Vostro brand of notebooks and desktops, complete with support services, are also part of what appears to be a larger makeover of Dell since Michael Dell resumed the role of CEO earlier this year.
Dell has been aggressive in repositioning the company as a services and solutions provider, a strategy clearly targeted at the growing SMB market.
Whether this transition proves compelling depends in large part on the company convincing SMBs that widespread complaints about its customer service have been addressed -- and that it has put a year marred by safety recalls behind it.
In other words, can Dell, as The Fabulous Thunderbirds crooned, "put out a burning building / With a shovel and dirt / And not even worry / About getting hurt"?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 10, 2007 03:28 PM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
EMC ports data de-dupe to VMware
Trend toward server virtualization pushes storage software into VMs
In yet another move aimed at extending business-conscious storage management capabilities to customers capitalizing on the virtualization trend, EMC today announced plans to virtualize data de-duplication technology it brought on board with its November 2006 Avamar acquisition.
Whereas yesterday FalconStor proposed virtualized CDP (continuout data protection) as the less-muss means for preventing data loss in the event of server failure, EMC is betting that its Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware will provide significant cost savings to VMware-based enterprises by virtualizing backup and recovery.
The marriage of Avamar de-duplication functionality with the virtualization capabilities of VMware likely comes as little surprise to those attempting to make sense of EMC's spate of acquisitions in recent years. Worth noting, however, is what EMC's move to port Avamar technology to ESX Server may say about enterprise interest in supporting remote branches by fully virtualizing them.
Tapping client-based agents, EMC Avamar Virtual Edition de-dupes data at the source, cutting down the resources required to back up guests and systems. And by making this technology available to VMware ESX Servers as a virtual machine, EMC enables VMware-based organizations to tap the benefits of data de-duplication at remote sites without impacting their existing infrastructures and -- more importantly, for some -- without requiring dedicated branch-office IT staff, according to the company.
"Encapsulating the Avamar server in a virtual machine so it can sit on the same shared server and storage infrastructure that's deployed at remote branch offices allows you to completely eliminate the need to have separate management and hardware for backup and recovery," said Jed Yueh, founder of Avamar and now vice president of product management at EMC.
Although Yueh noted that this model would free enterprises from having to ship tapes from site to site for disaster recovery, it is more likely that the trend toward server consolidation already under way at many organizations is what will drive the demand for storage software delivered in virtual iterations.
EMC Avamar Virtual Edition is slated for general availability in November.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 6, 2007 10:10 AM
September 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Company unveils VMware ESX version of its continuous data protection technology to stave off fallout of crashed guests and systems
More than just a means for reducing costs in the datacenter, virtualization is fast proving a force in redirecting the course of software delivery. Today FalconStor lent further credence to the growing industry mandate to support VMware by announcing a virtualized iteration of its IPStor product, thereby cutting down the cost and complexity of CDP (continuous data protection) in hybrid environments considerably.
Pre-built and pre-configured, FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware installs as a virtual instance on an ESX Server in less than 10 minutes, according to the company. Supporting as many as 16 connections per virtual node, the solution brings the cost of deploying CDP below $10,000, company officials said.
Moreover, by virtualizing IPStor and mirroring both physical and virtual data sources, FalconStor believes its solution provides a means for eliminating mandatory restores, enabling backup devices to act temporarily as primary sources in the event of server or guest failure, and doing so without a hit to performance or loss of data.
The solution employs DiskSafe, an agent-based technology for backing up Windows environments, to automatically allocate resources on the Virtual Appliance equivalent in size to the primary source. DiskSafe then takes point-in-time snapshots as scheduled by the administrator and mirrors incremental block-level changes in real time to the Virtual Appliance. In the event of failure, the DiskSafe mirror can be assigned to a new virtual machine to restore services instantly, thereby providing continuous data availability, according to the company.
"Because we're doing this at the block level, we give you not only the data but the system data. So you can have a failure on a server -- physical or virtual -- and actually restore that entire server from the product, including all system-state information," said Diamond Lauffin, technology evangelist at FalconStor. "And because we monitor transactions down to the I/O level, you can snap back to a point-in-time snapshot and then roll forward up to an actual transaction, which could be down to a nanosecond."
By providing continuous data availability in a virtualized environment, the solution eases P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversions and eliminates the need to perform mandatory restores, according to the company.
"You can now use what would be considered your backup or CDP device as a primary device temporarily while you are repairing either a physical failure of a primary or a corrupted position on a primary device," Lauffin said.
Public demonstrations of FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware will be performed at VMworld 2007, which will be held from Sept. 11-13 in San Francisco.
The release, which comes on the heels of VMware's recent IPO, may suggest that customers are pushing software vendors to support the VMware platform as their own virtualization initiatives take hold.
According to a report filed today on Newsday.com, company CEO and Chairman ReiJane Huai sold 12.5 percent of his FalconStor shares last Thursday, garnering $3.27 million. The report also notes that FalconStor Vice President Wayne Lam took home $1.45 million selling shares and exercising options last month, and that Bernard Wu, vice president of business development, netted $301,000 by selling 28,000 shares.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 5, 2007 11:46 AM
August 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Entering the Digital Dark Ages?
Welcome to the Digital Dark Ages -- an era of unprecedented information gathering likely to leave no lasting impression on the future, thanks in large part to a cross-departmental lack of understanding of the business requirements for data archiving.
Or at least that's the tenor of a recent study conducted by SNIA's 100 Year Archive Task Force, undertaken to shed light on the long-term fate of digital information as dictated by today's datacenter migration and archiving policies.
But whereas the late 5th and 6th centuries earned the "dark" moniker due to a dearth of texts from which to reconstruct historical events and philosophical leanings, today's informational blind spot may in fact be developing due to a lack of attention being paid to establishing the reconstruction mechanism itself.
"Long term, from an IT perspective, seems to come down to the 15-year period, during which three to four infrastructure refreshes will have occurred ," says Jeff Porter, chairman of the SNIA data management forum. "IT will have the ability to keep the bytes and bring them along, but not necessarily the ability to maintain the applications, and it's at that point that the risk of not being able to interpret the data begins to creep in."
Because of this, 60 percent of the survey's 276 respondents said they are "highly dissatisfied" with the likelihood of being able to read their retained information 50 years hence. And, although 50 years in computing time may seem an eternity, according to the survey of IT, security, legal, inventory management, and archive professionals, 80 percent of organizations retain at least some portion of their data stores for more than 50 years -- and 68 percent said they have data they must keep for more than a century.
"We were quite surprised by those numbers," Porter says.
The irony, of course, is that the very accumulation of data to be archived is among the chief factors pushing long-term archiving concerns even further down the IT priority stack. There are simply too many other business-critical endeavors not getting done to put resources into ensuring the readability of data a quarter century or more down the line.
"Archiving has not been viewed as a valuable business service to date," Porter notes. "But regulatory compliance requirements and the risk of fines really have businesses looking at these issues today, and they're discovering that archive has value and can help reduce their cost and limit their risk to legal exposures."
Chief among the SNIA task force's post-survey directives is to get application providers and storage system vendors on the same page when it comes to providing organizations with a means for reproducing original content unaltered over time.
"You have to get the application vendors involved. You have to move and store this data in a format that can be logically reproduced in the future and we don’t even know what the data formats will be 30 to 40 years from now," Porter says.
To achieve this, SNIA is betting on XAM (eXtensible Access Method), which it believes will provide much-needed metadata communication between applications and storage systems, thereby easing the ability to move data around in heterogeneous storage environments without application awareness.
Whether XAM can truly lead to an archiving Rosetta stone that will open today's troves to future generations remains to be seen. After all, XAM itself has yet to be seen, as XAM-based technology is slated for inaugural demonstration at Storage Networking World in Dallas in October.
That said, any enterprise that has attempted to reclaim knowledge locked away in legacy data formats knows that the case for some sort of comprehensive solution to long-term data reconstruction issues is compelling.
Posted by Jason Snyder on August 6, 2007 04:53 PM
March 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Amazon said Tuesday it was building out beyond the "Earth's biggest selection" of consumer products with a new Web 2.0-aimed storage service to make "web-scale computing easier for developers".
The move puts it ahead of Google, which is said to be developing an infinite online storage offering for consumers.
The mega online retailer wrote: "Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet."
Amazon said its "simple storage service" would offer developers "a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs".
Check it out S3 at http://aws.amazon.com/s3.
BusinessWeek has a good read up on it here.
Posted by Mike Barton on March 14, 2006 04:15 PM
March 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Google infinite storage plan leaked
Reuters is reporting that Google is preparing to offer online storage to web users, creating a mirror image of data stored on consumer hard drives, according to company documents that were mistakenly released on the web.
The news was first leaked at the Geeking with Greg Web log.
Greg reveals from an analyst presentation (which has been pulled from the Google Web site) the following, which seems to confirm the Gdrive plan:
"With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today." — excerpt from 2006 Analyst Day presentation notes.
However, Greg notes a PDF alternative of the slideshow has been posted.
The blogosphere is rightfully buzzing.
Question is: where does this fit into the grand plan for world domination? Comments anyone?
Posted by Mike Barton on March 7, 2006 04:18 PM
July 25, 2005 | Comments: (0)
EMC adds to high end array line
EMC today announced its next-generation product in its high-end Symmetrix storage line, the DMX-3. The new high-end system supports up to 960 disk drives and is expected to support more than 2,000 drives by the end of next year.
The DMX-3 system can store up to one petabyte of data and features increased processing power, internal bandwidth and new mirrored memory technology. The system will also support low-cost Fibre Channel (LC-FC) disk drives that are expected to hit the market next year.
“The new EMC Symmetrix DMX family delivers on the scalable design promise of the DMX architecture,” said David Donatelli, EMC executive vice president of storage platforms operations. “We introduced innovative new high-end software functionality last year and this new system can take advantage of all of our leading capabilities. This reduces costs for our customers in terms of hardware and software acquisition and maintenance and reduces operational and management expenses. We’re allowing customers to do more with less hardware, greatly enhancing total cost of ownership,” he said.
The DMX-3 is not cheap. While EMC does not release prices on high-end systems, customers can expect to fork over six figures for the new system.
EMC also announced two new data migration tools today. Open Migrator/LM is for users of Windows and Unix systems, while Logical Data Migration Facility (LDMF) is designed for mainframe users.
Open Migrator/LM will ship in August and LDMF will hit the streets in September. DMX-3 will also be available in September.
For more details, see our story here.
Posted by Bob Francis on July 25, 2005 10:56 AM
June 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
HP aims for small business with new backup options
Hewlett-Packard says it plans to introduce the first digital audiotape (DAT) USB 2.0 tape drives for servers next month.
The new DAT drives are aimed at the small to midsized business (SMB) market. The drives will have a data transfer rate of 23GB per hour with a 2 to 1 data compression. HP says a 40GB drive will start at $599, while a 72GB drive will cost $749.
Half-height LTO Ultrium 1 tape drives and additional tape drive support for the HP StorageWorks 1/8 tape autoloader were also introduced.
The new tape drives support HP's One-Button Disaster Recovery feature, allowing users to recover not only their data but, in the event of a catastrophic disaster, complete system configuration with the push of a single button.
Additionally, all of the new tape drives and autoloaders come with HP StorageWorks Library and Tape Tools, a set of utilities that make installation, management and troubleshooting simple, even for smaller businesses with little or no IT support.
The solutions are part of HP's Smart Office initiative, which provides smart technology, services and advice to help SMB customers keep their companies up and running by better safeguarding their business systems and IT operations.
With no need for a SCSI adapter and more complicated SCSI setup, users can have the HP StorageWorks DAT 72 and DAT 40 USB tape drives out of the box and ready to use with their HP ProLiant servers in less than 60 seconds, according to HP.
HP also is bringing to market the new HP StorageWorks Ultrium 232 tape drive based on the linear tape open (LTO) technology. The half-height LTO 1 HP StorageWorks Ultrium 232 tape drive has 200 GB capacity per cartridge and a backup speed of 115 GB per hour. Available in July, the Ultrium 232 has an estimated list price of $1,799.
HP also now offers two new versions of its HP StorageWorks 1/8 Tape Autoloader: an Ultrium 960 model and an Ultrium 448 model. These 2U tape autoloaders are rack-mountable.
Extending support to these two new Ultrium tape drives increases the autoloader's maximum capacity to 6.4 TB with an Ultrium 960 drive or to 3.2 TB with Ultrium 448 (assuming 2:1 data compression). The HP StorageWorks 1/8 Ultrium 960 Tape Autoloader starts at $7,499. The HP StorageWorks 1/8 Ultrium 448 Tape Autoloader starts at $5,299. Both are now available
Posted by Bob Francis on June 28, 2005 12:10 PM
June 27, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft, Toshiba define HD-DVD mission
Microsoft and Toshiba announced today they will work together to develop High Definition-DVD (HD-DVD) players, giving Toshiba some high-powered backing in the current standards battle over next-generation DVDs.
Toshiba is offering a different DVD format than its rival Sony, which is offering up Blu-ray, an alternative technology. Microsoft and Toshiba said they would investigate the development of HD-DVD players using Microsoft Windows CE technology and would continue to collaborate on iHD, a DVD interactivity format.
Even though HD-DVD uses some Microsoft technology in its system, Microsoft continues to maintain the company has a neutral position in regard to this format war.
The battle between the Blu-ray group and the HD-DVD format is similar to the Betamax and VHS wars 20 years ago. Most in the industry are hoping the two groups will reach an agreement to avoid a damaging repeat of the Betamax and VHS wars. The first players for the new format are expected to high store shelves this Christmas, so an agreement would have to occur pretty soon.
The technical difference between the two systems is slight, but difficult to overcome. The main differnce lies with the thin layer of plastic above the metal surface on which data is written. The HD DVD format specifies a 0.6-millimeter coating, while a Blu-ray disc specifies a 0.1 millimeter coating.
HD-DVD's slightly thicker coating is the same as on current DVDs, allowing manufacturers to use existing manufacturing technique, giving HD-DVD a cost advantage.
Blu-ray's thinner coating would require new manufacturing equipment, but it also allows for Blu-ray's higher storage capacity.
Posted by Bob Francis on June 27, 2005 02:34 PM
June 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sun tape purchase gets sticky analyst reactions
Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire Storage Technology, better known as StorageTek, for $4.1 billion in cash today in a bid to bolster its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy.
The move is designed to strengthen Sun's storage portfolio and also add to the company's ILM strategy, according to Scott McNealy, CEO at Sun. "With Sarbanes-"Oxley, HIPPA and other compliance issues, storage and data management are becoming more and more important," he said.
Unlike IBM or HP, Sun lacks a solid tape backup strategy, so the acquisition makes some sense. But many analysts question whether this was the right acquisition for cash-rich Sun. According to a research report from Merrill Lynch Shebly Seyrafi, the acquisition gives Sun a more complete ILM solution. Still, he questions Sun's decision to buy instead of partner with a tape company. "EMC, for example, has a reseller agreement with tape library company ADIC," according to the report.
Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett also has some questions on the acquisition. "Our bottom line is that we're skeptical on the acquisition being justified on the technology alone," he said. Gillett does believe the sales force consolidation could be a good thing. "It will be good to have a larger sales force out there selling Sun, but how to turn this into something more is not obvious to us at the moment," he said.
Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, is another skeptic. "If they can pull off a good merger, it could work out. But we all know that most mergers just don't come out very well. We'll just have to wait and see," he said.
Posted by Bob Francis on June 2, 2005 03:19 PM
June 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Capping off a season packed with storage news, Sun Microsystems this morning declared its intentions to purchase StorageTek for $4.1 billion.
The companies, of course, claim that Sun's storage hardware, and its platform for virtualization and data services are a natural fit for StorageTek's line of data protection and intelligent archive products including its Storage Resource management software and virtual tape systems, as the IDG News Service reported.
The story, Sun to acquire StorageTek for $4.1 billion, described the purchase:
The acquisition is part of Sun's strategy to meet customers' needs to rationalize their datacenter purchases, helping them "free up time and dollars to focus on compliance, architectural integration, security and ... the bottom line," the company said in a statement.
The products and services currently offered by Sun and StorageTek complement each other and will form one of the most comprehensive storage and data management portfolios in the industry, the statement said.
Other storage vendors have been busy this spring as well.
On Monday, Brocade announced several new products designed to make SANs smarter. As the story written by my colleague Bob Francis points out, Brocade is hardly the only vendor doing this.
Late last week, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems extended an existing interoperability agreement the companies had regarding their storage systems. The deal calls for Hitachi's systems to support Big Blue's mirroring and replication software, and for the companies to collaborate on interoperability testing between Hitachi's storage system and IBM's zSeries mainframes.
In the middle of May, HP and EMC held dueling user shows at which HP made what executives referred to as the largest expansion of its StorageWorks line in company history.
EMC also pushed its virtualization strategy forward, and NetApp added to its midrange roster.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 2, 2005 07:44 AM
May 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Network Appliance adds to midrange
Network Appliance released two new midrange products today aimed at reducing storage costs and increasing storage utilization rates.
The new products are the FAS3020 and the FAS3050, new midrange storage systems, a new serial ATA (SATA) option for primary storage applications and the V3020 and V3050, two new V-Series virtualization engines.
NetApp officials said the new SATA storage option, cuts the storage cost per MB significantly. "We also offer some safeguards for the SATA drives using RAID-DP technology," said Suresh Vasudevan, vice president of product marketing for NetApp. "This offers better data protection that traditional RAID-1 or disk mirroring," he said.
The V3020 and V3050 systems increase the virtualization capabilities of NetApp Data ONTAP 7G software to include additional third-party storage products from HDS, HP, IBM, and Sun.
The new FAS3020 and FAS3050 systems and the new SATA storage option are available immediately. The new V3020 and V3050 systems will be available in June.
Posted by Bob Francis on May 23, 2005 03:41 PM
May 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)
EMC joins with Brocade, Cisco and McData for Invista
Storage vendor EMC Corp. unveiled its storage network virtualization platform, dubbed Invista, this week and said the product will be available in the next quarter.
Invista is designed to operate with switches from Brocade, Cisco and McData. The Invista platform, priced starting at $225,000, will take on better established players in the storage virtualization market - IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard.
Invista allows users to retrieve data without knowing exactly where in a storage network the information resides. This will speed up service, increase storage capacity and flexibility and avoid downtime, according to EMC.
For users, EMC's product gives them additional storage options. "We want to see how this works, if it can help us better utilize our storage systems, we'll definitely be interested, " said Mack Kigada, an IT manager at Providence Health System.
Posted by Bob Francis on May 18, 2005 01:26 PM
May 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Hewlett-Packard opens StorageWorks with product parade
Hewlett-Packard is talking numbers at this year's StorageWorks conference in Las Vegas.
During an interactive chat following her keynote speech at the opening of the user conference, Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's technology sales group said: "We're announcing nine new products and solutions that make up the most comprehensive announcement in company history and for the storage business."
That's a key message point for Hewlett-Packard at this year's StorageWorks conference. Usually data like this is only important for accountants and number crunchers, but in HP's case it may be a bit more than that.
The company has been slow to release new storage products over the past 18 months and been a bit behind the curve in refreshing some product lines. It's doubtful you can say that now. Check out our story on the new products at HP and EMC's user conference, which also takes place this week.
Posted by Bob Francis on May 16, 2005 10:05 AM
April 28, 2005 | Comments: (0)
SGI gets supercomputing contract from military
A new Silicon Graphics supercomputer has been installed at the Aeronautical Systems Center's (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The installation is pretty top of the line. It consists of a 2,048-processor SGI Altix supercomputer, with each node consisting of a 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium 2 processor. The supercomputer also includes a 4 gigabit storage infrastructure configured from the SilkWorm 4100 family of 4-Gbit/sec midrange SAN switches, from Brocade Communications. Speed should not be a problem.
According to Maria Zimmer, ASC MSRC's Applications Management Branch chief, the new system will be used for a variety of purposes. "We'll be using it for advanced design concepts, military simulations, weather simulation, weapon system design and for any project that has large data requirements," she said. Military contractors will also use the system when working on projects for the military.
Posted by Bob Francis on April 28, 2005 12:11 PM
April 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)
EMC pushes against NetApp (and IBM) with new NAS entry
EMC ups the ante in the fast moving network-attached storage (NAS) market this week with its announcement of the Celerra NSX, a high-end NAS system designed to put pressure on rivals Network Appliance and its new-found ally IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard.
IBM recently agreed to re-sell NetApp's line of NAS system in a deal that squarely puts EMC behind the eight ball. NetApp pioneered the NAS market and also has an agreement with Hitachi, which also resells their products. However, Hitachi recently brought out a high-end NAS product it developed on its own.
EMC's latest system is the Celerra NSX, a high-end NAS gateway with new storage optimization and ease-of-use features. The new system uses a highly scalable blade technology, increasing its storage capacity from 48TB to 112TB. The new system will be available in May, priced at $278,250 for a four blade system that includes 48TB of storage, Celerra Manager and SnapSure replication software, dual management stations and uninterruptible power supplies.
According to International Data Corp., NetApp owns 37 percent of the NAS market, while EMC has 34 percent.
Posted by Bob Francis on April 18, 2005 10:24 AM
April 06, 2005 | Comments: (0)
IBM partners with NetApp for NAS fight
IBM and Network Appliance today announced a strategic storage relationship aimed at expanding both companies product lines and offering a more united front against storage giant EMC.
As part of the agreement, IBM will resell IBM-branded systems based on NetApp network attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI/IP SAN solutions, including the NearStore and NetApp V-Series systems and NetApp software products. For its part, NetApp will enhance the integration between NetApp applications and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager.
This is clearly a big win for NetApp, which pioneered the NAS market when network attached storage was barely a thought in the minds of the industry's big players. NetApp is now the market leader in NAS storage, a market that has IDC currently forecasts will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7 percent, reaching $3 billion by 2008.
The deal means NetApp will have IBM reselling its systems in a market in which Big Blue desperately wants to dominate over rival EMC. Of course, EMC has proven to be no pushover and IBM has muffed up more than one strategic partnership, but it should keep the competitive juices flowing in the storage industry for several years to come.
Posted by Bob Francis on April 6, 2005 07:12 AM
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