Leading into VMworld, storage vendors make news

Developments of the week in storage

WhipTail Tech announced last Wednesday that its Datacenter XLR8r solid-state storage appliance now supports synchronous and asynchronous high-availability. With two appliances connected via dual 10Gigabit Ethernet, a heartbeat function synchronizes the devices. Data can be written to either appliance at any time. Asynchronous HA allows the replication of two geographically disperse devices. The HA solution is expected to be available in September starting at $15,000.

The hottest virtualization products at VMworld

Coraid also last Wednesday announced the EtherDrive SRX4200, a new SATA, SAS or SSD drive array targeted at high-performance cloud and enterprise data centers. The SRX4200 has performance of as much as 1,800MBps and has multiple 10G Ethernet connections. Each SRX4200 has a maximum capacity of 108TB. In addition, Coraid announced a RESTful management interface for enabling cloud automation and scripting. Coraid's Ethernet SAN runs on Layer 2 Ethernet, eliminating complex layers of legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage. The new SRX4200 is available now.

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WhipTail Tech announced last Wednesday that its Datacenter XLR8r solid-state storage appliance now supports synchronous and asynchronous high-availability. With two appliances connected via dual 10Gigabit Ethernet, a heartbeat function synchronizes the devices. Data can be written to either appliance at any time. Asynchronous HA allows the replication of two geographically disperse devices. The HA solution is expected to be available in September starting at $15,000.

The hottest virtualization products at VMworld

Coraid also last Wednesday announced the EtherDrive SRX4200, a new SATA, SAS or SSD drive array targeted at high-performance cloud and enterprise data centers. The SRX4200 has performance of as much as 1,800MBps and has multiple 10G Ethernet connections. Each SRX4200 has a maximum capacity of 108TB. In addition, Coraid announced a RESTful management interface for enabling cloud automation and scripting. Coraid's Ethernet SAN runs on Layer 2 Ethernet, eliminating complex layers of legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage. The new SRX4200 is available now.

EMC earlier in the week on Tuesday announced new capabilities for its mid-range CLARiiON and Celerra storage platforms. The company announced the new Unisphere management software and added integration with VMware vCenter and the vStorage APIs for Array Integration. EMC also added FCoE capability to the CLARiiON and Celerra and block level compression, which can reduce capacity requirements by as much as 50%. The company also enhanced its FAST Cache performance tool to run twice as fast and invoke full automation.

Cloud.com, a vendor of open source software for private and public clouds, last Tuesday announced that its CloudStack software now supports VMware vSphere 4.1 and VMware vCenter Server. This capability allows companies that have deployed VMware to use the cloud without changing their infrastructure or virtualization tools.

Gluster last Tuesday announced VMStor, a new feature of Gluster storage that simplifies scalable NAS for virtual machines. The software, which first supports VMware, uses Gluster storage to store VM images. With VMStor also comes the ability to do VM-level snapshots and simplified backups. Snapshots are automatic – to restore a VM, simply copy the snapshot to the VM folder and restart the virtual machine. VMStore is integrated with VMware's user interface.

Akorri on Monday announced a new BalancePoint software tool that allows IT organizations to perform automated predictive analysis to rule out outages and network bottlenecks. BalancePoint Predictor for Storage detects issues that can cause application outages. Other new features of Akorri's BalancePoint are support for disk utilization, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere 4.1, NetApp V-series, HP SVSP and HDS Dynamic Provisioning. Disk utilization looks for stressed disks.

FalconStor Software on Tuesday announced FalconStor Network Storage Server SAN Accelerator for VMware View. The SSD-enhanced storage system allows for the backup and recovery of the virtual desktop and allows self-service file recovery for end-users. The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator for VMware View employs snapshots, thin clones, replication and file-level protection to protect an end-user environment.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.