Data protection remains very much on the minds of storage vendors, if announcements at this week’s Storage Networking World are any indication.
Dell and EMC combined to use a Microsoft Exchange 2003 messaging solution to demonstrate the Dell Business Continuity solution replicating data in real time between two Dell/EMC midrange storage systems across the Atlantic Ocean. Within minutes of an application failure in Limerick, asynchronous mirroring enabled the recovery location in Central Texas to be running and fully processing transactions. The solution costs less than $300,000.
Also at the conference, CNT announced the availability of its UltraNet Replication Appliance (URA), a suite of SAN-based local and remote heterogeneous data replication services over unlimited distances. WilTel teamed with Nortel and EMC to offer StorageXtend, a SONET-based business continuity, disaster recovery, server and storage consolidation service, in more than 100 cities. Kashya unveiled its KBX5000 data protection and system-wide disaster recovery appliance for SAN environments, and iQstor announced a SATA storage system that delivers long-distance asynchronous replication using iSCSI for less than $10,000.
Mellanox, Asigra Head Backup News
Mellanox Technologies unveiled a native InfiniBand storage platform that the InfiniBand chip leader said can significantly cut Oracle Database backup and restore costs and gain in operational time compared to midrange Fibre Channel storage solutions.
Mellanox tested Oracle Database 10g backup and restore operations on the MTD1000, a native InfiniBand storage development platform that is based on commodity server components and serial ATA (SATA) disk drives. Mellanox conducted a series of Oracle database backup and recovery operations using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM).
The native InfiniBand storage solution delivers roughly 780MB/s throughput to the disks — more than four times the measured performance of 2Gb/s Fibre Channel platforms, slicing backup and restore times in half. The development platform is available to OEMs and value added resellers for $11,999 and comes standard with 1.1 TB of storage and InfiniBand target driver software.
Mellanox took the wraps off the MTD1000, a native InfiniBand storage platform that the company says cuts backup and restore times in half. |
Asigra announced its BLM and Televaulting ILM-aware backup and recovery software package, which the company said is the only one to deliver information lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities across multiple corporate sites. With the innovations, Asigra said it reduces the cost and complexity of data storage by automatically moving data to the most appropriate storage media based on predetermined policies of accessibility, security and long-term storage. Asigra BLM has a starting price of $24,000. Televaulting ILM-aware is built into Asigra Televaulting backup software.
StoneFly Networks introduced high-availability enhancements to its StoneFly Backup Advantage, which the company said make it the first fully integrated IP SAN-based disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solution that provides advanced data protection, compliance and storage management capabilities. StoneFly Backup Advantage is a complete data protection solution that includes StoneFly’s IP SAN with storage provisioning, SBA backup and recovery software, and 1TB of storage capacity with pricing starting at $29,795.
SEPATON announced its new Synthetic Full Backup Application built on the company’s ContentAware data protection platform, with pricing starting at $3,000 and based upon the total usable capacity of the S2100-ES Virtual Tape Library. EVault introduced EVault Continuum Server, a high-availability storage solution designed to provide continuous data protection and quick recovery of business-critical database applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. Pricing for the fully bundled software and hardware solution starts at $11,428.
Isilon Systems’ third-generation OneFS distributed file system was released, including new advanced data protection technologies called FlexProtect-AP that can rebuild a failed 250GB disk in as little as one hour. Entry level three-node Isilon IQ clusters start at $49,950, and the company says complete system pricing that includes all software and hardware costs less than 1.5 cents per megabyte.
Bocada announced the release of the next generation of its BackupReport enterprise software, which the company said enables consistent, standards-based management of complex, distributed data protection environments, regardless of the underlying technology or system architecture. Neartek announced the latest version of its Virtual Storage Engine virtual tape solution, with performance up to 38TB per hour.
And Symantec LiveState Recovery Advanced Server 3.0, Symantec’s disk-based system and data recovery solution, was validated as interoperable with NetApp enterprise IP SAN storage systems, which the company said allows Windows customers to recover data stored on NetApp iSCSI volumes in a fraction of the time required for alternative tape-based recovery solutions.
Broadcom, Intransa Also Make Headlines
In other conference news, Broadcom unveiled a number of products, including industry-first SATA RAID-on-a Chip (ROC) and a single-chip I/O controller for HyperTransport devices.
Intransa announced the availability of the Intransa IP5500 SAN solution, which the company bills as the “only IP SAN solution designed with a patented, fully modular architecture to allow on the fly enhancements to storage capacity, performance and availability.” The Intransa IP5500 has a list price of $60,000 for a 2TB system which includes hardware, software and one year of support. Pricing for the IP5500 4TB storage system begins at $66,000.
Troika Networks and Agere Systems announced Troika’s next generation of ReadyPath technology, a hardware-based acceleration technology that extends functionality and increases performance of data protection and storage management solutions and storage devices for less. Both Troika and Agere will offer new products based on the ReadyPath technology next year. Troika also partnered with StoreAge and VMware to develop a storage and server virtualization offering.
And PyX Technologies claimed the first iSCSI thin client initiator and target storage management software featuring Error Recovery Level Two (ERL2), the highest-possible level of block level data transmission reliability over IP networks.