This post was written by Kim Windmiller
In an interview with Blocks & Files, StoneFly’s product manager, Jame Ervin, said that the company offers three product families with the help of which customers can choose to keep high availability systems, and implement the maximum infrastructure in a primary site, while reducing costs in the secondary site, DR location or branch office with lower cost IP SANs. Ervin added that StoneFly’s SANs take a layered approach to build redundancy across all critical components: the physical disks, controllers and management systems. Erwin believes that convenience, ease of implementation and simple scalability are the driving force behind the iSCSI market.
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Datastor has unveiled a NAS/iSCSI solution that leverages the benefits of iSCSI and virtualisation technology to allow serverless backups to hard drive and tape. Based on a Tandberg Data Viking FS-1610 NAS, powered by Microsoft iSCSI Target on Windows Unified Data Storage Server (UDSSD), the solution is driven by the new Alacritech iSCSI/IP card. Datastor has achieved throughput speeds up to 200 Mb/s with this configuration. The solution can provide storage to virtualised storage devices or application servers via VMware ESX. If a server needs additional storage, this can be provisioned using iSCSI.
Hifn(TM), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, has signed Xdata Corporation as the latest addition to its roster of resellers for the award-winning Swarm(TM) secure iSCSI appliance product line. A great quote from the piece:
Dell has announced that early next year it will begin selling EMC’s Celerra NX4 unified storage system. The companies have agreed to extend their partnership through 2013. The multiprotocol NX4 can be used for network-attached or iSCSI storage, or within a storage area network. The system scales up to 60 drives and can support one or two blade servers. The product supports SAS and SATA hard drives and is certified for operating within VMware-based virtualization environments and as storage for Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server and SQL Server database.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers has introduced the FibreCAT SX80 iSCSI (Internet Computer System Interface), a new model in its FibreCAT SX online storage solution product range. The system uses the standard IP infrastructure that many companies are already equipped with as the connection to the server to offer a more economically priced, high-performance alternative for setting up a SAN (storage area network) than via a separate fibre channel (FC) network. The FibreCAT SX80 iSCSI will be available from the Fujitsu Siemens Computers channel partners from July 1, 2008.
According to Gartner report called “Market Share: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries,” the external controller-based disk storage market has grown 6.6% over the past year. Robin Burke, research vice president for Gartner’s global Storage Quarterly Statistics program, said “Midrange disk array storage continued to bolster the revenue growth in 2007 and low-end iSCSI products also began to show growth potential.” In terms of market share, EMC retained the number one position with 24.6%, IBM came in second with 15%, followed by Hewlett-Packet (12.3%), Hitachi Data Systems (10.5%), Dell (8.4%), NetApp (7.4%), Sun Microsystems (5.3%), and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens (3.2%). Other vendors made up the remaining 13.4%.
QNAP Systems, Inc. has unveiled the new firmware version 2.1.0 for the high performance TS-509 Pro Turbo NAS to support iSCSI target service and a number of security solutions, e.g. AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, automatic policy-based IP blocking, instant SMS alert, SSL secure certificate, Syslog server, and the powerful Surveillance Station for live video monitoring and recording of up to 4 network cameras. The new firmware of the TS-509 Pro has brought a number of benefits to the business users, specifically cost-effective and flexible storage expansion as well as secure data protection.
ServerEngines today announced that its 10 Gigabit (10GbE) iSCSI technology has been selected by the LSI(TM) Engenio(R) Storage Group for the company’s future iSCSI storage systems offerings. ServerEngines’ 10GbE, full offload technology now embodies third generation iSCSI, the most mature iSCSI technology available in the industry. The combination of ServerEngines’ technology with LSI expertise in storage platform technology and support will result in advanced, next-generation iSCSI-based storage solutions. The combination of iSCSI-based storage solutions from LSI with 10Gb Ethernet connectivity enabled by ServerEngines will accelerate the growth of high-performance iSCSI SAN environments.
Virtual Iron Software has launched a new training vignette to round out an already robust series of best practice videos. “Management Server Deployment Best Practices” is the latest in a series of free and easy videos that demonstrate the basics of preparing and installing a Virtual Iron environment; creating and configuring virtual data centers and virtual servers; and testing Virtual Iron’s advanced feature set. The vignettes, emphasizing step-by-step procedures while providing underlying concepts, offer instruction on iSCSI basics, VLANs, PlateSpin P2V conversion, deployment strategies for high availability, along with other complex topics.