Cloud Storage, SSDs Take Center Stage at SNW

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Cloud computing and solid state drives (SSDs) are dominating the product announcements at this week’s Storage Networking World conference, with IBM (NYSE: IBM), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and 3PAR (NYSE: PAR) among the vendors making news.

IBM announced today that it’s added SSD support to the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), the company’s storage virtualization offering.

Based on IBM’s Quicksilver technology, SVC 5.0 with solid state can deliver up to 800,000 operations per second, with response times of about a millisecond, nearly a tenth of traditional disk storage, IBM said. SVC support of SSDs can come with as little as one STEC (NASDAQ: STEC) SSD to save on costs.

IBM has also added 8Gbps Fibre Channel and iSCSI support, a tripling of the maximum cache to 24GB per engine, and support for consolidated disaster recovery configurations.

SAN Volume Controller 5.0 will be available November 6, with a starting list price of $40,000.

Sun Microsystems unveiled the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array based on technology from Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL), designed to accelerate Oracle and MySQL database workloads. The 5100 features up to two terabytes of solid-state Flash capacity and 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS performance in a single rack unit that consumes just 300 watts.

Sun also announced the new Sun Storage 6180 Array, with a big boost in price and performance.

3PAR added to its thin provisioning technology with four new software products: Thin Conversion, Thin Persistence, Thin Copy Reclamation and Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation. The new products boost capacity utilization and convert “fat” legacy volumes to more efficient “thin” volumes on the company’s InServ arrays and work to keep the volumes and their copies thin over time.

Hitachi, SNIA Lead Cloud Parade

Hitachi Data Systems led the spate of cloud announcements this week, with the new Hitachi Content Platform that provides “security, reliability and multi-tenancy for cloud infrastructures.”

Miklos Sandorfi, HDS chief strategist for File and Content Services, said in a statement that Hitachi’s “unique approach delivers a dynamic cloud environment that virtualizes all existing storage resources into a single, agile service-oriented infrastructure that reduces storage costs, mitigates risk and is easily managed in the face of changing demands.”

Savvis (NASDAQ: SVVS) and Compellent (NYSE: CML) partnered on Project Spirit, Savvis’ next-generation cloud infrastructure platform, and Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) opened up its Archive Services Platform to application providers through an application programming interface (API).

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced the formation of the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI), which “will coordinate and deliver education efforts for the vendor and user communities and perform market outreach highlighting the virtues of cloud storage.” The effort will complement the technical innovation and development of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG).

SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) unveiled a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator that calculates the total cost of ownership for hard disk and solid state drives. To download the TCO Calculator, visit www.snia.org/forums/sssi/programs/TCOcalc.

SNIA also announced the availability of the Conformance Testing Program (CTP) for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) version 1.4, “making the selection of standards-based storage solutions more straightforward for end users.”

The Storage Performance Council (SPC) announced the public availability of SPC Benchmark 1/Energy (SPC-1/E), its second storage benchmark that includes measurement and reporting of energy use in addition to storage performance. SPC-1/E expands energy use measurement and reporting into larger, more complex storage configurations, complementing SPC-1C/E, which focuses on storage components. Xiotech was the first company to announce results for the new benchmark.

The SCSI Trade Association (STA) unveiled the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Advanced Connectivity Roadmap, which includes a converged Mini-SAS High-Density (HD) standard connector with support for active copper connections up to 20 meters and optical connections up to 100 meters, and 12Gbps SAS is also on the roadmap.

Dedupe Gets Its Due

deduplication also got plenty of attention at SNW, not too surprising in a year where EMC (NYSE: EMC) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) fought over the right to acquire Data Domain.

ExaGrid Systems unveiled the new EX10000E 10TB disk backup server and an upgrade of its GRID software that expands the maximum number of servers in a GRID configuration to ten. The new server and improved software “bring unsurpassed price/performance allowing customers to store a 100TB full backup, plus long term retention, in a single cost-effective GRID-based disk-backup system with data deduplication,” the company stated. Pricing starts at $85,900.

InQuinox launched with a high-performance appliance for Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) NetBackup PureDisk deduplication software.

WhipTail Technologies and Exar’s Hifn partnered to combine deduplication and compression into WhipTail Racerunner SSD appliances, while BakBone Software announced version 8.5 of its flagship NetVault Backup and new disk-based backup and deduplication options with NetVault SmartDisk.

Emulex (NYSE: ELX) expanded SAS and SSD support in its InSpeed Bridging technology and partnered with Ixia (NASDAQ: XXIA) on test solutions for Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and SAN devices.

NEC added an iSCSI model to its D-Series SAN Storage lineup and introduced thin provisioning.

AutoVirt unveiled version 3 of its file virtualization software, with improved storage automation, independent namespaces, and interoperability with Microsoft’s DFS/DFS-R platform.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI) introduced SGI InfiniteStorage NAS and LiveSAN, a set of modular software and hardware tools.

Metalogix Software released version 4.0 of Metalogix Professional Archive Manager for Exchange, with pricing of $15 per mailbox. The offering includes new features for e-mail preservation, e-discovery, e-mail lifecycle management and automatic PST file segmenting for automatic exporting.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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