Entries categorized under “Fibre Channel”

In this final installment of our blog series on WhipTail Technologies, a Solid State Drive (SSD) array provider with some impressive features and capabilities, I am continuing my discussion with WhipTail Technologies Chief Technology Officer, James Candelaria. Last time, we looked at how WhipTail implements software RAID on its devices. Today, we will be discussing the different transport protocols supported by the WhipTail array and why the FCoE and iSCSI protocols trump Infiniband in today's SSD deployments. (read more)

Today is part 2 of an interview I recently did with WhipTail Technologies Chief Technology Officer, James Candelaria, an emerging provider of SSD storage solutions. In my last entry, he and I discussed one major roadblock to widespread enterprise SSD adoption: the performance penalty incurred by garbage collection. This time, we'll look at how WhipTail optimizes SSD performance while minimizing the deficiencies of MLC flash. (read more)

Today DCIG is very excited to announce the availability of its updated DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 90 features on more than 50 midrange arrays from 18 different storage providers. However the reason that DCIG believes users will find this guide even more helpful and insightful than the prior DCIG 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is that it takes an in-depth look into how well each midrange array integrates with VMware and supports its vStorage APIs. (read more)

According to IDC, revenue from external disk storage systems totaled over $18 billion in 2010. But what that IDC number does not fully reflect is the growing impact that midrange arrays are having on organizations of all sizes and how well they are positioned to deliver the other key feature that organizations now want in their virtualized environments: Reliability. Among the midrange arrays available, the new NEC M100 storage array is better positioned than most to deliver on these two features. (read more)

If you are a regular follower of the DCIG blog site you may have noticed that there has been a noticeable lack of blogging activity on DCIG's site this week. Unfortunately it is not because I have been taking a vacation, fishing or merely lounging by the lake. Rather I have been locked away in my office completing the background research associated with the upcoming release of the DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide due out in the 4th quarter of 2011. Out of that some interesting early observations have emerged. (read more)

Today DCIG, LLC, and Foskett Services, LLC, are pleased to jointly announce the availability of an Expanded Edition of the DCIG 2011 Small Enterprise Storage Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 35 small enterprise storage array models priced from $5,000 - 30,000 from 19 different vendors. (read more)

About a year ago DCIG decided to do something completely different in the analyst space: a side-by-side independent comparison of products in a particular market segment in the form of a Buyer's Guide. The end result of that was the DCIG 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. But believe it or not, a year has already passed since that was produced and it is now time to update and refresh that Buyer's Guide for a number of reasons. (read more)

The overwhelming success of the 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that DCIG released in May 2010 did not come without some caveats. One of the specific areas in the Buyer's Guide that merited closer attention was in the area of replication software. It is not that midrange array replication software was ignored in the Buyer's Guide. But it quickly became evident that in order to do this topic justice replication software required its own dedicated Buyer's Guide which is what DCIG will be releasing in the first half of 2011. (read more)

Now that the acquisition of 3PAR by HP is a done deal, there are three big questions on the minds of many. How will 3PAR's InServ Storage Servers fit into HP's overall storage portfolio? Is HP's relationship with HDS over? Does HP keep its EVA line of storage? These are some of the questions I was able to get answered this week when I met with Craig Nunes, the new HP Director of StorageWorks Marketing at Storage Networking World (SNW) 2010. (read more)

Now that the bidding war between Dell and HP for 3PAR has subsided with HP emerging the victor, the question becomes, "Which storage company is on Dell's 2010 Christmas shopping list?" While there are still a good number of storage companies available, when one takes a hard look at which companies are the best fit for Dell, the list gets pretty short pretty quickly. (read more)

Over the past few years there has been a lot of hype that tape storage is being left dead. But while disk is capturing the fancy of enterprise organizations because of disk's success in solving their primary backup and recovery problems, longer-term issues with data management are just now starting to surface. It is for this reason that enterprise data centers are finding new tape library solutions such as the Overland Storage NEO 8000e well suited for their emerging archiving needs. (read more)

Symantec's decision to decouple DMP from its parent Storage Foundation puts concerns about other dependencies that all multi-pathing software solutions have to rest. Currently, a standalone version of DMP is available for Solaris, AIX and Red Hat and SuSe Linux. Beginning in Q4 2010, Symantec will also make DMP available as a standalone product for HP-UX and Windows. This now frees customers to deploy DMP without a requirement to first deploy Storage Foundation or VxFS. (read more)

We can all get caught up in the hoopla of new and slick storage technology features and lose sight of some the most important and basic details that keep our storage fabrics up and humming. Among these are the Fibre Channel cabling infrastructures and the distance limitations incurred by continued increases in FC speeds. (read more)

It has been rumored that EMC's CEO Joe Tucci has said that EMC's biggest threat comes not from Dell, HDS, HP or IBM but NetApp. It is for that reason that EMC has been looking over its shoulder for some time to see what NetApp is up to in an attempt to stay one step ahead of it from a technology perspective. But after attending NetApp's annual Analyst Days last week, it is time for EMC to stop looking over its shoulder and start looking up because EMC now finds itself in the shadow of NetApp's cloud. (read more)

Selecting a storage system from someone other than the incumbent historically has been a decision that most IT managers are reluctant to make. A 2008 Forrester Research report highlights this reticence as it found that over 80% of organizations bought all of their storage from only one storage provider. But times change and new storage systems such as the Nexsan DATABeast are demonstrating that IT managers can make a change in their storage system provider. (read more)

No one wants to pay more for less, yet that was exactly the situation that Delta Dental of Colorado was facing as it looked to upgrade its FC SAN to meet new application requirements. Further, new iSCSI SAN alternatives were not that much better as they had some of the same inflexibility and software licensing issues as the company's FC SAN. It was only when Delta Dental brought in the RELDATA 9240i that it found a solution that gave it more for less. (read more)

Today DCIG is pleased to announce that through a special licensing agreement with Nexsan Technologies, the 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is now available for a free download on Nexsan's website for a limited time. This is a full copy of the 105 page Buyer's Guide exactly as it was originally published by DCIG with no additions, deletions or edits. (read more)

In a couple of weeks, DCIG is going to release its first Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that will include information and analysis on over 70 midrange arrays from 20 different storage providers. However it is important to note that this is a "Buyer's Guide" and is not intended to do all of your thinking and decision making for you. (read more)

Data migrations are viewed as problematic by almost every size organization with administrative overhead, cost, downtime and risk among the problems most commonly cited in executing on them. For mid-sized organizations, these issues are compounded as they have the same challenges as larger organizations but fewer resources with which to perform them. This is why the RELDATA 9240i, that delivers block and file data migrations on a single unified storage platform, may just be the answer that mid-sized organizations seek. (read more)

Back in early February I wrote a blog that announced that I was going to resume writing technology reports similar to what I used to write for Storage magazine a few years ago. After some deliberation, I decided to focus the first one on midrange arrays. Since then questionnaires have been mailed out to storage providers, completed by them and their responses tabulated, weighted and scored. This means that DCIG is getting close to announcing how all of the different midrange array models from the various providers were scored and ranked. (read more)

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

However, during the many presentations that I attended and conversations that I had about this technology, SSD vendors revealed some key "gotchas" about SSDs. They also shared how SSDs stand to impact the hard disk drive (HDD) market as well as the market for memory as well. So here, in no particular order, are some of the new challenges and opportunities that SSDs create as well as what to watch out for. (read more)

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address. (read more)

At a time where vendors are positioning savings "guarantees" to draw attention to their storage offering, it is refreshing to see a storage user actually tout substantive savings just by switching to 3PAR. This was accomplished recently done by CEDAR Document Technologies who announced it saved a half a million dollars, improved performance, experienced a 5x increase in transaction volumes and avoided $250,000 in administrative costs just by switching to 3PAR's InServ storage systems. (read more)

One specific item that caught my attention was an article posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com's site regarding Texas Memory System's acquisition of Incipient's storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient's technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played. (read more)