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...

www.cio-today.com | 1/25/12 7:11 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 1/25/12 2:16 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 1/25/12 8:31 AM

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. www.networkworld.com | 1/24/12 11:32 AM

Online database repository provider RainStor unveiled what it is calling the industry's first enterprise-class database that runs natively on Hadoop. www.networkworld.com | 1/18/12 10:55 AM

Dell today announced its first deduplication appliance, along with an upgrade to its Compellent Storage Center management software that includes tighter integration with VMware. www.networkworld.com | 1/11/12 4:32 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 1/10/12 5:53 PM

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

www.topix.net | 12/26/11 10:16 AM

Imation today announced it has acquired deduplication technology from Nine Technology. www.networkworld.com | 12/21/11 3:59 PM

Enterprises can now use TwinStrata's CloudArray to access storage capacity hosted in OpenStack-based clouds, the company said on Tuesday. www.networkworld.com | 12/13/11 5:00 PM

Storage vendor STEC announced a high-performance drive that has three times the endurance capability of previous generation MLC-based solid state drives. www.networkworld.com | 11/30/11 8:04 AM

EMC today announced its first upgrade to the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform, adding metering capabilities and support for Linux. www.networkworld.com | 11/21/11 12:09 PM

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 www.networkworld.com | 11/8/11 6:20 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 11/2/11 10:40 AM

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)

www.topix.net | 11/1/11 1:48 AM

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 ... (more)

www.topix.net | 10/25/11 1:05 PM

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%. www.networkworld.com | 10/25/11 11:15 AM

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. osnews.com | 10/24/11 5:32 PM

Unspecified vulnerability in Oracle Solaris 11 Express allows remote attackers to affect availability, related to iSCSI DataMover (IDM). web.nvd.nist.gov | 10/18/11 3:00 AM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/17/11 6:14 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/17/11 10:24 AM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/12/11 3:47 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/11/11 3:18 PM

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.

www.crn.com | 10/11/11 3:00 PM

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 . www.eetimes.com | 10/11/11 12:27 AM

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

www.topix.net | 10/9/11 12:51 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/5/11 5:26 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 10/4/11 7:38 PM

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. web.nvd.nist.gov | 10/4/11 3:00 AM

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 . www.eetimes.com | 9/29/11 12:57 PM

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

www.fierceenterprisecommunications.com | 9/28/11 4:01 PM

Imation announced it has worked out a deal to buy the assets of IronKey's secure data storage hardware business. www.networkworld.com | 9/21/11 4:29 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 9/13/11 7:05 PM

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.

www.networkworld.com | 9/7/11 9:25 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 9/7/11 1:25 PM

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)

www.topix.net | 9/6/11 11:31 PM

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. www.clusterdb.com | 9/6/11 3:18 PM

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 . www.eetimes.com | 8/30/11 1:09 AM

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. www.networkworld.com | 8/29/11 12:24 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 8/23/11 2:09 AM

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.

www.topix.net | 8/18/11 6:41 PM

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.

www.crn.com | 8/8/11 10:40 PM

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...

www.linux.com | 8/8/11 3:19 PM

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

www.crn.com | 8/5/11 6:27 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 8/2/11 7:15 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 8/1/11 7:20 PM

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. us.rd.yahoo.com | 8/1/11 1:00 PM

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. www.networkworld.com | 7/27/11 2:58 PM

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.

www.networkworld.com | 7/27/11 3:00 AM

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. www.networkworld.com | 7/22/11 7:15 PM