Industry News

The last stop on the geek tour at Tech Field Day Seattle was NEC's Seattle office where we got a live demo of their HydraStor deduplicating backup system. For a product no one ever heard of, HydraStor is pretty darn impressive. You can buy a small HydraStor that can ingest 500MB/s to 12TB of disk and grow it to suck in over 25GB/s of backup data, dedupe it inline, and store it on up to 1.3PB of raw disk. That's much bigger than a DD880.

I had the good fortune last week to spend two days in the company of a dozen independent bloggers, pundits, geeks and other thought leaders in storage, networking and virtualization at GestaltIT's Seattle tech field day. We sat, not so politely, through the usual death by PowerPoint and live demos from a series of vendors ranging from those I knew well (F5 and Compellent) to those like Nimble Storage, a start-up brave enough to come out of stealth in front of the Tech Field Day crowd.

LSI Corporation today launched in the channel new high port count 6Gb/s SATA+SAS MegaRAID and 3ware RAID controller cards and host bus adapters (HBAs). The new storage adapters support both internal storage and external JBOD expansion to provide customers with a scalable and reliable solution to address the growing storage requirements in application environments ranging from cloud computing and video streaming to high-performance computing and general-purpose servers.

Ever since SSD drives began their slow march to mainstream storage, there has been a constant chorus over concerns about SSD failure rates and questions on if the technology was ready for the enterprise. Most of the concern lies around how many writes a SSD drive can sustain. Vendors of enterprise SSD drives have gone to great lengths to make sure that today's SSD drives used in the data center will not have premature write issues. With the improvements in the quality of the NAND and the capabilities of the Flash controller, if the right vendor is selected, Flash SSDs should outlive most mechanical drives.

Overland Storage is introducing new disk- and tape-based storage hardware to serve growing midsized firms that see their storage needs becoming more complex as data piles up. The SnapServer N2000 disk storage device for network-attached storage (NAS) environments and the NEO 8000E tape backup and archive storage system. Each 2U rack-mounted SnapServer N2000 has 4TB of storage capacity and is scalable for up to 144TB of system capacity. It accommodates either SAS or SATA drives and has six gigabit Ethernet ports for connectivity.

Terracotta, a recognized leader in infrastructure software for enterprise application performance and scalability, today announced the general availability of Ehcache 2.2. This latest version of Ehcache enables customers to store over a terabyte of data and hundreds of millions of entries in a single cache.

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today introduced a new, midrange deduplication storage system that drives continued price/performance increases into the Data Domain product line. The new EMC Data Domain DD670, which incorporates the Nehalem-based Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series, is over two times faster than midrange competitors using recently released EMC Data Domain Boost software and up to 1.5 times faster when used as a virtual tape library.

Nimbus Data Systems has expanded the capacity of its systems by announcing the S-1000, which provides up to 10 TB of solid state capacity per shelf, more than doubling the capacity of the system to 250 TB within a file system. Previously, the system supported up to 105 TB. In addition, the company announced FlexConnect, an embedded switch option for the device that the company says eliminates the need for a standalone storage-area network switch in most environments by providing up to 12 10GbE ports.

Nimble Storage has unveiled the Nimble CS-Series, which is intended for midsize companies of 200 to 2000 employees. The CS-series combines primary flash storage and secondary SATA storage, providing high-speed flash access at a reasonable cost along with simpler backup and disaster recovery. It is available in two configurations: CS220 (effective capacity 9TB primary and 108TB for 60-90 days of integrated backup), and CS240 (effective capacity 18TB primary and 216TB backup). Each configuration offers high availability through redundant, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies, fans and drives and resiliency capabilities. The CS-Series comes with thin provisioning, replication, zero-copy cloning, application-integrated data protection, and diagnostics and support. It supports both VMware, and Microsoft HyperV environments.

Microsoft's Azure Appliance announcement made a big splash at the Microsoft Partner Conference, but the meat of the announcement is that HP and Dell will be hosting Azure-based cloud services and providing the consulting to help their customers identify, prepare and move some workloads into an Azure-based cloud service. The appliance, more aptly described as a turn-key private cloud, is still far in the future.

In the odd world that is Twitter, #fail is a tag you put on your tweet when something goes wrong in your life, at your job or when flying your least favorite airline. What do you do to avoid #fail in your storage infrastructure? The most important thing you can do when dealing with storage failure is to make sure you are prepared for something to go wrong before it ever happens.