Overland Storage is offering price and margin promotions with its new unified NAS and iSCSI SAN disk appliance and new NEO 8000E tape libraries.

www.crn.com | 7/26/10 11:46 PM

QNAP's iSCSI-enabled NAS solution is a perfect match for the growing small office, especially one expanding beyond the internal storage of a VMware or Windows Hyper-V virtualization server.

www.topix.net | 7/22/10 10:10 PM

iSCSI Enterprise Target and tgt Multiple Format String Vulnerabilities www.securityfocus.com | 7/12/10 1:00 AM

A live recording of my LinuxTag 2010 presentation entitled Storage Done Right: Building a Resilient, Distributed, Highly Available Open Source iSCSI SAN is now available from our web site. If you want to find out how to build a complete SAN from 100% open source, do take a look! I do apologize for the less-than-optimal sound quality. I did the recording myself with my laptop mike, so unfortunately there’s quite a bit of clipping in the audio track. I hope my ramblings are still somewhat audible. fghaas.wordpress.com | 7/8/10 4:26 PM

Multiple buffer overflows in the iSNS implementation in isns.c in (1) Linux SCSI target framework (aka tgt or scsi-target-utils) before 1.0.6, (2) iSCSI Enterprise Target (aka iscsitarget or IET) 1.4.20.1 and earlier, and (3) Generic SCSI Target Subsystem for Linux (aka SCST or iscsi-scst) 1.0.1.1 and earlier allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via (a) a long iSCSI Name string in an SCN message or (b) an i... web.nvd.nist.gov | 7/8/10 1:00 AM

iSCSI Enterprise Target Multiple Implementations iSNS Message Stack Buffer Overflow Vulnerability www.securityfocus.com | 7/5/10 1:00 AM

Hewlett-Packard is adopting new Fibre Channel over Ethernet chips from Emulex and QLogic in its latest round of data center systems, giving a much boost to the upcoming suppliers who face competition from entrenched chip designers including Broadcom, Intel and Marvell.



Fibre Channel - Emulex - Hewlett-Packard - QLogic - Broadcom www.eetimes.com | 6/28/10 10:56 PM

Hitachi Data Systems is updating the capabilities for its Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 (AMS) line of products to increase storage density, configuration options, and protocol flexibility. The new features include SAS disks for high-density trays and an expanded capacity for rack mounting, enabling what the company called "extremely large capacities" -- up to a full petabyte on a single floor tile.

For the AMS 2100 and 2300, Hitachi is offering expanded host port options to allow for combined Fibre Channel and iSCSI ports on the same system, or to add more Fibre Channel host ports. The use of iSCSI and Fibre Channel multiprotocol solutions allows customers to protect their storage system investment, Hitachi said, while they might be evaluating a protocol switch.

Reduce Costs, Increase Utilization

The AMS 2000 family of products is a storage platform designed to provide what the company described as flexible, "cost-effective performance" through three models -- the 2100, 2300 and 2500, which differ in capacity, connectivity, performance and price. The company said the AMS 2500 can achieve better than 89,000 IOPS, a SPC-1 benchmark measurement from the Storage Performance Council.

In its announcement, Hitachi pointed to flexible solutions in which customers can start small and then expand the number of host ports as data-center needs grow. Mike Walkey, senior vice president of Hitachi's Global Channels and Solutions, said that, by allowing companies to start small, "this new solution gives our partners the ability to achieve energy efficiency without compromising the reliability, availability or security of their customers' IT infrastructure."

He added that the new capabilities continue to "empower channel partners to reduce their customer costs while increasing asset utilization" in the data center.

The options to increase utilization include a SAS disk option for a high-density expansion tray, and host port expansion slots for AMS 2100 and 2300 controllers....

www.cio-today.com | 6/28/10 8:17 PM

Brocade this week unveiled data center products available from OEM HP that are designed to support next-generation Fibre Channel rollouts anchored to optimizing application performance and scaling virtual machines.

www.topix.net | 6/24/10 10:30 AM

Israeli start-up Anobit Technologies announced its first solid-state drive using multilevel cell NAND, which it said is as reliable as higher-cost single-level cell NAND used in enterprise-class SSDs. www.networkworld.com | 6/15/10 12:24 PM

A Silicon Valley startup is using a processor primarily found in mobile devices for a new kind of cloud-computing server. On Monday, SeaMicro unveiled its Internet-optimized x86 server, based on 512 Intel Atom processors.

The model, SM10000, is described by the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company as the "ultimate rethink of the volume server." It said the server is specifically designed for the workloads and traffic patterns on the Internet, and that its approach "dramatically reduces power draw and footprint without requiring any modifications to existing software."

'Fundamental Server Design Mismatch'

The company said the SM10000's key benefits include using a quarter of the power and taking up a quarter of the space as an equivalent, best-in-class volume server. The new unit can run off-the-shelf operating systems and applications without modification, and has an architecture flexible enough to support any CPU.

Other technology innovations include a patented new CPU I/O virtualization, elimination of 90 percent of the components ordinarily required for virtualization, and a supercomputer-style interconnect fabric linking the 512 mini-motherboards into a single system -- which results in a throughput of 1.28 terabits. The architecture supports any protocol, including Ethernet, fibre channel, or data-center Ethernet. The unit's 512 Atom processors run at 1.6 GHz, with one terabyte of DRAM.

SeaMicro is especially promoting the power savings. The company cited reports from Google to the effect that, if current power requirements continue, the cost of energy for a server will, over its lifetime, surpass the initial purchase cost.

SeaMicro said its approach deals with a "fundamental server design mismatch." Servers, it said, were initially designed to solve a "relatively small number of very hard problems," a situation that was changed by the Internet.

Stealth Mode

In a data center focused on the Internet, it said, the challenge is handling many relatively small, independent tasks -- searches, social networking,...

www.cio-today.com | 6/14/10 8:35 PM

"Actually iSCSI is being phased out." I'd be curious as to what would be replacing it.

www.topix.net | 6/11/10 7:52 PM

Emulex said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire ServerEngines, a a privately held fabless chip vendor, in a cash and stock deal worth about $159 million.



Emulex - Business - Fibre Channel - Fibre Channel over Ethernet - Investing www.eetimes.com | 6/7/10 11:35 PM

A few months ago, I reviewed MySQL Admin Cookbook. Today I am reviewing High Availability MySQL Cookbook from Packt Publishing by Alex Davies. Overall, I found the book to contain some good hidden Gems.The book is a mixture of MySQL Cluster (NDB), Replication schemes, some performance tuning, some minor kernel tweaking, and some more exotic approaches to common High Availability problems. Overall, I found this book very informative and a good read.Now the specifics, the book starts out on NDB and stays focused on this fact for about 60% of the book. The next 20% is on mySQL replication then about 10% of the book is on tweaking kernel, mysql, network settings to get the most out of the system. The last 10% is a mixture of uses of exotic systems such as GFS, Conga, ISCSI and how to use these shared storage techs with mySQL.High Availability MySQL Cookbook, is a good read, and jogged my memory on NDB (since I do not use it on a day-to-day basis). If you are looking for a good reference on how to get an HA system up then this is a good book for you. If you are looking for why to use NDB over mySQL multi-master replication, this is not a book for you. The “why-to-use-this-over-that” is not the scope of the book. The drawbacks and concerns of what technology to use are not a focus of this book, and should not be. It is assumed that the reader knows which direction to go into for the most part or gives the reader enough information to set up and environment to see which way to go.In conclusion, I like this book. I think it is rather concise, and right to the point, which either gets you started into building HA systems or gives you a good reference for an existing HA environment. mysqldba.blogspot.com | 6/7/10 8:07 PM

For testing, Dot Hill sent the CRN Test Center the high-end AssuredSAN 3920R, which includes fully redundant power supplies and controllers, as well as AssuredRemote, Copy and Snap embedded software.

www.crn.com | 6/3/10 5:33 PM

Blog: Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6GB SAS and DAS are not Dumb A$$ Storage

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

With 6G that increases performance as well as connectivity flexibility, more servers are supporting SAS natively while storage system continue to add support for 3.5" and 2.5" small form factor high performance and large capacity SAS drives. Shared SAS DAS storage systems are being deployed for consolidation attached to two or more servers as well as for clustered solutions.

Another area where shared SAS DAS storage is being deployed is in cloud, scale out NAS and bulk storage environments as a price performance alternative to iSCSI or Fibre Channel solutions.

Keep an eye on these and other trends including converged systems, server, storage and networking management along with associated tools.

Related and companion material:
Article: Green and SASy = Energy and Economic, Effective Storage
Article: The Many Faces of SAS: Beyond the DAS Factor

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

read more

soa.sys-con.com | 5/27/10 9:30 AM

Blog: Industry Trends and Perspectives: 6GB SAS and DAS are not Dumb A$$ Storage

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

With 6G that increases performance as well as connectivity flexibility, more servers are supporting SAS natively while storage system continue to add support for 3.5" and 2.5" small form factor high performance and large capacity SAS drives. Shared SAS DAS storage systems are being deployed for consolidation attached to two or more servers as well as for clustered solutions.

Another area where shared SAS DAS storage is being deployed is in cloud, scale out NAS and bulk storage environments as a price performance alternative to iSCSI or Fibre Channel solutions.

Keep an eye on these and other trends including converged systems, server, storage and networking management along with associated tools.

Related and companion material:
Article: Green and SASy = Energy and Economic, Effective Storage
Article: The Many Faces of SAS: Beyond the DAS Factor

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

read more

soa.sys-con.com | 5/27/10 9:30 AM

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageio.com/reports.

Two years ago we read about how the magnetic disk drive would be dead in a couple of years at the hand of flash SSD. Guess what, it is a couple of years later and the magnetic disk drive is far from being dead. Granted high performance Fibre Channel disks will continue to be replaced by high performance, small form factor 2.5" SAS drives along with continued adoption of high capacity SAS and SATA devices.

Likewise, SSD or flash drives continue to be deployed, however outside of iPhone, iPod and other consumer or low end devices, nowhere near the projected or perhaps hoped for level. Rest assured the trend Im seeing and hearing from IT customers is that some will continue to look for places to strategically deploy SSD where possible, practical and affordable, there will continue to be a roll for disk and even tape devices on a go forward basis.

Also watch for more coverage and discussion around the emergence of the Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD) that was discussed about four to five years ago. The HHDD made an appearance and then quietly went away for some time, perhaps more R and D time in the labs while flash SSD garnered the spotlight.

There could be a good opportunity for HHDD technology leveraging the best of both worlds that is continued pricing decreases for disk with larger capacity using smaller yet more affordable amounts of flash in a solution that is transparent to the server or storage controller making for easier integration.

Related and companion material:
Blog: ILM = Has It Losts its Meaning
Blog: SSD and Storage System Performance
Blog: Has SSD put Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) On Endangered Species List
Blog: Optimize Data Storage for Performance and Capacity Efficiency

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz - Author The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

read more

opensource.sys-con.com | 5/27/10 9:30 AM

Thecus, award-winning and a leading manufacturer of NAS, DAS and iSCSI storage products, announces Computer Storage Services as its authorised and official distributor for the entire Thecus product range.

www.topix.net | 5/15/10 3:34 AM

Brian Gallagher, president of EMC's Symmetrix & Virtualization Product Group, sat down with Computerworld at EMC World to explain some details about its new VPLEX synchronous data replication product, including what sets it apart it from rivals. www.networkworld.com | 5/12/10 5:00 PM

DCIG today release a buyers guide for midrange storage arrays that ranks the hardware on user-developed, standardized criteria such as hardware and software sophistication and functionality. www.networkworld.com | 5/11/10 5:00 PM

EMC announced a new software application on Tuesday that improves the performance of its Data Domain appliance by an average of 50% by offloading parts of its de-duplication process to backup servers, thereby freeing up CPU cycles. www.networkworld.com | 5/11/10 5:00 PM

Compellent released a new storage device, the zNAS, which allows both file-based and block-level data to be stored and managed through a single user interface. www.networkworld.com | 4/27/10 5:00 PM

IBM announced new storage features and products today, including data tiering software, higher capacity hard drives and next-generation tape drive technology. www.networkworld.com | 4/21/10 5:00 PM

We all know how important hardware RAID controllers are in today’s data storage performance especially when dealing with large data sets. If we look at the trend from now to couple of years back; they really evolved rapidly with lot of useful features and their usage also grown as most of the new servers by default has one or two controllers built-in (one for internal and another one for external storage array or for redundancy). Few popular RAID controller vendors in the market:  PERC Controllers from DELL Adaptec RAID Controllers 3Ware RAID Controllers (now part of LSI) LSI RAID Controllers Smart Array Controllers from HP Intel RAID Controllers More or less everyone supports all common features and differs in number of ports, protocol support (ISCSI, SATA, SAS, HBA/FB), transfer speed, RAID levels, total disks support, cache size and its management. Controller Cache – Database Workloads For database OLTP workloads (IO bound), controller cache plays a crucial role for overall write or read throughput, depending on how the cache is used. Most RAID controllers are equipped with either 128MB or 256 MB or 512MB cache, and newer controllers like HP Smart Array P812 supports 1GB. Write-back mode improves the writes performance by magnitude as the write request is returned as completed as soon as the data is in the controller cache without actually writing to the disk (that’s why controller needs a BBU, Battery Backup Module so that there is no data loss on power failures) In case if you enable the read ahead from the controller (sometimes good for OLAP workloads or ETL data warehouse, especially adaptive read ahead due to heavy sequential access); then the same cache is used to store the pre-fetched data that can be satisfied later from the cache without hitting the disk. But in case if the database system does read ahead (like InnoDB), then it is better to turn off read ahead from controller to avoid page trashing. For some workloads, the controller cache can also cause negative performance if the cache is not properly utilized by the controller. Missing Cache Management Tools At present, none of the controllers either supports any cache management tools nor exposes how the cache has been actually used, so that one can adjust the cache according to the workloads for improved performance. Some of the missing features: A way to flush the data from cache to disks, so that the systems can be taken for offline maintenance. Right now there is no easy way to flush data from cache to disk; other than some of the controllers will indicate through LED whether data is in the cache or not Way to set the cache threshold in time or %, so that it can start flushing to disk once it meets the threshold value. For example; if you notice big spikes from RRD graphs for every few minutes, then one can adjust the threshold to evenly distribute the load. Cache usage statistics (writes data size, read ahead data size etc ), so that workload can be adjusted to yield much better results Splitting of cache between reads and writes either in size or by %; so that they do not overlap and cause performance issues. For example; one prefers to set 20% for read ahead data and 80% for writes. Only HP Smart Array controller supports this feature at present. As you get more control over the controller cache, the more you can tweak and adjust the workloads to get improved performance. Hopefully one day all vendors will expose more cache management options. venublog.com | 4/16/10 8:16 AM

The IBM BladeCenter with Advanced Management Module (AMM) firmware before bpet50g does not properly perform interrupt sharing for USB and iSCSI, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (management module reboot) via TCP packets with malformed application data. web.nvd.nist.gov | 4/16/10 1:00 AM

The Storage Networking Industry Association has finished a standard that should make it easier for enterprises to move data among public and private storage clouds. www.networkworld.com | 4/12/10 5:00 PM

Multiple format string vulnerabilities in isns.c in (1) Linux SCSI target framework (aka tgt or scsi-target-utils) 1.0.3, 0.9.5, and earlier and (2) iSCSI Enterprise Target (aka iscsitarget) 0.4.16 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (tgtd daemon crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via vectors that involve the isns_attr_query and qry_rsp_handle functions, and are related to (a) client appearance and (b) client disappearance messages. web.nvd.nist.gov | 4/8/10 1:00 AM

This article describes how you can setup and configuration of iSCSI shared disks, and build a sample configuration of true shared disks and SD secondary servers on Ubuntu Linux. By following this procedure, you should be able to customize your own shared disks and SD secondary servers on Ubuntu Linux. You can also easily adapt the instructions for other Linux distributions. RootPrompt.org | 3/26/10 9:13 AM

With its latest 10 Gbit/second chip, the four-port T4, Chelsio Communications Inc. aims to push ahead of a pack of competitors seeking design wins in data center systems expected to converge networking, storage and clustering functions on to Ethernet.



Ethernet - Fibre Channel - Data center - Chelsio Communications - Hardware www.eetimes.com | 3/22/10 4:01 AM

John Forte presents a new iSCSI Management API at the SNIA Storage Developer Conference, September 10-13, 2007. feedproxy.google.com | 3/19/10 9:10 AM

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. feedproxy.google.com | 3/18/10 7:25 PM

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. feedproxy.google.com | 3/18/10 5:10 PM

The virtualization market leader implies anti-competitive behavior in 'dance of the elephants.'

redir.internet.com | 3/11/10 12:19 AM

HP moves into the high-end NAS market with the acquisition of its long-time partner.

redir.internet.com | 3/11/10 12:04 AM

Deploying backup and replication operations over a WAN can have a negative impact on data recovery times and network bandwidth utilization. Storage virtualization technologies, such as virtualized iSCSI SANs and virtual appliances for WAN optimization, can eliminate WAN performance issues and reduce network bandwidth requirements. In their session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Charlie Kraus, Senior Director of Business Development at Certeon, and Dwayne McCoy, IT Manager at Boots and Coots, will present a case study of Boots and Coots, a leading global provider of integrated pressure control services for onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration companies. It will cover their lessons learned and successes in deploying storage virtualization to improve data backup and replication performance and lower business continuity costs.

read more

websphere.sys-con.com | 3/6/10 12:15 AM

Netgear, best known for its SOHO and 'prosumer' storage, is moving upstream with its first rackmount iSCSI appliances.

www.crn.com | 3/5/10 10:20 PM

Open storage systems, including iSCSI SANs, were a bright spot for 2009

The amount of disk storage capacity shipped worldwide grew 33.4% in 2009, with more than 3.3 petabytes worth of capacity sold during the fourth quarter alone. Also, in the fourth quarter, disk storage revenue also grew .2 per cent to $7.3 billion, representing the first increase in external storage systems sales in more than a year, according to a report release today by market research firm IDC.

www.macworld.co.uk | 3/5/10 6:15 PM

Though fewer servers were sold, the research firm points to the trend in virtualization and consolidation.

redir.internet.com | 3/4/10 12:20 AM

The database giant wants a piece of the information lifecycle management action.

redir.internet.com | 3/4/10 12:05 AM

The company debuts a new disk-based backup device for small- and medium-sized businesses.

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 11:50 PM

FalconStor CEO ReiJane Huai says the company's goal is to offer storage customers one-stop shopping for backup technologies.

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 11:35 PM

Summit Energy Services needed to control its storage costs, so it ditched EMC and Veritas for Apple and BakBone.

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 11:20 PM

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

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 11:05 PM

New proposal would give Department of Justice wide discretion over how much and how long ISPs must keep customer data, such as IP addresses.

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 10:50 PM

Analysis: Buying partner Bocada could be an answer to EMC's OEM deal with WysDM, which is gaining traction.

redir.internet.com | 3/3/10 10:35 PM

VMware acquires several management software assets from EMC’s Ionix portfolio, potentially equipping the virtualization vendor with management and automation capabilities for the cloud. www.networkworld.com | 3/2/10 4:00 PM

Nexenta Systems is updating its NexentaStor open-source storage software with in-line deduplication, which increases the amount of data that can be stored on a server by storing it more efficiently, and support for three popular hypervisors. www.networkworld.com | 3/2/10 4:00 PM

ATTO Technology, Inc., a global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, today introduced the FibreConnectTM 8300, a series of high-performance 8Gb/s Fibre Channel switches.

www.topix.net | 2/24/10 8:50 AM

Tandberg Data is continuing to expand beyond its traditional tape storage base with its first NAS appliance that also supports iSCSI targets, as well as a new dedupe software application.

www.crn.com | 2/24/10 12:35 AM