Enterprise Storage Snapshots – 1/30/04

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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 the last week of January: LSI Logic announces plans for an extensive line of SAS products, IXOS and NetApp partner on an Information Lifecycle Management solution, Sony delivers LTO Ultrium 2 media products, CNT envisions easier end-to-end storage management with its new inVSN software, and INLINE introduces its new SATAlite family of storage drive products.



LSI Logic Launches Extensive SAS Product Plans

LSI Logic this week announced “the industry’s most comprehensive Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) product plan.” Based on the company’s Fusion-MPT (Message Passing Technology) architecture and the Gflx/FlexStream design system, LSI Logic’s new LSISAS1064 controller IC and expander will enable a SAS family of Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and RAID storage adapter products aimed at system, server, workstation, and channel markets.

The SAS controler IC (Integrated Circuit) will offer support for the Serial Attached SCSI Protocol (SSP), the Serial ATA Tunneling Protocol (STP), the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol, and the SAS Management Protocol (SMP). The news follows last week’s announcement that LSI Logic has released the industry’s first single-chip SAS controller IC, the LSISAS1064, with silicon verified at 3Gb/s I/O transfer speed direct to SAS prototype drives and at 1.5 Gb/s speed to production Serial ATA (SATA) drives.

With SAS technology, OEMs and end customers gain greater choice and flexibility. SAS technology extends SCSI interface solutions beyond Ultra320 to the next-generation Direct Attach Storage (DAS) server and workstation markets while retaining device-level backward compatibility. Because the SAS physical layer is compatible with SATA, users will be able to populate systems with SAS or SATA hard disk drives, or a combination of the two.

“The Direct Attached Storage (DAS) market, in terms of terabytes, will continue to see healthy growth, as companies such as LSI Logic successfully position SAS as the follow-on technology to parallel SCSI,” said Dave Reinsel, research manager, Hard Disk Drives and Components, IDC. “New technologies must provide both performance enhancements and cost efficiencies, and they must be delivered on time. This will be especially important as the server market transitions from Ultra320 SCSI to SAS.”

The complete line of SAS products is expected to be available later this year. Additional information on LSI Logic’s plans for SAS is available here.

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IXOS and NetApp Partner on ILM

IXOS SOFTWARE AG and Network Appliance have teamed on an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution that tightly integrates IXOS’ Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite with Network Appliance’s SnapLock to provide a scalable, comprehensive platform for archival and retrieval of business-critical information that must remain unaltered.

The solution is designed to offer enterprises an alternative to traditional optical or tape storage by delivering a robust ILM solution capable of handling diverse ECM requirements, from creation through disposal. The joint solution will enable businesses to comply with regulations such as SEC 17a-4, Sarbanes-Oxley, GoB, and Basel II through the creation of non-rewritable, non-erasable data, thereby preventing critical files from being altered or deleted until a specified date.

The breadth of the two offerings will enable enterprise customers to consolidate capabilities under one open ILM platform to realize significant benefits, including faster data search, retrieval, replication, backup and recovery; improved data migration; unlimited scalability; and reduced administrative costs and risks associated with data security and regulatory compliance, according to the companies.

“Many corporations are finding it difficult to meet compliance regulations across their applications infrastructure without a high level of customization,” says Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions and alliances at Network Appliance. “With IXOS, we provide a single, open platform for ILM that is easy to deploy, easy to use, and flexible enough to meet storage requirements across different architectures, protocols, and enterprise applications.”

The integrated solution of IXOS support for NetApp SnapLock is generally available now through both companies. The companies also announced that they will continue to strengthen their partnership through additional joint offerings that are currently in development. [Additional Information]

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Sony Delivers LTO Ultrium 2 Data Cartridges

Sony this week announced that it has started manufacturing and distributing LTO Ultrium 2 media after being qualified to do so by the LTO Consortium, a group composed of IBM , HP , and Certance.

The new Sony LTO Ultrium 2 media cartridges feature a 200GB native storage capacity (400GB compressed) and sustained transfer rates of up to 40 MB/s native and 80 MB/s compressed. The release of the half-inch LTO 2 tape cartridges adds to Sony’s portfolio of more than 20 data media format offerings, including DLT, DTF, Mammoth, SAIT, and Super DLT formats.

Key technologies for Sony’s LTO Ultrium 2 media include CM (cartridge memory), an embedded electronics and interface module that can store and retrieve a cartridge’s historical usage and other information; a direction buffer designed to minimize magnetic interference between tracks; and four data bands, with servo bands at the top of each, for accurate head positioning and error reduction.

“As a leading media developer, we have expertise in all of the latest storage technologies and offer the broadest portfolio of formats to our customers,” says Mack Hattori, director of marketing for data media in Sony Electronics’ Media and Applications Solutions Division. “This is further underscored with the introduction and market delivery of LTO 2 media.”

LTO Ultrium 2 tape cartridges from Sony are currently available for purchase through wholesale distributors, resellers, VARs, and direct marketers nationwide. [Additional Information]

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CNT Envisions Easier End-to-End Storage Management

CNT’s new inVSN family of storage network management software is designed to cut across domains, protocols, and sites to discover and report potential storage networking issues before they become problems.

Facilitating the management of an enterprise’s entire SAN, MAN, and WAN infrastructure, inVSN makes it possible for businesses to see their entire global storage infrastructure in a single view, pro-actively collect network performance data, identify potential problem areas, and correlate those problems back to the affected application, increasing data availability and reducing the time required to diagnose and resolve problems.

“One of the key issues with network management solutions is that they are limited in their ability to see across varying network topologies. Organizations will invest heavily in network management frameworks, only to find that they cannot correlate information across MAN, SAN, WAN, and mainframe networks,” says Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “CNT’s inVSN is unique in its ability to visualize and correlate network information across multiple topologies. No other solution can give users this type of insight to issues across their entire enterprise infrastructure.”

“It doesn’t matter what equipment, protocols, or infrastructure managers are using in their storage network,” said Ed Walsh, vice president of marketing, alliances, and strategy at CNT. “Our new inVSN management software makes it much easier to design, implement, manage, and troubleshoot your entire storage network environment, regardless of where that storage is located.”

The inVSN Open Edition version, which provides active management of Fibre Channel SAN environments that extend across metro or wide area IP and ATM infrastructures, is available immediately, while the Enterprise Edition, which provides robust performance and diagnostic tools for mainframe or mixed environments (ESCON, FC, FICON across IP, ATM, SONET, and dark fiber), is expected to follow in mid-2004. CNT’s professional, remote monitoring, and support services can be included as an optional part of the inVSN solution. [Additional Information]

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INLINE Introduces New SATAlite Product Line

INLINE Corporation has released a new SATAlite family of Serial ATA (SATA) drive storage products. Developed to meet the growing demand for affordable, high-availability, high-performance storage products and solutions, the SATAlite family features four products – the s10, s20, 230, and s30H – all of which offer fast throughput and flexible configuration options in 3U rack-optimized enclosures.

Starting at 1.2 terabytes of capacity and scaling up to 32.8 TB, the SATAlite producs allow customers to easily add modules as needed to meet changing storage demands. Four exclusive INLINE technologies – TruCache, TruMap, TruMask, and TruSwap – assure high-performance, data integrity, minimum or maximum data rates, SAN installation, and continuous service, according to the company.

“We know that failure is not an option when it comes to offering a solution for managing and protecting digital assets, so we designed the SATAlite family to operate non-stop, to be expandable, and to allow for parts to be swapped out without interruption of service,” says John Tibbitts, INLINE Corporation’s CEO.

Additional information on the SATAlite product family is available from the INLINE web site.

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