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.
Read the full article here
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.
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%.
Hifn, the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, has partnered with Genesix Inc. to continue its strong momentum in expanding its reseller channel for its Swarm secure iSCSI appliances. Genesix President and CEO Al Vickers said that the Hifn Swarm appliances are a perfect storage solution for a PACS environment, with a feature set that addresses health care IT issues and a design simplicity that fits well with the staffing challenges facing many health care operations. A great quote from the piece
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.
Arista Networks announced interoperability with host adapters from leading vendors: Chelsio Communications, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Myricom, Neterion, NetXen, and ServerEngines. Arista will be showcasing an end-to-end 10GbE ecosystem at booth # 2009. The combination of the Arista 7100 Series switches and Network Interface Cards (NICs) from these vendors enables scalable, low-latency interconnects between computational machines at uncompromised ten gigabit performance. The ServerEngines’ Validation Lab uses the Arista 7124S 24 port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch. During months of continuous 10 GbE full line-rate testing with network and iSCSI storage traffic, the Arista switch has proven to be extremely reliable.
ThinkCP(TM) Technologies has launched Think ViPoR Storage 10G-Extreme SAN Solutions, providing customers with the latest in storage technologies, evolutionary architecture, easy manageability, an outstanding cost-to-performance ratio and low total cost of ownership (TCO). The fully integrated and tested core platforms provide between 1 to 4 AMD Opteron Quad-Core Processors, 12 to 48 Terabytes of SAS or SATA II iSCSI SAN or NAS storage and an optional 10Gig-E NPU multi-path NIC. The new series is designed for all customers ranging from small businesses with rigorous I.T. requirements through departmental and large enterprise customers.
Open-E Inc., a leading developer of storage management software, announced recently that its flagship Data Storage Server (DSS) IP-Storage operating software has now been certified to work with VMware ESX Server 3.5. Open-E’s DSS is an all-in-one, fourth generation operating system software solution for centralized IP-storage management, combining full NAS and iSCSI SAN functionality. Seamless integration of Open-E with the VMware ESX Server delivers significant ease of use, provides for consolidation of storage resources and enables organizations to automate and simplify their data management environment across both physical and virtual environments.
Dell Inc. has gained share in iSCSI-based SANs to take the number one position with more than twice the revenue of the next leading vendor. This growth demonstrates strong momentum in all segments of Dell’s worldwide storage business. Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell Enterprise Storage said
Open-E has won a major contract to provide a robust storage solution for the Tax Authorities of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The company will work jointly with partners BASIS and Tarox to install and launch 150 critical systems based on Open-E’s Data Storage Server (DSS) throughout the German state in just five weeks. DSS provides a fast, reliable, and scalable platform for IP Storage and is one of the easiest ways of implementing a NAS server and/or an iSCSI technology in a network. The DSS can be used with all x86 PCs containing USB ports, an IDE controller and an additional SATA controller on the main board or hardware controller.