EqualLogic adds to storage array product line
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Storage appliance maker EqualLogic Inc. says its newest product improves performance by doing a better job of balancing the data load between storage arrays in a network.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard is developing new storage hardware that will make it easier for administrators to assign the right amount of storage to different departments in an organization. HP on Monday announced plans for new models in its midrange EVA series of disk storage arrays at the HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas. The EVA 4100, 6100, and 8100, due later this year, feature what HP calls Dynamic Capacity Management. Typically, when a company buys new storage capacity, it apportions it to different programs or different business functions in the organization. It can lead to the false impression that the company has used up all its storage capacity. Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM), HP said, allows the storage manager of a company to assign capacity to various departments or functions as needed and allows the system to reduce capacity assigned to departments if they're not using it up at the rate they thought they would. This saves companies the cost of buying more storage capacity they may not need, said Mark Gonzalez, vice president of enterprise server and storage sales at HP. "Perhaps you don't have to buy as much storage as you had to before and because of that, you use less power, use less cooling and can delay your purchases," Gonzalez said. "What's the most expensive storage that you'll buy? The storage that you have to buy today." Gonzalez said the EVAs may carry a list price somewhere in the range of $35,000 to $40,000. HP offers DCM, what it also calls thin provisioning, in the high-end XP line of disk storage arrays it introduced in May. The availability of it on the EVA line will coincide with the launch of Microsoft's new Windows Server 2008 operating system, which is due out later this year. Besides assigning storage capacity more in line with actual use, the EVAs will utilize a Windows feature that can reduce the size of storage capacity already assigned and reassign it to another purpose. But storage provisioning is as much a problem of office politics as it is technology, said Andrew Reichman, a storage industry analyst with Forrester Research Inc. Software application administrators at companies ask for as much storage as they can get because it's difficult to add more space later. But storage administrators want to preserve storage capacity so they don't have to buy more storage capacity unnecessarily. In the back and forth of office politics, Reichman said, the software administrators tend to win these battles. But with DCM, which he thinks is more accurately called "adaptive provisioning," assigning and adjusting capacity is easier and better assures applications will get the storage they need but not more than they need, he said. "Adaptive provisioning is good for environments where you have good communications. Where the server admins and the applications admins say 'I agree to take less and will trust you to grow it for me as time goes so we use less resources,'" Reichman said. "In my experience those environments are few and far between." HP also announced it's introducing a new tape drive for data storage and its first tape storage device in a blade form factor.
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InfoWorld - IBM on Tuesday announced two new storage products &#8211; upper midrange and high-end disk arrays designed for ease of use and lower cost. The DS6000 and DS8000 feature higher physical storage capacities, a modular architecture, and additional visualization technology, all in systems considerably smaller than previous versions.
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Symmetrix goes solid EMC will be the first major storage vendor to add solid-state drives for its high-end gear. The company said it will offer flash-based memory from STEC in its Symmetrix DMX-4 systems by the end of March.â¦
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Plain kit, sweet file system Rackable Systems this week made an unusual acquisition for a no nonsense server vendor. It bought flashy storage software maker Terrascale for $38m in cash.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Emulex will buy Sierra LogicÂ to build a bigger enterprise storage portfolio. Emulex said Tuesday it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Sierra Logic for $180 million to expand its position in the embedded storage components market. The acquisition will combine two suppliers of network storage components and may improve the reliability of storage networks that enterprise customers depend on. Sierra's line of embedded bridges and routers will join Emulex's portfolio of embedded switches and multiple protocol input/output controllers. The combination will make Emulex more competitive in selling to storage system makers, said Mike Smith, Emulex's executive vice president for worldwide marketing. Emulex's current customers include Sun Microsystems, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Network Appliance. "There is always a trend toward integration, and you can offer more integrated solutions the more pieces you provide. It makes you more of a single, trusted supplier," Smith said. The deal gives Emulex access to key technology developed by Sierra Logic to make SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) storage systems more reliable, said storage industry analyst Arun Taneja, founder of The Taneja Group, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Fibre Channel disk drives are used in high-end storage environments, while SATA drives are a lower cost alternative. But SATA drives are less reliable than Fibre Channel. Sierra Logic's technology makes SATA more reliable, Taneja said. "Sierra makes a SATA drive look like a Fibre Channel drive but maintains the price advantage of SATA," said Taneja. "Emulex looked at the technology and said 'It's too important to this industry. I want to own it.'" Consistent with its integration strategy, Emulex also acquired Arohi Communications, a maker of data center networking and intelligent storage platforms, in May for $39 million. The Sierra Logic deal is expected to be completed by Sept. 30 and to contribute an incremental $8 million to $10 million in revenues to Emulex in the fourth quarter. Emulex, based in Costa Mesa, California, has about 600 employees worldwide, while Sierra Logic, based in Roseville, California, has 70 employees. Smith expects most of them to come to Emulex, including Sierra Logic Chief Executive Officer Bob Whitson.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Trade Me has purchased a RAM SAN array from Texas Memory Systems, a storage system for serving thousands of pictures of items for sale on its site. Right now, the site uses traditional disk storage for the task, but it is encountering I/O bottlenecks.
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OCTOBER 18, 2004  - NEW YORK -- IBM last week unveiled two new enterprise-class disk arrays. One is aimed at the high end and one at midrange environments, but both have compatible software
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Storage Expo Do you want a SAN or a SANity check?
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The leading vendors in the data warehousing market are running scared of new entrants to the market that are offering data warehouse appliances (i.e. pre-integrated hardware, software, storage combinations) that can offer greatly superior performance at a significantly lower price.  In this white paper we will dispel the 'fog of war' that currently pervades the data warehousing landscape, dismissing those question marks that are irrelevant and gratuitous, but highlighting any genuine issues that need to be addressed.
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Hitachi Data Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard this week are trying to leapfrog EMC for enterprise-class storage leadership using pretty much the same product -- HDS&#39;s new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform.
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Replication doesn't have to take place at the array level. It can happen at the application, database, file system, operating system, or network levels as well, and the truth is that a "one-size-fits-all" may no longer make sense.
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Diligent announced its ProtecTIER Mid-range Entry Package and the Mid-range Standard Package, two appliances that let users perform disk-to-disk backup and deduplication of redundant data. While the appliances emulate the operations of a tape library, they are faster and with the deduplication of data, can reduce the amount of data being backed up by as much as a 20:1 ratio.
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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 plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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Enhanced midrange storage array, network hardware released.
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Partitioning an array and/or a storage network may not be enough to satisfy air-gap sensitive users.