Storage Vendors Descend on SNW

Storage Networking World kicked off in San Diego today with high-profile and lesser known companies touting products that help businesses sock away data while meeting compliance regulations.

EMC introduced new versions of its e-mail and file system archiving software to make it easier for companies to meet internal and federal governance rules.

EMC EmailXtender 4.8 lets corporate employees categorize e-mails as important and deposit them in the EmailXtender archive for a set retention period.

This feature allows corporations to comply with attorneys’ requests for certain files for legal discovery and reduces the amount of non-business messages in the archive, said Kelly Ferguson, senior product marketing manager.

“With the struggle that companies have with the volume of electronic information, the changes in discovery requirements, the constant addition of regulations for data preservation and records keeping, governance is pretty hot for a lot of companies,” Ferguson said.

Moreover, EmailXtender 4.8 lets administrators track each message from the time the mail router receives it to the moment EmailXtender either archives or excludes it. This lets administrators see what rules caused a specific message to be collected or excluded from the archive.

Available May 21, EmailXtender 4.8 also provides full support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

EMC’s new DiskXtender 6.2 for Windows file system archiving software includes new search module that enables file index and search across drives on servers, direct attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SANs).

This allows IT managers to locate both active and archived files for legal discovery. Moreover, users can configure the search module to search a single index or a collection of indexes.

Also, DiskXtender lets managers do snapshots of a DiskXtender managed drive using Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Services (VSS). With this feature, backup applications such as EMC’s NetWorker may be used to back up from a snapshot without restoring files previously archived through DiskXtender.

Big Blue Unveils New Arrays

EMC’s storage rival IBM also came to SNW armed with new configurations of its System Storage DS3200 and DS3400 disk arrays for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Management components such as controllers, cables and host bus adapters (HBA) will now be bundled into specific configurations of the DS3200 and DS3400 to make it easier for SMB customers to get up and running in a quick fashion.

The newly configured IBM System Storage DS3000 products are available now, starting at $4,200.

Verari Systems, which is gunning for IBM and HP in the bladed computing and storage market, upgraded its BladeRack 2 VB5150 Storage Subsystem with more capacity, performance and functionality.

The VB5150 includes the company’s new VB1056S disk blade for a 17 percent boost in drive density per VB5150. And, because the VB1056S contains 12 drives per blade and 48 drives per subsystem, BladeRack 2 storage capacities now range from 6 terabytes up to 576TB using 500GB, 750GB or 1TB SATAII hard-disk drives.

The new VB5150 also features a spruced up VB1150 Storage Controller Blade to up performance by 38 percent, delivering higher throughput and increased capacity.

HP, Intel Among Other Newsmakers

Also SNW, HP announced a new version of its storage resource management (SRM) software that lets midsize businesses automate complex and manual tasks and improves the utilization of IT resources through a single Web-based interface. Pricing is $37,000 for 150 Fibre Channel ports, compared to $50,000 for the Enterprise Edition.

HP said the software is the first product rollout from HP’s recently formed Enterprise Storage and Server Software business unit. HP Storage Essentials Standard Edition offers a more cost-effective solution that better equips companies to deal with constant business change and the exponential growth of their data, the company said.

Intel unveiled what it claims is the first 2U, 12-drive, integrated quad-core storage server, the Intel Storage Server SSR212MC2, for $2,800 with no RAID controller and $3,600 with the Intel SRCSAS144e RAID Controller.

Sun Microsystems took the wraps off the sub-$10,000 Sun StorageTek ST2500 Low Cost Array (LCA), Sun’s first serial-attached SCSI (SAS) storage array and newest member of the modular disk storage family that works with the Solaris Operating System and other heterogeneous data center environments. Sun also added partitioning functionality to its StorageTek SL8500 enterprise tape library and secure encryption to its Sun StorageTek T10000 FICON tape drive.

Arkeia Software previewed EdgeFort, an all-in-one, appliance-based, federated data protection solution for remote offices and mid-sized businesses. The EdgeFort appliance is integrated with Arkeia’s network backup software and a complete backup hardware system, including disk and an integrated tape drive.

ONStor, meanwhile, unveiled global namespace (GNS) technology in version 3.0 of its Pantera Clustered NAS Systems and Bobcat Clustered NAS Gateways.

Data protection software maker WysDM Software inked an OEM agreement with data recovery software specialist Double-Take Software. The vendors will forge recovery management with predictive analysis, real-time data protection, and detailed reporting capabilities.

And in management standards, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Eclipse Foundation announced that the two organizations will increase their collaboration around open storage management standards such as the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and the Eclipse Aperi open source project.

Already, the Aperi code version 0.1 has been tested and passed the SNIA Conformance Testing Program for both disk array discovery and disk array management and is now conformant to SMI-S version 1.1.0.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com, with additional reporting by Paul Shread of Enterprise Storage Forum