Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

Direct attached storage often still predominates in small businesses, but as networked storage becomes more affordable and the management of it becomes easier and simpler to perform, network hard drives and network attached storage (NAS) appliances are poised to become much more pervasive. Recently Jerome Wendt, DCIG's Lead Analyst and President, met with Jonathan Huberman, President of Iomega as well as the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, to discuss Iomega's growing role in networked storage for small businesses and other similarly-sized work groups. In this first of a 3-part series, Jonathan examines current trends in networked storage for small businesses, how Iomega is differentiating itself from competitors and what advantages being a part of EMC brings to Iomega. (read more)

Video surveillance is shaping up as the next big thing in enterprise security. IP-based cameras from Mobotix and the continued growth of high-capacity network attached storage systems from Overland Storage make it possible for almost any size and type of organization to inexpensively deploy a video surveillance solution. But what was still missing until recently was a comprehensive backend support structure for implementing these solutions and then supporting them long-term. (read more)

If you happened to attend any recent conferences or trade shows then you know that most of the discussions center on driving costs out of storage environments. In the current yo-yo economy we live in, most IT Directors are looking for new and unique ways to solve their storage dilemma as storage capacity continues to grow. One way enterprise IT organizations are tackling this problem is thru deduplication using a disk-based backup solution. Though this is definitely a good approach of tackling data growth and cost savings in the backup space, it does nothing to alleviate the burden of data growth on primary storage since backup solutions do not remove and archive aging production data. (read more)

No one is immune from these tough economic times but there are always some technologies that are better positioned than others to benefit from economic downturns. Permabit's Enterprise Archive is one of those products as it provides companies with a cost-effective, scalable and secure means to store archived data on disk. DCIG analyst Jerome Wendt recently met with Tom Cook, Permabit's President and CEO, to discuss how Permabit is evolving in these tough economic times and what steps Permabit is taking to adapt and even thrive during this period. (read more)

The STN-6000 Series resides in the data path on corporate LANs between production servers and corporate file servers and compresses data stored on the corporate file servers. While it supports any file server that does CIFS or NFS traffic (which is pretty much all file servers) and is available in models suitable for departments, organizations that are using enterprise network filers like the EMC Celerra, HP StorageWorks 9100 or NetApp FAS are likely going to see the greatest benefit. The simple reason is that organizations need to generate enough savings in capacity to justify the cost of introducing the 6000 Series into their environment. (read more)

About 40 years ago, high-tech video surveillance consisted of closed-circuit television (CCTV) that had to be monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Then came the move to video cassette recorders (VCRs) with analog video capture, which helped bring about a revolution of video surveillance in the '70s. But just as all of us movie buffs have figured out, VCR tapes eventually wear out, tear or become unmanageable, and the same occurs with video surveillance tapes. While there are many new features in tape-based video recording, such as charged-coupled device (CCD), digital multiplexing as well as time-lapse and motion-only recording, the ability to digitally record data to network-attached storage is starting to takeoff and, as it does create a more scalable solution for video surveillance. (read more)

It is sometimes argued that media such as optical and tape are better options for archiving data when compared to disk because they have a longer shelf life, up to 100 years in the case of some optical media. Further, optical and tape vendors also argue that they are "greener" than disk because they do not have the same heating, cooling and power requirements that disk may have when used for archive. (read more)

Those of us who cut our teeth on single-disk storage systems and were heavily involved in performance optimization often find it difficult to take the leap of faith required to trust many new technologies. I (James) can remember when RAID came out. At the time, I was working on Oracle databases and wondered why I needed RAID and if it would stand the test of time. After all, many database professionals were already manually striping data across discrete disks. With RAID technology we had to overcome our inherent need to control data placement and embrace the ease of deployment and gains in performance, reliability, and availability. (read more)

A picture is worth a thousand words, so even in a world with a great deal of economic uncertainty, the video surveillance market is still forecasted to grow 30 percent or more this year and beyond, according to Security Products magazine. This is mostly due to the fact that corporate security needs are growing more critical. Yet the reasons behind the explosion of video surveillance go well beyond just security; companies are finding that the sharp pictures possible with the new generation of digital IP cameras can help them better analyze shoppers' behaviors and buying patterns at their stores. (read more)

Any storage architect or administrator that has ever dared to accept the challenge of engineering or re-designing their company's backup and recovery environment has undoubtedly discovered that he or she has had to sacrifice functionality or features based on the practical limits of their budget. Reasons for this vary from vendor to vendor, but mostly it comes down to how many backup and recovery software options are they willing to pay for? Most vendors offer reasonably good licensing for the core software, but once you step outside of that realm, some of the most basics features are not included. (read more)

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) take a look at the worsening economic crisis and begin to understand how it impacts them, reality is starting to set in. A recent survey reports that nearly 80 percent of SMBs are not convinced the U.S. government's $700 billion financial bailout will help them. Furthermore, SMBs' purchasing power is being drastically altered, which will undoubtedly cause ripple effects throughout the economy. Case in point, the reluctance and abrupt spending halt of SMBs has impacted SAP -- causing SAP's third-quarter earnings to tank. This has already prompted SAP to implement financial help and discounts on its software that is explicitly intended for SMBs. (read more)

One of the more elaborately crafted illusions that deduplication vendors have created over the last few years is that deduplication appliances are simply a "plug-n-play" proposition. In one respect, this is true. Companies can often introduce a deduplication appliance into their backup environment without substantially changing their existing backup configurations. Where the slight of hand comes in is when it comes to the vendor appropriately sizing the deduplication appliance for the client's environment. If it is too small or undersized, companies end up with a deduplication appliance that does not perform as anticipated; if it is too large, companies end up with an oversized appliance that costs them too much money. (read more)

NAS is sometimes viewed as a challenge by enterprise shops if their intent is to use it as a target for disk-based backup. Two reasons often cited is that there is only a finite amount of storage capacity available on NAS and backup software does not handle out-of-space conditions on file systems very well. This causes failures in backup jobs as well as performance bottlenecks when multiple backup jobs are occurring . The use of grid storage architectures in products like the NEC HYDRAstor are helping to put some of these concerns to rest and making NAS a more practical option for use as a target for disk-based backup in enterprise shops. (read more)

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland's most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland's tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection. (read more)

I recently had the opportunity to talk with CMO Len Rosenthal of Panasas and learn more about what Panasas has been up to. For those of you not familiar with Panasas, it makes a highly scalable, clustered Linux storage product aimed mainly at the technical (scientific research and engineering) and emerging commercial departmental computing environments. This is achieved through its object-based, PanFS™ parallel file system. As of last month, it also announced new products such as the ActiveStor 200, 4000 and 6000 Parallel Storage Clusters. (read more)

There continues to be a lot of buzz about storage consolidation and, more specifically, consolidating file servers. Regardless of what form NAS consolidation takes - monolithic NAS filers, file virtualization or clustered NAS - companies tend to focus on its obvious benefits. Smaller data center footprints, improved storage utilization, centralized consoles for simpler administration and even deduplicating redundant files are some of the advantages that companies will realize should they consolidate NAS. Yet what companies may forget to consider is the new backup challenges that consolidation creates and that the new backup problems created may mitigate whatever benefits consolidation delivers. (read more)

Cross-platform security has long been an issue. If your network is like most, chances are you are tied to the Microsoft Security paradigm, which does not necessarily play well with non-Microsoft permissions and security. This is not a judgment, but an acknowledgement that a growing number of companies operate in a Windows-dominated world. Binding Windows Clients to a Windows Active Directory domain almost always works. Conversely, if companies need to support a mixed operating system environment for clients and then share files and folders between these different operating systems in a Microsoft AD environment, the experience may be less than pleasurable. (read more)

A few years ago, companies wondered "What if?" regarding whether the Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives found in consumer-grade PCs would eventually find their way into enterprise-class storage systems. Now, the question no longer is "What if?" but "Where will it stop?" SATA disk drives have found their way into existing SAN and NAS storage systems as well as emerging Cloud and Grid storage architectures. As this has occurred, SATA disk drives have evolved to keep pace with new demands that companies of all sizes are placing on them. (read more)

It isn't enough for a vendor to make claims about their storage system; they should have to prove it. In a recent briefing with BlueArc it was quite clear that it was ready to back up its claims which really shouldn't have surprised us since BlueArc has taken control of its destiny from the beginning. A quick look at various U.S. Patents shows BlueArc's ingenuity, direction, and leadership. (read more)

The Swiss Army Knife's endearing legacy is that of a tool that has helped everyone from soldiers in the late 1800s to astronauts in the twentieth century deal with whatever situations they might encounter. Of course, part of its appeal is being a low-cost, lightweight, multi-faceted instrument that provides a multiple of options. Much of its cool factor comes from its design to handle whatever challenge an individual might confront. Today's SMBs face similar challenges. SMBs are entering the largely unknown worlds of D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape) and network attached storage (NAS), for which they need their own version of a Swiss Army Knife to offset the complexities that these storage environments create. (read more)

Enter FalconStor with its NSS Virtual Appliance, which is the first software vendor to receive this ratification from VMware in the SRM landscape. FalconStor brings a very open approach to this solution. By placing a FalconStor NSS appliance in between the ESX Server's and the storage farm the solution can now become truly hardware independent as the FalconStor appliance can virtualize some or all of the storage on the back-end. (read more)

If you have spent any time in the IT world you have seen technologies come and go, but few areas have been subjected to the dramatic changes that storage has endured. As enterprise networks have matured the storage of data has exploded. This has fostered new and inventive ways to store and retrieve critical data like the emerging cloud storage platform. Cloud storage's time is upon us and as large companies such as Amazon take the lead in this area it has brought legitimacy to the cloud concept. In 2007 IDC released the Digital Universe Study which stated between 2006 and 2010 information stored in the digital universe would increase from 161 Exabytes to 988 Exabytes. Based on this incredible projected growth in data and how cloud storage is evolving we quite possibly are witnessing the future of storage unfolding before us. (read more)

As a former end-user, I know companies internally spend a lot of time talking about the importance of cutting costs. But at the end of the day, often their bigger concern is to mitigate risk in their environment. So no matter how much money a new technology saves, companies do not want to adversely impact their existing production environment. However, standing still is not an option either. The question for companies then becomes which technologies are worth taking a chance on and innovating versus preserving the status quo. While everyone's criteria for making that decision and tolerance for risk are different, a major question they always ask is, "What happens if it does not work in my environment?" (read more)

I spend a great deal of time analyzing and writing about different disk-based backup products. The reason is simple. Companies are buying disk-based backup products as a quick fix to their backup problems and want to know what purchasing options they have. But companies should not assume that the purchase of a disk-based backup solution, deduplicating or otherwise, equates to an improvement in the management of their production data. Rather it is just a band aid. (read more)

Have you ever been out hiking, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you see something moving in your peripheral vision? Because you're not sure what you saw you stand real still so whatever it was doesn't bite you. Well, that was my first impression after I finished listening to a briefing about Wasabi Systems' VMX 2000 Series Storage Appliance given by Frank G. Logan, III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Wasabi Systems, Inc. (read more)