Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

VMware ESX Server and its latest vSphere software release have become instrumental in helping organizations tame server hardware costs within data centers while improving the ROI associated with existing and new projects. But this isn't to say that virtualization doesn't come with any pain points--and managing virtual storage infrastructures is one of the biggest. So to help combat these challenges, FalconStor Software today announced at VMworld 2009 a comprehensive VMware Initiative that will help organizations bridge their physical and virtual infrastructures and provide continuous availability in multi-vendor storage environments. (read more)

It was only back in February that Iomega with great fanfare released its StorCenter Pro ix4-100 targeted at the SMB market. Now, only 6 months later, Iomega announces an updated version of the ix4-100 appropriately named the StorCenter™ ix4-200d. The ix4-200d doubles the storage capacity and triples the processing power of the ix4-100d but it is the addition of replication to its EMC LifeLine software that really makes the ix4-200d stand out from its competitors. (read more)

Over the last couple of weeks my weekly recap blogs touching on the subject of cloud storage has prompted a lot of emails and phone calls to me in the background to discuss this topic so I wanted to touch on that again this week. In addition, I've also been doing a little research into some of Data Domain's claims (and the counterclaims of its competitors) in regards to the advertised performance numbers on its new DD880 and under what conditions enterprise users might expect to achieve those numbers. Finally, I wanted to comment on some of the statements that I made last week about a CEO change and a corporate acquisition and end up with a new rumor that is circulating in the storage industry. (read more)

Weekly I try to do a recap of what was on my mind this during the past week and this week cloud storage garnered my attention. Deduplication may be the BIG thing in storage right now but cloud storage is rapidly gaining momentum and looks to be the next big thing in storage sooner rather than later. But when I speak to cloud storage providers that are virtualizing cloud storage offerings from other providers, it tells me that cloud storage has a ways to go before it can be officially proclaimed ready for the main stream. (read more)

Last fall Plasmon and its UDO technology and G-Series optical libraries appeared all but left for dead. Years of mismanagement had left Plasmon in dire financial straits and when a refinancing deal in the fall of 2008 for $20 million led by Plasmon's-then CEO Stephen Murphy fell apart in the midst of the worldwide credit crunch, Plasmon's end was imminent. It was only after Plasmon went into receivership in early 2009 that Alliance Storage Technologies, led by its CEO and President Chris Carr (himself a former Plasmon engineer), entered the scene and breathed new life into this dead and dying company. (read more)

Many deduplication technologies attack the storage optimization angle at the tail end of the data management process: when it is transmitted by the backup software to a target storage device. However, some storage providers believe that as the benefits of deduplication are better understood by organizations, deduplication technology will rapidly move upstream such that it will become a core feature in more primary, value-tier and cloud storage offerings. (read more)

From time to time I help small, non-profit organizations in my area with some of their IT needs since, like most small businesses, the majority of them do not have dedicated IT staff. Recently a situation arose when I had to help one of them with a file server problem. After I fixed it, the question arose as to how I might do things differently and, more specifically, "How could they know when it is time to upgrade their current file server to a modern less labor intensive network attached storage (NAS) solution?" (read more)

The pending acquisition of Data Domain by either EMC or NetApp is going to have a ripple effect across the storage industry with some providers more affected by it than others. Numerous backup providers have gone on the record and told me that they are confident they can compete against Data Domain regardless of who acquires them. However, Permabit has a bigger view. It sees Data Domain's acquisition as the catalyst to the spread of deduplication beyond just disk-to-disk (D2D) backup into primary storage. (read more)

One time occurrences that are accompanied by spikes in capacity and performance requirements are the bane of data centers. While many organizations can excuse IT for their inability to respond to unexpected one-time or occasional demands, perceptions and attitudes change when organizations know a heavy load is coming and IT cannot adeptly respond. It is this type of challenge that Carrenza Hosting, a managed hosting company based in London, England, intended to solve when it began to start down the path of adopting cloud-based computing and storage services. (read more)

Plug-n-play - that's part of the idea behind the Microsoft Exchange Storage Calculator spreadsheet which provides organizations the general guidelines that they need when planning and configuring the storage that will support an instance of Microsoft Exchange. However one should not assume that this spreadsheet takes into account every possible variable regarding storage systems - it most certainly does not and says as much within the spreadsheet. (read more)

Best practices for configuring storage systems in enterprise Microsoft Exchange environments requires that they look beyond Microsoft's basic guidelines for how to configure their storage systems. While these guidelines may be sufficient when deploying Exchange in smaller shops where direct attached storage (DAS) or traditional array-based storage systems are the norm, enterprise organizations need to know when to look beyond these guidelines and tweak them when deploying Exchange on a next generation storage system like the 3PAR InServ Storage Server. The key to making these tweaks, however, is to satisfy Microsoft's best practices without negating the inherent benefits that storage systems like 3PAR provide. (read more)

In 1939 Winston Churchill said, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." In my case, I wanted to substitute "Russia" with "Mellanox" when I heard about its latest technology announcement regarding low latency Ethernet. (read more)

No technology has become more ubiquitous or more critical to day-to-day business processes than email with Microsoft Exchange Server now arguably the email software that most businesses rely on. But even as Microsoft Exchange has become so widely adopted (65% across all organizations now use Exchange according to a recent report from Ferris Research) and the release of Exchange 2010 looms, information about how to optimally configure specific resources that Exchange uses still remains in short supply. Nowhere is this dearth of information more evident than in what new options are available to administrators as they look to configure and optimize the back end storage assigned to Exchange. (read more)

Every organization knows its data stores are growing annually by 30%, 50% or more and, as they do, archiving is taking on a greater role to help organizations more economically store and manage this data. But, what organizations can fail to consider is the downside of not having an archival data store that can scale to meet their current and future data storage requirements. For example, today science departments across the nation are grappling with the inability to cost-effectively manage and scale their archived data stores. Their experience will provide enterprise organizations some insight into the types of problems they can avoid if they act now. (read more)

The lead article in the March 2009 issue of Storage magazine, "Quality Awards for Midrange Arrays", finds that a remarkable 82% of respondents in the survey would make the same storage purchasing decision that they made in the past. But are these impressive numbers a sign, as the author of this article suggests, that users are truly satisfied with their current storage system? Or is it a sign of a deeper, more systemic problem in storage where users resist changing their storage system even when they are presented with a solution that is obviously better and/or more economical than the one they currently use? (read more)

On April 16, 2009, the Iomega® StorCenter Pro ix4-200r was unveiled to the world and was subsequently greeted with an almost universal chorus of "oh's" and "ah's" by press and analysts alike. Now, mind you, this is the same crowd that normally first begins their write-ups with details about new features in the product and then promptly explain what is wrong with them or why they do not measure up. The coverage on this product announcement was definitely an exception to the rule. In scanning what has been written so far, one can hardly find any negative reviews on the ix4-200r with most observers and insiders feeling like Iomega hit it out of the park with its latest major foray into the small business networked storage space. (read more)

No one plans for "Domesday" scenarios because the thought is (a) if it does happen, I'll be gone anyway or (b) if it does happen, hopefully it won't happen on my watch so I will not be held accountable. But many organizations are unknowingly creating their own Domesday scenarios by selecting archiving products that take them down a path of technology obsolescence. One notable exception to this trend is Permabit with the Enterprise Archive solution which, with today's announcement of its new model 4010, demonstrates that archiving solutions and Domesday scenarios do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. (read more)

You can't talk about storage these days without including virtualization somewhere in the conversation. The Spring 2009 SNW was no different as one of its Summits was devoted to virtualization. The Tuesday, April 7, Virtualization Summit proved very interesting even though it was dominated by vendors. Some of the better data points that came out of this Summit were from TheInfoPro and Boston Medical Center. Also, interesting tidbits on SSD are emerging as SSD appears to solve performance challenges for VMware-access-to-storage in high I/O environments as well as performance intensive development environments. (read more)

This morning EMC announced its new Virtual Matrix Architecture as well as it new third generation Symmetrix V-Max based upon the Virtual Matrix Architecture. Since EMC has been hyping this announcement for at least a couple of weeks if not longer, I felt obligated to pop in and listen to the pre-recorded webcasts by EMC's CEO Joe Tucci and EMC's Storage Division President, David Donatelli, that highlighted the major aspects of this new release from EMC. And while it is impossible to summarize all of the features that a high end system like the Symmetrix V-Max will deliver, my initial thoughts were: "It's about time". (read more)

Even though the Spring 2009 Storage Networking World (SNW) ended last Thursday, April 8, there was still some other information from a few other briefings that I attended that I wanted to share. None of the information was of and by itself necessarily earth shattering but some of the comments made provided interesting insight into activities that are going on in the background within the storage industry (read more)

Every time I run across an article that evaluates and ranks the latest midrange storage systems I always read it with a bit of a jaundiced eye. The latest lead article in the online March 2009 issue of Storage magazine is no exception. The article admirably tries to compare multiple midrange systems in an attempt to help users make an informed buying decision as to products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. Yet this article falls down in one important respect - it fails to take into account specific criteria for midrange storage systems that some enterprise storage shops will have. (read more)

Cisco's bold move to enter the server market in mid-March was followed by the equally dramatic news just a couple of days later that IBM was allegedly in talks to acquire Sun. While Cisco's intentions to enter the server market have been rumored for some time, the news that IBM was allegedly in talks to acquire Sun caught many by surprise. Yet what makes both of these moves noteworthy is that they may signal a larger shift away from the traditional segmentation of server, network and storage vendors as it exists now and towards a single vendor providing all hardware and software in order to deliver a more holistic cloud computing offering. (read more)

There is always concern among small business owners that the software on a NAS appliance will become obsolete or out-of-date after they buy it. Iomega takes that concern off the table. Recently I met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses. In this final installment of a 3-part series, Jonathan describes what enterprise features are finding their way onto Iomega NAS appliances, how Iomega provides investment protection for products purchased and what Iomega will look like in the coming 2 to 5 years. (read more)

Anyone who has ever tried to assess their existing storage infrastructure and then compare it to a newer storage system knows just how frustrating an exercise it can be to try to balance price and feature functionality of the different storage systems. On one hand, you want to achieve maximum uptime, peak performance and unwavering reliability and, on the other hand, you want to obtain it at the lowest possible price while still meeting the application's requirements. In fact, one would think that storage professionals operating in the 21st century wouldn't need a storage vendor looking over their shoulder to help them do their job. (read more)

The cost for small businesses and the remote offices of corporations to use networked storage for functions such as centralized storage, data protection and video surveillance is often cost prohibitive. But today's small business NAS products are changing that trend. Recently I met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses. In this second of a 3-part series, Jonathan describes Iomega's NAS product offerings and how large corporations can leverage them to more cost-effectively store, protect and manage data in their remote offices as well as how businesses of any size can more easily build and deploy video surveillance solutions. (read more)