Cisco, NetApp and EMC focus in on storage software
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Storage Decisions Being the competent vendors that they are, Cisco, Network Appliance and EMC all made good use of the Storage Decisions conference being held here this week and rolled out new gear.
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Storage Expo Do you want a SAN or a SANity check?
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems is stepping up to the plate in the highly competitive application acceleration game, banking on technology and a lot of end-to-end network expertise to set it apart from other players. The company will announce on Tuesday that it is beefing up the WAFS (Wide-Area File Services) software it introduced last year so it can speed up application transactions and file transfers. It is also adding compression and other techniques so application traffic wonât take up so much network bandwidth, said Mark Weiner, director of marketing for application solutions at Cisco. Also this week, the company is set to roll out WAAS (Wide-Area Application Services) software, as well as more powerful versions of its WAE (Wide-Area Application Engine) appliances on which to run it. There will also be a WAAS module for Ciscoâs Integrated Services Router. Wide-area bandwidth is expensive, and software overhead can slow down applications even on a fat pipe. Wide-area file services allow companies to speed up the performance of those applications by caching copies of files locally and then managing updates and changes. Cisco competes with companies such as Juniper, which purchased WAFS vendor Peribit, and Riverbed, an application acceleration startup that enhanced its software and appliances last week and is aiming to go public. Cisco is late to the game with some of its new technology, but it can offer peace of mind by making the products work smoothly with a Cisco infrastructure, said Eric Siegel, an analyst at Burton Group. Pairing up Cisco gear worked well for the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., which wants to use WAAS to speed up communication with some of its fire stations, said CIO Clifford Clarke. WAAS seems to have performed better with Fort Wayneâs Cisco network than did other vendorsâ products, he said. Harold Hamm, vice president of IT at architecture firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, said he couldnât buy the kind of WAN bandwidth heâd need to match his test results with the new gear. âOnce a big file gets cached on a local server, itâs like working on a LAN,â he said.
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Ziff Davis - New software programs enable storage silos to connect with one another.
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Some attendees at Computerworlds Storage Networking World conference are combining their use of backup software and deduplication tehnology with virtual systems in an effort to manage ever-increasing data stores.
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(NetApp)  This report reviews what an organization should consider when calculating the total cost of ownership for managing storage in VMware server virtualization environments.  It presents findings from independent research conducted by Oliver Wyman, formerly Mercer Management Consulting, in determining the total cost of acquiring, deploying, operating, and managing storage environments from EMC, HP and NetApp to support VMware server virtualization solutions, and how the total cost of a NetApp SAN storage solution for VMware is over 37% lower than comparable offerings from EMC or HP.
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Not all good storage software comes from the industry giants like IBM, Symantec and EMC. We found a sample of storage management applications that are relatively cheap, effective and easy to use. They handle everything from simple backup and restore to continuous protection of e-mail for BlackBerries.
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Network Appliance today introduced tools to manage backup and storage tasks for VMware virtual servers.
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EMC's new Clariion AX4, for small and medium businesses, can take advantage of advanced enterprise storage management apps.
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Here&#39;s the skinny: The EMC Storage Router made its debut at Storage Network World here this week, but only in ballroom demonstrations (see EMC on Virtualization: Wait for Us).
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eWeek: Security partnerships and technology advances are making it increasingly safer to keep corporate data up in the air. To better fight the threat of wireless network subterfuge, Cisco Systems Inc.
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Companies that need to move storage data over long distances quickly and securely now have more options with the introduction of the MDS 9000 Multiprotocol Services Module and 9216i fabric switch from Cisco Systems Inc.
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As small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) save more data and rely on it more, they are turning to networked storage even under the burden of limited budgets and IT expertise.Regulatory requirements, more sophisticated applications and reliance on Web-based supply chains all are forcing small businesses to collect and store more information, according to IDC analyst Rick Villars. They may not have enough data to fill an enterprise-class storage system today, but they want systems that let them add more capacity as they grow, he said.EMC is aiming at this growing market with its Clariion AX4, a platform that can scale from a few terabytes of storage to 60TB and take advantage of many advanced EMC storage management applications designed for large enterprises. The company was set to announce and ship it Tuesday.Swervepoint, a provider of promotional gifts in Middleton, Mass., has less than 1TB of data between its two locations but wants to be able to add storage capacity without buying new servers.&quot;We should buy our servers for the server qualities and buy storage for our server needs,&quot; said Kevin Phoenix, principal in charge of operations and administration.The 15-employee company&#39;s main concerns about networked storage are cost and complexity, and the AX4 eased those worries, Phoenix said. Swervepoint, which counts EMC as one of its own clients, has been a beta tester of the AX4 and purchased a unit. It came with management software that was easy to use, said Phoenix, who said he handles IT for the company but is not an IT specialist.The AX4 comes with at least 3TB of storage and can be expanded by stringing together as many as five systems with 12 drives each. Each AX4 can be ordered with either a Fibre Channel or a iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) connection, meeting demand for IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity among SMBs, according to Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC. Smaller companies tend not to have expertise with Fibre Channel, which is typically used in large enterprises, he said. On the AX4, there is no price difference between the two interface options.The systems will come with 750GB drives at first, but 1TB drives will be available starting in March, opening the door to the AX4&#39;s top-end storage capacity of 60TB, Ader said. Within the full AX4 system and even within each enclosure, users can mix and match SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives. Companies can use management tools including snapshot, failover, business continuity and Microsoft Exchange replication capability with the AX4.By mixing SAS and SATA drives, users can set up a tiered storage system in which the more critical data is on better-performing, more expensive SAS drives and less critical on lower-performance SATA disks, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. Support for enterprise-class software is another benefit of the AX4, which goes up against SMB storage products from competitors including Network Appliance and Equalogic, King said. In particular, its support for virtualization software from EMC&#39;s VMware subsidiary appears to be stronger than in competing products, King said.
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EMC's goal is to be able to encrypt storage array data "on the fly" and without slowing down the input or adding cost.
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Well, here's your problem right here, ma'am Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft are joining forces to help the US government build a secure IT system for agencies to manage and share data.â¦
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The data center fabric will at a minimum bring together network, server, and storage administrators. Are you ready? Can you handle it?
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Fujitsu Siemens readies storage area network bundle for small businesses.