Entries categorized under “iSCSI”

Last week's acquisition of NexGen Storage by Fusion-io was greeted with quite a bit of fanfare by the storage industry. But as an individual who has covered Fusion-io for many years and talked one-on-one with their top executives on multiple occasions, its acquisition of NexGen signaled that Fusion-io wanted to do more than deliver an external storage array that had its technology built-in. Rather Fusion-io felt it was incumbent for it to take action and accelerate the coming data center transformation that it has talked and written about for years. (read more)

In May 2010 DCIG released its first-ever Midrange Array Buyer's Guide in which we covered 70+ models from over 20 vendors. Fast forward just three (3) short years later and DCIG is on track to release not one, not two, not three no, not even four Buyer's Guides on enterprise midrange arrays but five distinct Buyer's Guides on this topic! So what has changed in just three (3) short years that DCIG feels the need to produce so many? To understand this requires a closer look at the forces that are driving the evolution and revolution in enterprise midrange arrays. (read more)

DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its inaugural DCIG 2013 Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 100 features on 30 different storage arrays from eight (8) different storage providers. This Buyer's Guide provides the critical information that small and midsize enterprises particularly need in regards to storage arrays that will need to serve a variety of purposes within their organization. These purposes may include storing large amounts of unstructured data such as files and emails, hosting virtualized and high performance applications and even serving as a target for archival and backup data stores. (read more)

Fitting "enterprise" storage systems into small and midsized businesses (SMBs) requires they deliver all of the features without the up-front capital or ongoing management costs. To date, that has rarely been the case with SMBs either needing to make trade-offs in cost or ease of use to get the storage system they need. That changed earlier this month with HP's introduction of its HP StoreEasy and StoreVirtual that bring into SMBs the storage system efficiency, security, reliability and availability once previously only reserved for enterprise storage products. (read more)

The IT infrastructure that most enterprises want is pretty obvious: it is a private cloud. Less intuitive, however, is how enterprises will transition from simply hosting file, print and web servers in their private clouds today to hosting business critical applications tomorrow. Successfully navigating this transition requires that enterprises introduce a new set of proven technologies that deliver the agility and cost-savings that they have come to expect from private clouds with the availability, performance, manageability and visibility they need for their business critical applications and data. (read more)

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)

The introduction of the HP P10000 into the HP 3PAR line of storage systems about three (3) months ago firmly put 3PAR systems in the realm of high end, Tier 1 storage. But the new V400 and V800 models in the HP P10000 line do more than increase the available storage capacity and performance of existing 3PAR storage systems. They indicate that the mainframe-like requirements that enterprise data centers have for storage systems persist and that, in order for HP to keep up, it needed to introduce a high end storage system that possessed "Big Iron" like attributes to meet these growing storage cloud requirements. (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)

More storage capacity, new options to configure storage capacity and a starting price point of under $2,000 -- that's the at-a-glance description of the newest Overland Storage model, SnapServer DX, available in a 1U and 2U form factors, SnapServer DX1 and SnapServer DX2, respectively. But what makes the new NAS/iSCSI SAN SnapServer DX so compelling is the increased flexibility that it offers to organizations to manage and scale, using the new DynamicRAID technology which contribute to eliminating the need for organizations to provision storage altogether. (read more)

The number of storage arrays that have a starting price point under $5,000 has grown substantially in the last few years. But the adoption of these systems is being largely fueled by their low price point even as features such as availability, performance and scalability are in some way sacrificed. The one notable exception to this trend is the Gridstore GS-1000 which also offers this attractive entry-level price point but does not require SMBs to sacrifice any of these 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)

As the economy rebounds, midsized companies looking to expand their business must usually first grow their datacenter. However datacenter growth introduces new levels of complexity that cast a long shadow over future business expansion as managing this technology can take the focus off of the business. The Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX400 server changes that model. (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)

Today DCIG and Foskett Services are pleased to jointly announce the availability of DCIG's latest Buyer's Guide, the 2011 Small Enterprise Storage Array Buyer's Guide. This Buyer's Guide is focused on storage arrays that are priced from approximately $10,000 - $30,000 and is specifically targeted at small enterprises and business units within large enterprises who are looking for the most value for their IT dollar when spending on storage. (read more)

Ask any VMware administrator what the implications are of using a non-certified storage solution in their VMware environment and they shudder to think of the consequences if they call VMware support. But identifying a unified storage solution that is also VMware Certified is more complex than small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) may expect. (read more)

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are rapidly moving towards virtualizing their physical servers using VMware. But as they do so, they are also looking to minimize the cost, complexity and overhead that the backup of VMware servers introduces while increasing their ability to recover their newly virtualized applications. It is these concerns that InMage's new vContinuum software addresses by using a new technique to tap into VMware that provides near zero impact backups with near real time recoveries. (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)

A few months ago DCIG released its first ever Buyer's Guide - the Midrange Array Buyer's Guide - to gauge the interest of such a guide among users and vendors alike. Needless to say, DCIG has been overwhelmed with the positive response and has received numerous requests to produce more like that one. But due to the amount of research and expertise required to produce these guides in an authoritative fashion in other segments of the storage market, DCIG elected to reach out to other analysts in the industry who have the needed experience to do this task. (read more)

It is no secret that small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are still keeping their belts tight in the face of the economic slowdown that has occurred. This is forcing them to change how they do business which means bringing in the right technologies to make sure their employees can still get their work done. As they do, more are bound to find the Overland Storage SnapServer N2000 the right technology to help them meet this objective. (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)

Not that many years ago the debate around how to best deduplicate data centered on inline versus post processing deduplication as data was archived or backed up. While that debate still simmers, a new one is brewing that was spurred in part by the recent announcement that Dell plans to acquire Ocarina Networks. (read more)