Data Security

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.

I've spent a lot of time developing disaster recovery plans for mid-size companies with 200-2000 users and 10-100 servers. These companies don't have the multiple data centers and dark fibre that the big boys use to enable array-to-array replication. They make do with servers at a co-lo site and use host or application replication. Double-Take Cloud has extended host-based replication and application recovery to Amazon's public cloud.

Any day now, storage managers should get happier - a lot happier. Virsto Software is due to ship Virsto One, the first hypervisor-based storage solution that aims at reducing the size of VMs while improving their performance. This implies a lot of things, one of which is that it will radically shrink the size of VMs by 80 or 90 percent. For an IT organization swamped in VMs, that can only be a good thing.

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. To get a better handle on precisely what's happening -- and, more importantly, to get the scoop from the business technology professionals who really know what's going on--InformationWeek Analytics is conducting a survey on the current state of server technology within the enterprise.

Storage hardware OEM Dot Hill Systems today unveiled the 3000 series, an all-new line of rack-mounted storage area network arrays that support the 8Gb/s Fibre Channel speed variant as well as dual-interface models that add 1Gb/s iSCSI support, effectively bridging the two protocols without the need for a second network. The 3000 series is available now to OEMs and will begin shipping under the Dot Hill brand next week.