This newsletter is bittersweet. Network World is retiring some of its newsletter at the end of this month. That means that I'll too be leaving a newsletter I've been writing for over seven years. But that's not the end of storage for me.
SANRAD launched its VXL software last week with support for flash memory. The VXL software provides caching support for multiple virtual machines over host-based flash resources. It is deployed as a virtual appliance on the host server and distributes flash capability to applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange.
Pivot3 this week introduced a new storage appliance for video surveillance that supports 64-bit operating systems, VMware Fault Tolerant and integrated management.
Cleversafe, a cloud storage vendor that distributes data through the cloud, announced enhancements to its Cleversafe platform that make it more reliable and scalable for companies that are managing large collections of unstructured data for business analytics.
Acronis announced the release of their new VMware disaster recovery product, vmProtect 6 last week at VMworld 2011. The product is designed for vSphere servers (v4.0 or later) using ESX and ESXi hypervisors. According to Acronis, vmProtect 6 "provides businesses with a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage disaster solution to back up and quickly recover their VMware virtual environments."
Tintri last week announced is second-generation Tintri VMstore appliance, which now provides visibility into virtual machine performance bottlenecks and corrects misalignment problems between the guest file system and storage infrastructure.
Iomega, an EMC company, last week announced a new 12-bay NAS/SAN storage system, the px12-350r, which replaces the current ix12-300r storage system, New features include support for 3TB SATA drives for a 56TB capacity, support for solid state drives drives and 4GB RAM. The system, which uses the EMC LifeLine Linux-based operating system, can be configured as both a NAS and an iSCSI SAN. Features of the px12-350r include:
Medical image archives are growing at an alarming rate and taxing IT with the problem of storing them and being able to access them rapidly for review by healthcare clinicians. Growth is so rampant now that images are digital that SSG-NOW research estimates that there will be approximately 970 million imaging procedures performed in the United States this year - that volume is expected to increase to 1.15 billion by 2014.
Starting with the announcement the prior week by STEC of its new Kronos PCIe Solid State Drive and EnhanceIO caching software and on the same day the announcement Fusion-IO's acquisition of caching software provider IOTurbine, the Flash Memory Summit last week was already buzzing with cache software discussion on its opening day.
Altaro, a maker of backup software for small and mid-sized businesses, announced last week a new version of its backup technology -- Hyper-V Backup. SMBs deploying Hyper-V virtualization have long been looking for data protection solutions that fit their limited budgets and skimpy IT resources. Altaro's Hyper-V Backup, which is easy to install and configure, fits well into the SMB's protection arsenal.
Everything was coming up SSDs last week. Major solid state drive (SSD) manufacturer STEC announced last week that it was entering the PCIe-based SSD fray with an advanced drive that supports both Single-Level Cell and Multi-Level Cell (SLC and MLC) configurations and a caching solution that can greatly increase the performance of servers accessing direct attached or shared storage.
There was big news last week from Fusion-io. For their fourth fiscal quarter of 2011 ending June 30, Fusion-io reported GAAP revenue of $71.7 million, up from $67.3 million in the prior quarter.
Recently, SSG-NOW tested the Drobo B800i, an iSCSI SAN for small and mid-sized businesses. In our limited testing the B800i worked as advertised. It survived the removal of a drive in single-drive protection mode and survived the removal of two drives in dual-drive protection mode.
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 today announced the Symmetrix VMAXe system, a high-end storage system that has a smaller footprint than previous Symms and includes local and remote replication support. Like prior VMAX systems, the VMAXe uses the Virtual Matrix Architecture. Although smaller than the previous VMAX, the VMAXe includes software that eases and speeds installation, configuration and management.
Choosing a cloud storage provider is more difficult than one thinks, complicated by the issues of accountability and responsibility for data latency, availability, corruption and in the most extreme circumstances, data loss.
VMware announced enhancements last week to its VMware vSphere, new versions of vShield 5, vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Director and a new vSphere Storage Appliance.
F5 Networks this week announced new file virtualization appliances for small and mid-sized businesses. The Like F5's other appliances, the ARX1500 and ARX2500 are aimed at virtualizing, managing and migrating data for businesses of all sizes who are suffering from growing amounts of file data.
SEPATON, a vendor of disk-based data protection systems, recently announced the results of its annual SEPATON Data Protection Index, a survey of IT professionals in enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50TB of primary data. The survey, which was conducted during the second quarter of 2011, tabulated results from 168 IT professionals. The survey was intended to elicit concerns about data protection and disaster prevention issues facing enterprise data centers.