Industry News

While I had been waiting for FalconStor to add flash support to their Network Storage Server (NSS) storage virtualization software, I was expecting flash volumes off a Fusion-IO or TMS PCIe flash card with promises of automated tiering to arrive sometime before Snow White's prince. I was pleasantly surprised when the folks at FalconStor called to tell me they were aiming a little higher than that and using Violin's solid state memory array as a cache.

Global CIO's Bob Evans and I were talking with Rod Adkins, the senior vice president who runs IBM's Systems and Technology Group. That operation is Big Blue's Big Kahuna, accounting for $19 billion in annual revenues and including IBM's chip, server, storage and systems software businesses. Did I mention that Adkins is also responsible for IBM's global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment operations? All of this is by way of saying that, when Adkins speaks, one should listen.

The first system administrator to ever upgrade a server undoubtedly experienced a mismatch in performance between the installed server and the new component. Since then, millions of data center managers have experienced first-hand the performance bottleneck constantly moving from one component in their data center to another. Have those years of experience stopped smart people in our industry from challenging whether it makes sense to deploy new generations of faster technology, because the new technology has performance the rest of the system can't use? The answer is no. The latest generation of high-performance converged network adapters is a great case-in-point.

Sepaton adds deduplication along with capacity and bandwidth optimization to its enterprise storage platform with today's introduction of the S2100-MS2. The S2100-MS2 sits in the midrange of the Sepaton products. A rack-ready device with capacity to back-up and restore of up to 40TB is aimed at small enterprises, the MS2 can be equipped for up to 160TB of useable data, while the existing ES3 can be configured for up to 1.6 Petabytes of data. The 2100-MS is currently available, listing for a two-node 30 Terabyte system starts at $321,000.

3Par dramatically improves the performance of corporate storage arrays with the announcement of its support for Solid State Drives (SSD) in its autonomic storage arrays, the InServ Storage Server F-Class and T-Class storage servers. SSDs, the sort of small drives that you might find in an iPod or other consumer electronics, provide incredibly fast storage access. They're widely being seen as an alternative to higher-priced Fibre Channel access for commonly accessed files. With SSDs, IT would continue to use SATA drives for about 98 to 95 percent of their storage needs and then integrate SSDs for the two to five percent of files that are commonly accessed, says Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3Par.

Nexenta Systems Inc. has enhanced its NexentaStor 3.0 product to include in-line deduplication for Zettabyte File System (ZFS). The company also used NexentaStor 3.0 as the basis for its Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0 product, which adds support for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization environment.

The server space has changed rapidly over the past few years, forced into a technological transition by four broad and simultaneously emerging trends: the ongoing push toward consolidation, the business imperative to rein in out-of-control power and cooling costs, the rise of cloud computing and a looming push for next-generation data center architectures.

One of the questions that came up quite a bit in response to my last entry was whether or not Automated Tiering Systems (ATS) were designed to drive cost savings or to be a performance enhancers. In that entry, I took the stance that ATS is a performance enhancer, while some of the comments and emails suggested that it was a cost enhancer. The real answer is that it's what you make of it.

On February 26, Emulex announced that its OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters are available from HP. This is a massive opportunity, given that HP is the largest OEM consumer of host adapters in the world. It is also significant because time-to-sales will be quick since the new HP-branded products are available for high-volume HP ProLiant rack, tower and blade servers. This also marks a ground floor opportunity for Emulex. These products are the first host adapters available from HP to support Data Center Bridging (DCB) - a technology that underpins converged networks that will dominate the future.