Iomega upgrades SMB NAS with server-class drives, management features

Iomega Corp., today ships its StorCenter PX Server Class Series of SMB NAS devices that support 3 TB SATA drives, solid-state drives (SSDs), as well as software enhancements for management and data protection that the company says is better suited for business use than its SOHO and prosumer systems.

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Scale-out network-attached storage: Options in today’s market

In storage, scale-out systems are becoming a popular option to deal with rapid data growth. File data is growing the fastest, making network-attached storage (NAS) the most popular type of scale-out storage. Clustered NAS systems that fit the “scale-out” tag are targeted at processing heavy applications such as “big data” analytics and large file environments.

Storage vendors differ over the best way to architect a scale-out network-attached storage system, but the largest vendors and many smaller ones have pushed into the market. Most scale-out NAS systems use individual device nodes, which can be commodity servers or proprietary devices. As interest in scale-out systems has increased, well-known storage vendors such as Dell Corp., EMC Corp., Hewlett Packard (HP) Co., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and NetApp Inc. have acquired technology to offer their own scale-out NAS products. IBM OEMs NetApp’s technology while it develops its own.

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EMC Isilon aims to make Hadoop storage ready for enterprise

EMC Corp. is tackling Hadoop storage by integrating the open source “big data” analytics framework with EMC Isilon scale-out NAS.

Today, EMC said its Isilon OneFS 6.5 operating system natively supports the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol. The vendor also released EMC Greenplum HD on Isilon. EMC launched Greenplum HD last May, putting Hadoop on its Greenplum data analytics appliance. Now the Greenplum appliance works with Isilon back-end storage.

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Virtual desktop software aims to help storage VDI performance

It’s no secret that implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can play havoc with storage performance and cost.

Storage system vendors have developed features and entire arrays designed to help solve these problems, but third-party virtual desktop software tools can also help solve problems for organizations planning and implementing a VDI.

Software products designed to boost storage performance or reduce capacity requirements for VDI projects are available in the areas of storage optimization, predeployment analytics, virtual file systems and application management software.

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National Geographic chooses tape archiving to store PBs of content

While many organizations want to eliminate tape, National Geographic Global Media (NG Global) embraces tape archiving to store between 5 and 10 TB of media content every day.

Kyle Knack, NG Global’s director of infrastructure systems, said his company has petabytes of data in his long-term tape archive and requires a highly available tape library to make sure the data is protected, searchable and retrievable.

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