Enterprise Storage Snapshots – 4/2/04

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Enterprise Storage Snapshots offers a weekly wrap-up of what’s going on in the storage industry.Here are our storage news highlights for early April: LSI Logic hops on board the 4-Gig Fibre Channel train, STORServer passes the Petabyte milestone with its new S40000 Backup Appliance, VERITAS ships its new Data Lifecycle Manager software, Voltaire and StoreAge team on storage management over InfiniBand, and Addonics’ new technology makes hard disks hot-swappable.



LSI Logic Hops on Board 4-Gig FC Train

Following in the footsteps of firms such as Emulex, Hitachi, and McDATA, LSI Logic has jumped on board the 4-Gig Fibre Channel freight train. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company this week announced it will deliver a 4Gb/s (aka 4-Gig or 4G) Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) product family supporting the Fibre Channel Industry Association’s (FCIA) vote to extend 4Gb/s Fibre Channel from a drive interconnect to HBAs and switched SAN (Storage Area Network) fabrics.



LSI Logic PCI-X HBA

LSI Logic PCI-X HBA


4-Gig FC has caught on quickly as a bridge between current 1-2 Gig systems and the 10-Gig systems of the future. One of 4-Gig’s biggest selling points is that, unlike 10-Gig, it is backward-compatible with 1-2 Gig FC. 4G will also cost about the same as 1-2 Gig systems.

LSI Logic’s 4Gb/s HBAs are anticipated to be available in mid 2004 in single and dual port versions with PCI-X bus interfaces, and will be bundled with the firm’s MyStorage management software, which is designed to help simplify SAN management and reduce SAN installation time.

“With businesses increasingly using Fibre Channel storage area networks and looking ahead to the performance and cost benefits of 4Gb/s technology, LSI Logic is taking all the necessary steps to meet the demands of today’s storage managers,” says Charlie Kraus, director of product management and marketing for the LSI Logic Storage Standard Products HBA Division. “With twice the speed of previous Fibre Channel generations and at nearly the same cost, our new 4Gb/s HBAs will deliver tremendous price/performance value.”

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STORServer Passes Petabyte Milestone

STORServer has extended its enterprise-class line of Backup Appliance solutions with its first product capable of storing over a Petabyte of data.
The Colorado Springs, Colo.-based company claims its new S40000 Backup Appliance is the industry’s highest density backup solution.



STORServer S Series

STORServer S Series


“With the S40000, STORServer Backup Appliances now hold the largest amount of online data available for immediate recovery in the smallest cabinet space,” states STORServer President John Pearring.

The S40000 Backup Appliance’s first frame offers the ability to handle 4 to 90 Terabytes of data, with support for adding supplementary library frames that offer 1300 additional tape cartridge slots per frame.

And as data continues to grow, storage capacity can be increased within a single frame in increments of 100 cartridge slots “on the fly” through CoD, a capacity-on-demand feature that activates additional storage slots by storage license keys, ten cartridges (that is, one TeraPack case) at a time.

The appliance offers support for LTO-2 (Linear-Tape Open) and SAIT-1 (Sony AIT) formats, with support for AIT-4 and SDLT expected to be added later this year.

“The S40000 can increase capacity in one footprint to a total of 6,150 slots — which translates to nearly 600 Terabytes of customer data using STORServer’s default storage management policies,” says John Sorensen, vice president of manufacturing for STORServer. “The capacity can reach nearly 1.5 Petabytes of customer data if more stringent policies are used. Every single file in this massive storage pool is available for recovery at a moment’s notice.”

Additional information is available from the STORServer web site.

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Additional Briefs for 4/2/04 on Page 2:

VERITAS Ships Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0

Voltaire and StoreAge Team on Storage Management over InfiniBand

Addonics Makes Hard Disks Hot-Swappable


Additional Briefs for 4/2/04 on Page 1:

LSI Logic Hops on Board 4-Gig FC Train

STORServer Passes Petabyte Milestone



VERITAS Ships Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0

VERITAS this week released a new software solution designed to help companies comply with the growing data preservation requirements mandated by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

The new VERITAS Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 software helps companies solve their problems of data growth, compliance, data security, data organization, and resource utilization by automating the management of data from cradle to grave according to defined policies.

The software is also designed to leverage a company’s existing investments in VERITAS NetBackup and Backup Exec to address compliance without needing to add new hardware. The integration between applications also makes it possible to index historical backup information from VERITAS NetBackup software — enabling a user, for example, to easily search across potentially terabytes of data spanning multiple years in one search.

Data Lifecycle Manager offers agents for Microsoft Windows NTFS and Microsoft Exchange Server, and provides an architecture that allows interoperability with a variety of applications and archiving utilities to address a wide range of data types.

Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 is shipping now, with pricing set at $30 per user.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Software Debut as Well

The Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 announcement follows on last week’s news that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has introduced integrated high availability and disaster recovery software with capabilities for testing, planning, and validating disaster recovery scenarios, without disrupting customers’ applications.

The new VERITAS Cluster Server 4.0 and VERITAS Volume Replicator 4.0 solutions work together to provide a complete solution for high availability
and disaster recovery with protection against application downtime and data loss.

Cluster Server is an open systems clustering solution designed to minimize both planned and unplanned application and database downtime in heterogeneous environments, while Volume Replicator is a disaster recovery component for data availability at remote sites.

Both VERITAS Cluster Server 4.0 and Volume Replicator 4.0 are available immediately, with pricing starting at $2,995 and $4,495, respectively.

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Voltaire and StoreAge Team on Storage Management over InfiniBand

InfiniBand player Voltaire and storage management software provider StorageAge have partnered to offer a solution that “leverages the high performance capabilities of InfiniBand to enable flexible, scalable SAN storage management, virtualization, and data protection.” The joint solution will combine StoreAge’s Virtualization Manager software with Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based switching solutions that use the iSCSI RDMA protocol to connect InfiniBand clusters to Fibre Channel storage and IP SANs.



Voltaire ISR 9024 InfiniBand Switch Router

Voltaire InfiniBand Switch


Voltaire’s leverage of iSCSI RDMA over 4X (10 Gbps) InfiniBand offers customers a high performance method for connecting hundreds of nodes with access to multiple Fibre Channel storage devices and remote iSCSI storage, while StoreAge’s provisioning and data protection applications hosted on InfiniBand switching solutions make it possible for customers to centrally manage heterogeneous storage subsystems with a common software storage management suite.

The companies tout one of the major benefits of the solution to be the ability to offer transparent storage provision and protection for servers at the InfiniBand switch router level, thereby eliminating the need to install any special software or agents on any servers in the cluster.

“As the demand for InfiniBand solutions continues to grow, it is clear that integration with storage is a necessity,” says David Hill, vice president of storage research at the Aberdeen Group. “This integration of virtualization and data protection on InfiniBand gives customers a scalable, flexible solution for high performance storage.”

The companies will be demonstrating their joint solution at next week’s Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as at next week’s ClusterWorld Conference and Expo in San Jose, California. The demonstrations will run volume management, snapshot, and mirroring capabilities across multiple cluster nodes.

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Addonics Makes Hard Disks Hot-Swappable


Addonics news courtesy of Enterprise IT Planet

What removable storage medium will replace the old, low-capacity floppy disk? You might think of USB flash drives or rewritable CDs or DVDs, but Addonics Technologies thinks bigger — the company’s Combo Hard Drive USIB25 enables any standard 2.5-inch IDE hard disk to be used like a hot-swappable data cartridge.



Addonics Combo Hard Drive USIB25

Addonics USIB25

The USIB25 kit combines an external enclosure with Addonics’ drive cradle that lets users install a hot-swap setup in a standard 3.5-inch desktop or server drive bay. Via a USB 1.1/2.0, FireWire, Serial ATA (SATA), or CardBus connection, the same hard disk can become a mobile storage device for any system that doesn’t have a free drive bay, with data-transfer rates ranging from 1.5MB/sec for USB 1.1 to 150MB/sec for Serial ATA.

The Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, and XP-compatible kit costs $79 with a USB 1.1/2.0 adapter, $89 with Serial ATA or CardBus/PCMCIA support, or $99 with a FireWire interface. The drive enclosure can get its power from the USB or FireWire port, PCMCIA slot, PC power supply, or provided AC adapter.

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