Storage news

Symantec releases faster next-gen NetBackup, Backup Exec software

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:26:24 GMT

Symantec announced new versions of its flagship backup applications for SMBs and the enterprise adding more support for virtual machines, a cloud storage offering and integration of snapshot and backup management

AWS Offers Storage Gateway for Automated Backups

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:11:06 GMT

Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that it was releasing a public beta of its Storage Gateway, enabling companies to schedule automatic backups to the Amazon cloud. Storage Gateway is a software appliance currently optimized for VMware, although other virtual environments will be supported in the future.

The gateway sends backup snapshots of data to the cloud, while also storing the data locally. Snapshots can be used to readily restore the data to local hardware, and can be accessed as Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes for mirroring data between on-premises and Amazon apps that are based in the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

Disaster Recovery, Data Migration

In a statement, Amazon said the gateways make it easy to use its EC2 "for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads."

The company said it expected the AWS Storage Gateway would be used primarily for disaster recovery and business continuity, backup, and data migration. AWS cited the advantages of reducing costs for hardware by emphasizing a cloud strategy, and avoiding any concerns about running out of storage space or managing off-site facilities.

Storage volumes created with the gateway can be attached as iSCSI devices to on-site app servers. Amazon said the standard iSCSI interface worked with existing apps and on-premise architecture. Gateway-Stored volumes, available now, maintain a complete copy on local storage, while uploading backup snapshots to Amazon. Gateway-cached volumes, available soon, can use local storage as a low-latency cache for frequently used data, while the clean copy lives in the cloud.

Each gateway can support as many as 12 iSCSI volumes and a total of 12 terabytes, and there can be multiple gateways for each account. If different configurations are needed, users can request special arrangements. Users can choose to store data in...

Amazon Web Services moves backups to cloud with new appliance

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:16:19 GMT

Amazon Web Services has launched a public beta test of AWS Storage Gateway, which allows enterprises to back up application data in Amazon's cloud using a software appliance, the company said on Tuesday.

Mozy releases 'Stash' file syncing service

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:31:42 GMT

Mozy released the beta of a new file synchronization service called Stash, which allows photos, videos or documents to be uploaded automatically to the cloud and shared across any device.

EMC lays out product roadmap, warns of disk shortages

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:32:44 GMT

During his company's year-end earnings call, EMC CEO Joe Tucci warned that hard disk drive supplies will be an issue through 2012 and said all major products will see refreshes this year.

RainStor launches Hadoop version of enterprise database

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:55:40 GMT

Online database repository provider RainStor unveiled what it is calling the industry's first enterprise-class database that runs natively on Hadoop.

Dell launches dedupe appliance, VMware integration

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:32:44 GMT

Dell today announced its first deduplication appliance, along with an upgrade to its Compellent Storage Center management software that includes tighter integration with VMware.

CommVault to combine backup, archive functions

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:53:43 GMT

CommVault plans to announce an upgrade to its flagship Simpana software in the next several weeks that will allow backed-up data to be archived while still leaving end users will an easy way to retrieve that data.

Multi-Gigabit Datacom Network Connectivity Market Analyzed in New...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:16:39 GMT

Ethernet remains the most pervasive networking technology within the datacom market, with Fibre Channel and InfiniBand lagging behind and coming second and third respectively.

Imation buys dedupe backup vendor Nine Technology

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:59:26 GMT

Imation today announced it has acquired deduplication technology from Nine Technology.

TwinStrata integrates storage gateway with OpenStack-based clouds

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:00:50 GMT

Enterprises can now use TwinStrata's CloudArray to access storage capacity hosted in OpenStack-based clouds, the company said on Tuesday.

STEC announces high-endurance SSD

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:04:34 GMT

Storage vendor STEC announced a high-performance drive that has three times the endurance capability of previous generation MLC-based solid state drives.

EMC adds Linux support, metering to Atmos cloud software

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:09:53 GMT

EMC today announced its first upgrade to the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform, adding metering capabilities and support for Linux.

NetApp's new entry-level array offers up to 432TB of capacity

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:20:22 GMT

NetApp today announced an addition to its Fabric-Attached Storage 2000 family of arrays: the FAS2240, which scales to 432TB of capacity and has a starting price of $7,500

Carbonite launches bare metal backups, file versioning

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:40:22 GMT

Carbonite has announced upgrades to its online backup and restore service that include full OS and application backups, as well as the ability to mirror data to an external drive. The service allows users to perform a full metal restore from the external drive or a CD.

STORAGEWORKS P2000 G3 FC/ISCSI - $13698.99

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:48:25 GMT

HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array P2000 G3 FC/iSCSI Dual Combo Controller LFF Array - Hard drive array - 12 bays - iSCSI, 8Gb Fibre Channel - rack-mountable - 2U The HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 FC Modular Smart Array is a Fiber Channel model of Hewlett Packard's 2000 family of storage arrays , specifically designed for entry-level customers and ... (more)

Linux 3.1 Released

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:05:22 GMT

Quantum offers $5K deduplication appliance for SMBs

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:15:22 GMT

Quantum's new NDX-8 NAS appliance delivers 8TB of capacity with built-in backup software and deduplication technology, offering to reduce storage requirements by up to 90%.

Linux 3.1 Released

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:32:41 GMT

Linux 3.1 has been released. The changes include support for the OpenRISC opensource CPU, performance improvements to the writeback throttling, some speedups in the slab allocator, a new iSCSI implementation, support for Near-Field Communication chips used to enable mobile payments, bad block management in the generic software RAID layer, a new "cpupowerutils" userspace utility for power management, filesystem barriers enabled by default in Ext3, Wii Controller support and new drivers and many small improvements. Here's the full changelog.

CVE-2011-3543

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Unspecified vulnerability in Oracle Solaris 11 Express allows remote attackers to affect availability, related to iSCSI DataMover (IDM).

Viking combines DRAM module with flash for auto backup

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:14:22 GMT

Viking Technology announced a new memory module that combines DRAM, NAND flash and a super capacitor to automatically backup data in the event of a power failure.

Dell ends 10-year reseller relationship with EMC

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:24:21 GMT

Dell announced it has ended a decadelong reseller relationship with EMC this month through which it sold more than a billion dollars worth of midrange and entry-level storage products.

IBM to sell global data migration engine, NAS/iSCSI SAN

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:47:21 GMT

IBM plans to roll out software on its midrange and high-end clustered storage arrays that allows policy-based migration, backups and data deletion. The company also will announce that its V7000 series array can perform both file- and block-based data transfers.

Overland Storage unveils NAS/iSCSI SAN array

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:18:22 GMT

Overland Storage today announced its first converged NAS and iSCSI SAN array that scales up to 288TB, and has a starting price of about $1,700.

Overland Storage Intros Unified SAN-NAS Appliance With Dynamic RAID

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Overland Storage's new SnapServer DX series, a storage appliance with both NAS and iSCSI SAN capability, includes dynamic RAID for automatically increasing and shrinking RAID sets without shutting the device down.

Emulex helps drive shift to 16G FC

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:27:50 GMT

Emulex announced its first server adapter cards for 16 Gbit/second Fibre Channel, starting the marathon to the next generation of the storage systems interface.

View the full article HERE .

Fibre Channel over Ethernet in the Data Center: An Introduction

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:51:06 GMT

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is a newly proposed standard that is being developed by INCITS T11.

Symantec updates flagship storage, high availability suites

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:26:22 GMT

In order to provide greater private cloud capabilities, Symantec announced new product versions of Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 and Veritas Operations Manager 4.1 and eight other products.

Cloud storage arrays to generate $1.45B in 2015

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:38:22 GMT

An analysis of the cloud storage market, both public and private, released by Gartner today showed that the market is on pace to total $417.3 million in 2011, a 56% increase from 2010 and it will reach $1.4B by 2015.

CVE-2011-3982

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Fibre Channel driver for QLogic adapters in IBM AIX 6.1 and 7.1 does not properly handle DMA resource limitations, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system hang) via vectors that generate a large amount of DMA I/O, related to a deadlock in timer processing across CPUs.

Fibre Channel decline predicted for 2014

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:57:06 GMT

Fibre Channel will decline starting in 2014, the same year 10 Gbit/s Ethernet will surpass Gbit Ethernet in unit shipments, according to a new report.

View the full article HERE .

IP Infusion's ZebOS 7.9 aims to trim time to market for innovations

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:01:19 GMT

Software-based networking specialist IP Infusion this week rolled out the latest iteration of it ZebOS platform, ZebOS 7.9, looking to enable networking OEMs to more quickly, and at reduced cost, deliver customized and innovative solutions to telecom as well as public and private cloud service providers.

With networking resource use increasing dramatically and the pace of networking communications innovation accelerating, IP Infusion VP of Marketing Sandra Orlando said on-time delivery of new services contributes significantly to revenue and profitability.

"A survey from Amdocs showed 95 percent of telecom providers saw a direct correlation between time-to-market and revenue," she said. That, she contends, requires network evolution to be software- rather than hardware-based.

"We believe the future of networking is going to be software," Orlando said. "It introduces capabilities that will enable network equipment vendors to get to market with innovations faster."

With ZebOS 7.9, IP Infusion specifically addresses the evolving requirements for data center networking, mobile backhaul and Carrier Ethernet.

Among the highlights in the latest version:

Data Center Networking - It implements the data center bridging extensions to accelerate the transition from Fibre Channel to FCoE in Storage Area Networks (SANs).
Mobile Backhaul - ZebOS 7.9 provides the Mobile Backhaul Implementation Agreement for Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)-MBH IA. These capabilities support a wide-range of implementation options with the goal of supporting more cost effective delivery of mobile services by moving from an entirely legacy RAN network to Ethernet.
Carrier Ethernet - ZebOS 7.9 offers new capabilities to accelerate the transformation to Carrier Ethernet. This includes implementation of the MEF 13 and MEF 20 specifications that define standard services and open the door to interoperability of networking equipment.

"With the telecom market changing so rapidly, OEMs are requiring network solutions that are not only fast and cost-effective but also deliver unique value and capture new revenue opportunities--a tall order," said Ray Mota, managing partner, ACG Research. "Software-centric networking solutions such as IP Infusion's ZebOS can help service providers meet this challenge by delivering networking solutions easily and quickly, which helps them maintain their competitive edge."

For more:
- see this release

Imation buys IronKey's hardware assets

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:29:22 GMT

Imation announced it has worked out a deal to buy the assets of IronKey's secure data storage hardware business.

Getting the most out of flash storage

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:05:53 GMT

Over the past few years mainstream enterprises have been turning to NAND flash storage to boost speed and decrease latency, but some vendors still produce products that inhibit customers from achieving flash's full potential.

IBM's futuristic storage aims for speed, density

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:25:29 GMT

IBM is working on both super-fast and super-dense storage media that should reach enterprises before the end of this decade, and demand in some industries looks likely to keep pace with the advances.

IBM's futuristic storage aims for speed, density

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:25:29 GMT

IBM is working on both super-fast and super-dense storage media that should reach enterprises before the end of this decade, and demand in some industries looks likely to keep pace with the advances.

Chelsio Unveils New Unfired Wire Adapters for Data Center and Storage

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:31:41 GMT

Chelsio also introduced the T420- According to the 10 Gigabit Ethernet company, the new adapters are based on the fourth generation T4 technology, and enable a Unified Wire for LAN, SAN and cluster traffic, providing full offload of TCP, , iSCSI, FCoE and iWARP traffic simultaneously with support for every major virtualization technology in the ... (more)

MySQL with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:18:44 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering Oracle has announced support for running MySQL on Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC); with so many people developing and deploying MySQL on Windows, this offers a great option to add High Availability to MySQL deployments if you don’t want to go as far as deploying MySQL Cluster. This post will give a brief overview of how to set things up but for all of the gory details a new white paper MySQL with Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering is available – please give me any feedback. I will also be presenting on this at a free webinar on Thursday 15th September (please register in advance) as well at an Oracle OpenWorld session in San Francisco on Tuesday 4th October (Tuesday, 01:15 PM, Marriott Marquis – Golden Gate C2) – a good opportunity to get more details and get your questions answered. It sometimes surprises people just how much MySQL is used on Windows, here are a few of the reasons: Lower TCO 90% savings over Microsoft SQL Server If your a little skeptical about this then try it out for yourself with the MySQL TCO Savings Calculator Broad platform support No lock-in Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris Ease of use and administration < 5 mins to download, install & configure MySQL Enterprise Monitor & MySQL WorkBench Reliability 24×7 Uptime Field Proven Performance and scalability MySQL 5.5 delivered over 500% performance boost on Windows. Integration into Windows environment ADO.NET, ODBC & Microsoft Access Integration And now, support for Windows Server Failover Clustering! Probably the most common form of High Availability for MySQL is MySQL (asynchronous or semi-synchronous replication) and the option for the highest levels of availability is MySQL Cluster. We are in the process of rolling out a number of solutions that provide levels of availability somewhere in between MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster; Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition was the first (overview, webinar replay, white paper) and WSFC is the second. Solution Overview MySQL with Windows Failover Clustering requires at least 2 servers within the cluster together with some shared storage (for example FCAL SAN or iSCSI disks). For redundancy, 2 LANs should be used for the cluster to avoid a single point of failure and typically one would be reserved for the heartbeats between the cluster nodes. The MySQL binaries and data files are stored in the shared storage and Windows Failover Clustering ensures that at most one of the cluster nodes will access those files at any point in time (hence avoiding file corruptions). Clients connect to the MySQL service through a Virtual IP Address (VIP) and so in the event of failover they experience a brief loss of connection but otherwise do not need to be aware that the failover has happened other than to handle the failure of any in-flight transactions. Target Configuration This post will briefly step through how to set up and use a cluster and this diagrams shows how this is mapped onto physical hardware and network addresses for the lab used later in this post. In this case, iSCSI is used for the shared storage. Note that ideally there would be an extra subnet for the heartbeat connection between ws1 and ws3. This is only intended to be an overview and the steps have been simplified refer to the white paper for more details on the steps. Prerequisites MySQL 5.5 & InnoDB must be used for the database (note that MyISAM is not crash-safe and so failover may result in a corrupt database) Windows Server 2008 R2 Redundant network connections between nodes and storage WSFC cluster validation must pass iSCSI or FCAL SAN should be used for the shared storage Step 1 Configure iSCSI in software (optional) Create 2 clustered disks This post does not attempt to describe how to configure a highly available, secure and performant SAN but in order to implement the subsequent steps shared storage is required and so in this step we look at one way of using software to provide iSCSI targets without any iSCSI/SAN hardware (just using the server’s internal disk). This is a reasonable option to experiment with but probably not what you’d want to deploy with for a HA application. If you already have shared storage set up then you can skip this step and use that instead. As part of this process you’ll create at least two virtual disks within the iSCSI target; one for the quorum file and one for the MySQL binaries and data files. The quorum file is used by Windows Failover Clustering to avoid “split-brain” behaviour. Step 2. Ensure Windows Failover Clustering is enabled Ensure that WSFC is enabled To confirm that Windows Failover Clustering is installed on ws1 and ws3, open the “Features” branch in the Server Manager tool and check if “Failover Cluster Manager” is present. If Failover Clustering is not installed then it is very simple to add it. Select “Features” within the Service Manager and then click on “Add Features” and then select “Failover Clustering” and then “Next”. Step 3. Install MySQL as a service on both servers Install MySQL as a Windows Service If MySQL is already installed as a service on both ws1 and ws3 then this step can be skipped. The installation is very straight-forward using the MySQL Windows Installer and selecting the default options is fine. Within the MySQL installation wizard, sticking with the defaults is fine for this exercise. When you reach the configuration step, check “Create Windows Service”. The installation and configuration must be performed on both ws1 and ws2, if necessary. Step 4. Migrate MySQL binaries & data to shared storage If the MySQL Service is running on either ws1 or ws3 then stop it – open the Task Manager using ctrl-shift-escape, select the “Services” tab and then right-click on the MySQL service and choose “Stop Service”. As the iSCSI disks were enabled on ws1 you can safely access them in order to copy across the MySQL binaries and data files to the shared disk. Step 5. Create Windows Failover Cluster Create the Cluster (without MySQL) From the Server Manager on either ws1 or ws3 navigate to “Features -> Failover Cluster Manager” and then select “Validate a Configuration”. When prompted enter ws1 as one name and then ws3 as the other. In the “Testing Options” select “Run all tests” and continue. If the tests report any errors then these should be fixed before continuing. Now that the system has been verified, select “Create a Cluster” and provide the same server names as used in the validation step. In this example, “MySQL” is provided as the “Cluster Name” and then the wizard goes on to create the cluster. Step 6. Create Cluster of MySQL Servers within Windows Cluster Cluster the MySQL Service Adding the MySQL service to the new Cluster is very straight-forward. Right-click on “Services and applications” in the Server Manager tree and select “Configure a Service or Application…”. When requested by the subsequent wizard, select “Generic Service” from the list and then “MySQL” from the offered list of services. Our example name was “ClusteredMySQL”. Please choose an appropriate name for your cluster. The wizard will then offer the shared disk that has not already been established as the quorum disk for use with the Clustered service – make sure that it is selected. Once the wizard finishes, it starts up the MySQL Service. Click on the “ClusteredMySQL” service branch to observe that the service is up and running. You should also make a note of the Virtual IP (VIP) assigned, in this case 192.168.2.18. Step 7. Test the cluster As described in Step 6, the VIP should be used to connect to the clustered MySQL service: C:\ mysql –u root –h 192.168.2.18 –P3306 –pbob From there create a database and populate some data. mysql> CREATE DATABASE clusterdb; mysql> USE clusterdb; mysql> CREATE TABLE simples (id int not null primary key) ENGINE=innodb; mysql> INSERT INTO simples VALUES (1); mysql> SELECT * FROM simples; +----+ | id | +----+ | 1 | +----+ Migrate MySQL Service Across Cluster The MySQL service was initially created on ws1 but it can be forced to migrate to ws3 by right-clicking on the service and selecting “Move this service or application to another node”. As the MySQL data is held in the shared storage (which has also been migrated to ws3), it is still available and can still be accessed through the existing mysql client which is connected to the VIP: mysql> select * from simples; ERROR 2006 (HY000): MySQL server has gone away No connection. Trying to reconnect... Connection id: 1 Current database: clusterdb +----+ | id | +----+ | 1 | +----+ Note the error shown above – the mysql client loses the connection to the MySQL service as part of the migration and so it automatically reconnects and complete the query. Any application using MySQL with Windows Failover Cluster should also expect to have to cope with these “glitches” in the connection. Conclusion More users develop and deploy and MySQL on Windows than any other single platform. Enhancements in MySQL 5.5 increased performance by over 5x compared to previous MySQL releases. With certification for Windows Server Failover Clustering, MySQL can now be deployed to support business critical workloads demanding high availability, enabling organizations to better meet demanding service levels while also reducing TCO and eliminating single vendor lock-in. Please let me know how you get on by leaving comments on this post.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet, GPON rising

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:09:18 GMT

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is driving sales and market share shifts for 10 Gbit Ethernet, while China drives sales in GPONs, according to two Dell 'Oro Group reports.

View the full article HERE .

Silver Peak unveils free WAN acceleration product

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 09:24:35 GMT

Silver Peak today announced free downloadable software that performs the same data acceleration functions as its enterprise-class product, but only for data replication between two sites and not multiple applications.

Texas Memory Systems challenges high-end hard drives with new flash product

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:09:35 GMT

Texas Memory Systems broke out of its uber-high end mold and introduced a flash-based array that it says will compete with Tier 1 hard drive systems on a price-per-gigabyte basis.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:41:21 GMT

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is the proposed industry standard being developed by an ecosystem of Fibre Channel and networking product vendors to drive network convergence in the enterprise data center.

Nexsan To Launch Its First NAS Appliances, Plans Unified SAN-NAS Option

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:40:00 GMT

Nexsan's new E5000 NAS family of storage appliances in the next few months will have a firmware update giving them unified NAS and iSCSI SAN capabilities.

Kernel Prepatch 3.1-rc1

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:19:28 GMT

The 3.1-rc1 prepatch is out after a longer than usual merge window. "Notable? It depends on what you look for. VM writeback work? You got it. And there was some controversy over the iscsi target code. There's networking changes, there's the rest of the generic ACL support moving into the...

REVIEW: Drobo B800i Turns iSCSI Storage From Complex To Simple

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:27:00 GMT

With Drobo's LED-based monitoring and set-and-forget administration, iSCSI storage has never been so easy.

OCZ releases next-gen PCIe SSD with 2.8GB/sec performance

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:15:35 GMT

OCZ today announced the availability of its highest performing PCI-e flash card to date, the Z-Series R4, which has up to 2.8GB/sec throughput.

Symantec releases next-gen email archiving software

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:20:35 GMT

Symantec today unveiled the latest version of its email archiving software, which can now automatically classify email and assign it to the appropriate tier of storage.

iSCSI learns new tricks (InfoWorld)

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:00:00 GMT

InfoWorld - Many people still believe iSCSI can't cut it in the enterprise, which is better served by Fibre Channel. iSCSI vendors are doing their best to prove that assumption wrong.

EMC launches storage management software

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:58:19 GMT

EMC recently launched a new storage management package for cloud computing called ProSphere to replace its aging ControlCenter software and allow more flexible management for cloud computing environments.

EMC launches storage management software

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

IBM speeds storage retrieval with flash drives

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:15:18 GMT

With an eye toward helping tomorrow's data-deluged organizations, IBM researchers have created a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.

Creating Software-backed iSCSI Targets in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:00:00 GMT

VMware, EMC release new virtual storage, smaller VMAX array

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:02:35 GMT

In conjunction with VMware's release of its vSphere 5 cloud OS, EMC has released virtual storage appliance software and a new, lower-end version of its high-end virtual storage array, VMAX.

Silver Peak releases software-only WAN optimization

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 05:08:35 GMT

Silver Peak Systems released a software-only edition of its WAN optimization product that will allow users and vendors to deploy it on a variety of hardware and hypervisors, from virtualized blade servers to storage area networks.

PMC-Sierra releases 6Gbit/sec SATA/SAS RAID controllers

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:02:38 GMT

PMC-Sierra today released two new entry-level RAID controllers for SATA and SAS hardware that sport 6Gbit/sec throughput.

TMCnet 10-Gigabit Ethernet Week in Review

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:12:53 GMT

Chelsio Communications' recent white paper , titled "Chelsio 10GbE iSCSI: Enabling 'No-Compromise' IP SANs For Enterprise Networks," showing how its 10GbE iSCSI lets customers have what the company calls "No compromise" IP SANs for enterprise networks.

Industry Catching On To Fibre Channel Over Ethernet

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:34:15 GMT

Page 1 of 3 Fibre Channel over Ethernet, a technology for combining Fibre Channel SANs across Ethernet-based networks, has been talked about for years as a low-cost alternative for expanding legacy SANs with a minimum investment in Fibre Channel technology.

Industry Catching On To Fibre Channel Over Ethernet

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Despite the ability of FCoE to converge SAN and LAN traffic into a single network, corporations are moving slowly to adopt the technology.

Do Unified Data Center Products Mean Lock-in?

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:27:46 GMT

Cisco, HP and Oracle are among the vendors pursuing unified storage, server and networking strategies. Will customers win or lose?

Q: How different is performance between iSCSI direct and native iSCSI?

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:21:34 GMT

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Oracle Refreshes Content Management Suite

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:12:46 GMT

The latest version, Content Management Suite 11g, complements the rest of Oracle's Fusion middleware stack.

Cisco Tailors Network Storage for Small Business

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:57:46 GMT

The new Smart Series of storage products includes integrated applications.

NEC Offers Midrange Data Deduplication

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:42:46 GMT

The new HydraStor HS3-210 bring a more affordable, relatively speaking, storage system to the midmarket.

Solid Growth Seen for Health Care IT Sector

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:27:46 GMT

Key contributor to revenue growth will be the government's push to electronically store patients' medical records.

RE: A bit on SANs and system dependencies

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:58:24 GMT

This is a reply on A bit on SANs and system dependencies by Eric Bergen.Lets first start by making a difference between entry level, midrange and high-end SAN's.Entry level:This is basically a bunch of disks with a network connection. The Oracle/Sun/StorageTek 2540 is an example for this category. This storage is aimed at lowcost shared storage.Midrange:This kind of storage generally features replication and more disks than entry level. HP EVA is what comes to mind for this category. This storage is aimed at a good price/performance.High-End:This is mainframe style storage which is made usable for open systems. Hitachi Data Systems VSP is a good example of this category. This category is for extreme performance and reliability.Please make sure to not (mis-)judge High-End SAN by the experiences you had with entry-level storage.Why should we use SAN/NAS storage?SAN's can offer more reliable storage than local storageSAN's offer all kinds of extra services like replication for disaster recovery.SAN's be used to make machines be easy replaceable. (Diskless, Boot from SAN)SAN's offer shared storage which can be used to make cluster setups.SAN's offer server-less backups and snapshots.SAN's offer storage poolingMost SAN's offer online upgrade of firmwareSAN's offer online adding and replacement of disksWhy shouldn't we use SAN/NAS storage?There are many issues which can arise with shared storage. I've encountered many issues with all of the above categories.Multipath setups which fail due to human error or due to firmware issues.Storage becomes slow because 1 machine is hammering the SAN. This bottleneck could arise on the network, the storage controller and on the disks.FC controllers are expensive and so are iSCSI controllers.Using ethernet might require a seperate network or a upgrade of your current network.Using SAN/NAS will require a storage administrator in many cases. Most MySQL setups can offer the same features as a SANUse MySQL (semisync) replication for disaster recovery instead of replication on the SAN level. This offers more efficient replication as statement based (or mixed) replication can be used.Use DRBD for repliation of disks for cluster setups. Or use a NDB Cluster.MySQL Enterprise Backup and XtraBackup can provide you with a low-impact backup wich can be used instead of a server-less backup solution. It could even be a no-impact backup when done on a slave. Using server-free backups with MySQL is not always possible.Using LVM will allow for flexible storage assignment and snapshots, but most filesystems only support growing and do not offer shrinking features. Think of it as the ever-growing ibdata file which happens if you're not using innodb_file_per_table SAN or NASA typical NAS storage array like a NetApp Filer can be accessed using FC nowadays. And most SAN storage vendors do offer NAS heads. So this is not as big of a difference as it once was. SAN is block level storage which uses FC or iSCSI and NAS is file level storage using NFS or CIFS.MySQL can be used on FC, NFS, iSCSI or any other type of storage. But when sync_binlog=1 and innodb_flush_trx_at_commit=1 is used MySQL will do a lot of fsyncs. This will slow down the storage a lot. A local battery backed RAID array will be much quicker as the network roundtrip will be eliminated. (Beware of raid auto learning!)Some virtualization software like VMWare and VirtualBox do offer virtualized disks which can be located on a SAN. Make your virtualization layer is configured correctly to do a proper fsync.Conclusion:There is enough software in the MySQL ecosystem which can bring you SAN-like features with cheap/fast local storage. However if MySQL is not the only software which should be replicated it might be good choice to use a more generic way of managing your storage, this could include a SAN. Using a SAN might allow you to do things like upgrade the firmware of your disks and controllers without doing a failover on your master.Do you use SAN/NAS for MySQL? Why? Why not? Do you use SAN features like replication and/or snapshots?

Blade Servers Begin Migration to FCoE, According to Dell'Oro Group

Wed, 25 May 2011 22:43:52 GMT

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 25, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- A recently published report by Dell'Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, indicates that approximately 7 percent of servers, or 150,000 units, shipped with Fibre Channel over Ethernet capable network connections in ...

Brocade Developing 32-Gigabit Fibre Channel

Wed, 04 May 2011 09:16:54 GMT

Brocade Technologies, which announced 16G bps Fibre Channel products on Monday, is already working on a 32G bps version and expects to have it on the market within three years.

Brocade Intros Complete 16-Gbps Fibre Channel For Cloud Transition

Tue, 03 May 2011 23:14:00 GMT

Brocade introduced a full portfolio of 16-Gbps Fibre Channel products, including a new server switch that allows the configuration of multiple 16-Gbps Fibre Channel and/or 10-Gbps Ethernet ports.

Brocade Doubles Down on 16 Gbps Fibre Channel

Tue, 03 May 2011 23:10:49 GMT

Fibre Channel speeds doubled and yes they still work with FCoE.

BSD Release: FreeNAS 8.0

Tue, 03 May 2011 11:43:55 GMT

Josh Paetzel has announced the release of FreeNAS 8.0, , a FreeBSD-based system providing free Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services: "I'm pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE. FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE supports NFS, CIFS, AFP, FTP and TFTP as file sharing mechanisms. It also supports exporting devices via iSCSI....

Openfiler 2.99 Active/Passive With Corosync, Pacemaker And DRBD

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Openfiler is a Linux based NAS/SAN Application which can deliver storage over nfs/smb/iscsi and ftp. It has a web interface over that you can control these services. This howto is based on the latest version of openfiler at this date, you can...

Cloud Services Drive Data Center Markets

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:02:00 GMT

Research from Infonetics shows that last year was a strong year for data centre network equipment sales, due to a rebound from bare-bones 2009 spending levels and, more importantly, fundamental trends favouring investments in the data centre, such as the explosion of content and traffic, use of virtualization, and increasingly, cloud-based services and architectures.

For 2011, tempering is expected but still robust growth in sales, and the biggest opportunities for vendors is in helping companies grow their data centre infrastructure sustainably, such as through the use of products that dramatically increase price-to-performance or improve management in highly virtualized environments.

Data centre network equipment market highlights

In 2010, the worldwide data centre network equipment market, data centre Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), WAN optimization appliances — jumped more than 50% over 2009, to almost $8 billion
Data centre switches, by far the largest segment, are transitioning from general-purpose to purpose-built equipment, as evidenced by a near-doubling in purpose-built equipment revenue quarter-over-quarter
Cisco leads the data centre Ethernet switching market by far, with over 80% market share
ADC market leader F5 maintains its strong #1 position, although revenue share declined as rival Cisco turned the corner
The WAN optimization market is a 3-horse race between Blue Coat, Cisco, and Riverbed

Enterprise data center survey highlights

North American enterprises plan to increase their data center infrastructure spending by an average of 25% in 2011
Cloud technologies will play a major role in this expansion, and are among the top 3 expected data centre changes
Interest in 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) equals or exceeds interest in 40GE, despite the lack of available products
Fibre Channel is the most used SAN technology, but respondents show strong interest in next generation FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) to streamline their data centre networks

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Permabit extends data dedupe to Linux-based NAS

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 07:09:17 GMT

Deduplication vendor Permabit announced a product aimed at lower-end NAS systems based on Linux servers and the iSCSI protocol.

Cheap storage and sleepless nights (InfoWorld)

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:00:00 GMT

InfoWorld - The low-end storage marketplace is rife with an ever-expanding selection of incredibly cheap, feature-rich NAS devices. With support for RAID, hot-swap disks, CIFS file sharing, iSCSI block-level access, and a multitude of other useful features, these devices are a godsend for small businesses with surging storage needs. But if you try to use these devices for the same roles as their expensive enterprise-class cousins, disappointment may result.

What We're Watching: John Forte on a New iSCSI Management API

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:30:12 GMT

John Forte presents a new iSCSI Management API at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference, September 10-13, 2007.

Sun Datapath Policies for Disks and Disk Arrays

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:59:46 GMT

Datapath policies for disk and disk array implementations are documented for drivers for the Solaris OS, and management applications that issue SCSI, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI commands.

New XPerts Session: Fibre Channel Connectivity, Configuration, and Tuning for the Solaris OS

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:44:46 GMT

Don't miss our Q&A session with Sumit Gupta. Ask him everything you've always wanted to know about using Fibre Channel with the Solaris platform.

CVE-2011-0001 (tgt)

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Double free vulnerability in the iscsi_rx_handler function (usr/iscsi/iscsid.c) in the tgt daemon (tgtd) in Linux SCSI target framework (tgt) before 1.0.14, aka scsi-target-utils, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via unknown vectors related to a buffer overflow during iscsi login. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information.

EMC, Dell Hit New Low in Midrange Storage

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:57:57 GMT

The partners release a new storage machine that handles Fibre Channel and iSCSI for medium-sized companies.

Ethernet, Fibre Channel sales boom in Q4

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:53:15 GMT

Networking and telecom market watcher Dell'Oro Group says that shipments of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel adapters are booming.

Drobo Takes Aim At Small Businesses With New 12-Bay Version

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:16:46 GMT

Over the years we've seen Drobo expand its portfolio of devices from a strictly consumer-oriented lineup to a broader and more business-friendly one. October's DroboPro FS made a beeline for small businesses by mashing up its networking-centric FS series with the 8-drive Pro series. And now they're taking that a step further with the 12-bay version of the same. There's a naming convention change, too, with numbers and everything, something I never thought I'd see Drobo do. The new B1200i denotes the 12 bays it has and the iSCSI interface. What was wrong with "DroboDozen"?

Data Robotics launches Drobo for Business line, new 12-bay SAN option

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:01:00 GMT

Data Robotics has certainly flexed its biz muscle before, but this is nothing short of a full-out assault on the boardroom. Or at least the boardroom's IT closet. The outfit's new Drobo for Business line is being revealed today, with three pieces of hardware making up the initial line. The new trio is primarily aimed at small businesses, but even average consumers in need of some serious at-home storage may find something worth investigating. Though the system designs are obviously built for use in rack-mount arrangements, you'll still find the same BeyondRAID setup that existing Drobo users have grown familiar with. At least initially, the company will be offering an 8-bay file sharing Drobo with remote backup, an 8-bay SAN (iSCSI-attached) Drobo and a 12-bay SAN (also iSCSI-attached) with expanded redundancy features, support for thin provisioning and deprovisioning and new data-aware tiering technology. Those who buy in will also be treated to a bolstered level of DroboCare business support, a refreshed management interface tailor to the needs of SMB, new functionality / redundancy and boosted performance from top to bottom. The former two are available now -- with pricing to start at just north of $2,000 -- while the latter can be reserved as we speak for a Q2 delivery.

Gallery: Data Robotics launches Drobo for Business line

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