Avago executives said they expect the deal to close in the second quarter of 2014, and the combined company could generate more than $5 billion in annual revenue.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Avago Technologies joins enterprise storage fray with LSI acquisition
Avago Technologies became the new kid on the storage component block this week when it spent $6.6 billion to acquire LSI Corp.
Slack: Decoding common virtual data storage terms
Storage technology has its own language. Marketing departments and product managers invent words and vitiate common phrases to describe how storage technology works and how it advances an organization's goals. Storage virtualization vendors may be guiltier of this than others because the way they decouple hardware and software is often difficult to explain.
Sometimes we get carried away, and many times it's difficult to decipher virtual data storage terms, especially when you are comparing technologies or systems before a big purchasing decision. Just what is a "value-added, impactful solution" anyway?
In this podcast, analyst firm Storage Switzerland LLC's senior analyst Eric Slack breaks down some common virtual data storage terms to help you decode sales and marketing gibberish and determine which technology and product is right for your environment.
Monday, December 9, 2013
OCZ bankruptcy may yet ignite bidding war
Industry experts see solid-state drive (SSD) vendor OCZ Technology Group Inc.'s bankruptcy and pending asset sale to Toshiba as a continuation of the consolidation that has gone on throughout the past year rather than a bad omen for the flash business.
"I don't consider this anything but business as usual," said Arun Taneja, the founder and consulting analyst of the storage industry consulting firm Taneja Group.
Top five solid-state flash storage news stories of 2013
What better to describe 2013 than "The Year of Flash"? This topic generated many of the year's top storage news stories, from advanced technology announcements to market changing acquisitions.
And that trend looks as if it will continue in 2014 as we move beyond the question of "Should I use flash in my data center?" to "Where should I use flash in my data center?" and "What kind of flash should I use?"
Analyzing the almost staggering amount of activity around flash during the past year, we've culled our top five flash story lines from 2013.
Monday, November 25, 2013
LSI releases dual interface flash controller, 12 Gbps SAS cards
LSI Corp. has been busy upgrading its flash product lines, pushing out new SandForce and MegaRAID flash controllers last week.
LSI introduced its SandForce (SF) 3700 series flash controllers and filled out its 12 Gbps Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) MegaRAID product line. The SandForce 3700 provides native support for PCI-Express and 6 Gbps Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) interfaces. The latest MegaRAID products are the SAS 9300 controller cards and the 12 Gbps SAS expanders.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
EMC, NetApp allege startups stole company secrets
Two of the storage startups with large bankrolls will have to spend a big piece of their cash lawsuits rather than business.
EMC Inc. fired a legal salvo at all-flash startup Pure Storage Inc. and NetApp Inc. has sued hybrid storage vendor Nimble Storage Inc. In both cases, the establish vendors allege that former employees who are now employed by the two startups stole trade secrets, customer lists, and solicited other employees in violation of employment agreements.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Violin goes native with Microsoft on all-flash arrays
Violin Memory Inc. this week launched a scale-out memory array platform that allows Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 to run natively on Violin's all-flash storage systems.
Violin claims the native support in-memory will increase performance for customers running Microsoft Hyper-V, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, and the Server Message Block 3.0 NAS Protocol.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Fusion-io bundles ioControl hybrid array with server flash
Fusion-io extended the hybrid flash storage array platform it gained by acquiring NexGen Storage in April, adding a bundle that brings server caching to the array.
The Server Performance Extension (SPX) bundles provide flash from host to storage for ioControl iSCSI arrays. Fusion-io also released ioControl 3.0, an updated version of the software that enables storage quality of service (QoS) on the arrays.
In April 2013, Fusion-io acquired NexGen for $119 million, giving the PCIe flash pioneer its first storage array platform.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Coho Data targets storage scalability issues
Coho Data emerged from stealth mode Tuesday and launched Coho DataStream, its scale-out, object-storage platform that combines its software-controlled switch with PCI Express flash and spinning disk.
Designed to target storage scalability, the Coho DataStream hybrid 3U device includes a 2U storage "micro array" with two 800 GB multi-level cell (MLC) PCI Express (PCIe) cards, six 3 TB spinning disk drives and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports. The third rack unit houses a 52-port 10 GbE switch.
Friday, October 4, 2013
County expands VDI environment with 'flash first' hybrid storage array
When Bartholomew County, Ind. expanded its virtual desktop infrastructure, IT Director Jim Hartsook acquired a Tintri VMstore T540 hybrid storage array that mixes solid-state drives and hard disk drives for better performance and easier management, instead of expanding his legacy HDD array.
Hartsook's department supports more than 455 users in 10 geographically dispersed offices. In the summer of 2011, the department decided to expand its VMware View deployment from a 50-seat mobile training operation to more general use; it now supports around 200 users.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Violin Memory Maestro software can migrate data from disk to flash arrays
Violin Memory Inc. launched software and an appliance this week that enables application acceleration, tiering and data migration between legacy spinning-disk storage arrays and Violin flash storage.
The Maestro Memory Services Software Suite ships on a 2U Violin Force 2510 Memory appliance.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Tegile flash hybrid array accelerates dental school's virtual app
When the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine (UC SDM) found the latency of its newly installed virtual application environment unacceptable, its IT team decided flash was called for and looked into whether it required an all-flash or hybrid array.
The final decision was a hybrid system -- the Tegile Systems Zebi HA2100EP.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Tech Talk: W. Curtis Preston on endpoint backup
In part three of this three-part interview with SearchDataBackup, backup expert W. Curtis Preston, founder of Truth in IT and backupcentral.com, discusses endpoint backup.
Tech Talk: W. Curtis Preston on tape use, virtual server backups
In part two of this three-part interview with SearchDataBackup, backup expert W. Curtis Preston, founder of Truth in IT and backupcentral.com, discusses how tape is being used today and virtual server backups.
TechTalk Video: Curtis Preston on data growth and cloud backup
As the amount of data generated by organizations grows, so too does the need for procedures and infrastructure robust enough to back it up. In this interview with SearchDataBackup news and features writer Todd Erickson, backup expert W. Curtis Preston, founder of Truth in IT and backupcentral.com, discusses data growth, whether cloud backups are enterprise-ready, due-diligence steps you can take to be sure a cloud backup service is right for your organization, and more.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Dell boosts Foglight's virtual storage management support
Dell Inc. updated its Foglight virtualization management platform this week, adding support for more SAN arrays and improved monitoring tools to Foglight for Storage Management.
Along with Foglight for Storage Management, Dell's Foglight platform includes Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition and Foglight for Virtualization Standard Edition. Dell acquired the Foglight platform when it purchased Quest Software for $2.4 billion in June 2012. Dell changed the entire platform's name to Foglight in February.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Skyera plans to pack 500 TB into 1U flash array
Skyera Inc. this week said it would expand its all-solid-state storage array portfolio next year with skyEagle, which will hold 500 terabytes (TB) of raw flash storage in a 1U array.
Skyera claims skyEagle can deliver 20 Gbps throughput and 5 million IOPS, and the product is priced at $1.99 per gigabyte for read-intensive applications.
SkyEagle will be startup Skyera's second all-flash array. The company released the skyHawk array with a mix of 19 nm and 20 nm NAND flash in April 2012. The skyHawk array was priced at $2.99 per gigabyte. Like the skyEagle system, the skyHawk utilizes consumer-grade multi-level cell technology and manages it with its proprietary flash optimization software the company claims can extend the life of flash by 100 times.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Violin pumps up capacity for all-flash array
Violin Memory Inc. this week launched its largest capacity all-flash array and a new Symphony storage management application.
The Violin 6264 Flash Memory array scales to 64 TB -- twice as much as the vendor's previous highest capacity array -- in a 3U box. Violin claimed the 6264 can deliver 750,000 IOPS. The system uses 19-nanometer, multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash from Toshiba.
Friday, August 9, 2013
Smart Storage goes DIMM with memory channel storage
Smart Storage Systems this week released a server-side memory channel storage card using technology from Diablo Technologies Inc.
Smart's ULLtraDIMM flash storage boards sit in the motherboard's dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots and use memory channel lanes for system connections. The vendor claims its cards have much lower and more consistent latency than traditional PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards or SATA and SAS solid-state drive (SSD) connections.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
PernixData virtualizes server-side flash caching
PernixData Inc. this week launched its server-side Flash Virtualization Platform, which allows organizations to share flash caching across clustered servers running VMware.
The Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) lets any server running the software to access flash resources installed on another host in the cluster. FVP installs into the VMware vSphere kernel, uses the same resources as the vSphere hypervisor, and can piggyback on the vMotion virtual network. The software is managed as a tab in vCenter.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Allant speeds big data analytics with Kaminario K2 all-flash storage
When its heavy big data analytics processing required more storage and more performance to run in a timely manner, the Allant Group added an all-flash array to its storage collection.
The Chicago-based marketing performance company processes hundreds of millions of files for its business intelligence and marketing services. To improve extract, transform and load time, it added a Kaminario K2 solid-state disk (SSD) array to its Hewlett-Packard 3PAR and Nimble Storage hybrid flash arrays.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
SolidFire launches its largest all-flash storage array with SF9010
Solid-state array provider SolidFire announced the addition of the SF9010 model to its line of all-flash storage arrays, with 2.5-inch 960 GB Samsung SSDs and an effective price below $3 per GB and $1 per IOPS. The company also announced a $31-million series C round of financing led by Samsung.
A single SF9010 node is a rackmount 1U form factor unit with 256 GB of memory and 9.6 TB of raw all-solid-state drive (SSD) capacity that provides 75,000 IOPS. With SolidFire's in-house thin provisioning and deduplication technologies, and industry standard compression algorithms, Jay Prassl, SolidFire's vice president of marketing, said a single node's effective capacity is close to 34 TB. He said the SF9010 can run in a 100-node cluster, bringing effective capacity to 3.4 PB.
Monday, July 15, 2013
The Fantasy Football Sage: Top 10 Rules for Fantasy Football Newbies (podcast)
What do new fantasy football players need to know once they join a league and start preparing for the draft?
A lot.
Listen to The Fantasy Football Sage's Top 10 Rules for Fantasy Football Newbies on The Football Educator sports talk radio show on Mile High Sports radio in Denver.
Follow The Fantasy Football Sage on The Football Educator sports talk radio show, Sunday mornings from 8:00 am to 10:00 am on Mile High Sports radio -- 93.7 FM/1510 AM. You can stream the show on TheFootballEducator.com and MileHighSports.com.
You can also follow @fanfootballsage on Twitter.
Friday, July 12, 2013
EMC and Western Digital make flash software buys
EMC Corp. and Western Digital Corp. strengthened their solid-state storage portfolios this week by acquiring startups with flash software technology to enhance their hardware products.
EMC signed a definitive agreement to acquire storage pooling software provider ScaleIO Inc. following weeks of speculation. The deal is expected to close this month.
Western Digital acquired VeloBit Inc., which sells server-based caching software for block-based primary storage and solid-state drives (SSDs). VeloBit will be integrated into Western Digital's wholly owned subsidiary HGST Inc. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), which manufactures SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs).
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Coraid EtherDrive helps Emerson College simplify its VM management
When the three-person IT team at Boston-based Emerson College decided to simplify the communications and arts institution's data center, the first thing to go was tape. Fibre Channel was next.
The college replaced its direct-to-tape backup system with a disk-to-disk off-site replication product, according to Frankie Frain, Emerson's manager of network systems. No surprise there, since many IT groups have gone from tape to disk backup.
Switching from Fibre Channel (FC) to Ethernet storage is also not unheard of, although FC is far from being as endangered as tape. But what Emerson did that was different was to move to two Coraid EtherDrive SRX arrays, rather than a more common iSCSI Ethernet storage system, while it consolidated servers with VMware in May 2012.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
LSI Nytro PCIe cards get capacity, feature upgrades
LSI Corp. expanded its Nytro application-acceleration product line this week with a 3.2 TB WarpDrive PCI Express (PCIe) flash card and two new MegaRAID PCIe intelligent flash acceleration and storage cards.
The LSI Nytro application-acceleration product line features PCIe cards with multiple form factors that can connect internally to direct-attached storage or externally to SANs with both SATA and SAS interfaces.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Tips to lower data storage costs: Don't always fall for the new stuff
Last week's Storage Decisions in Chicago provided a fountain of storage tips for storage administrators as experts delivered advice on how to reduce data storage costs when buying and deploying emerging technologies.
Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International, opened the second day of the show with his keynote, "Sharks in the storage pool: 10 ways to cut your storage costs now." A main theme of his presentation was that tape archiving and other, less sexy storage media, including refurbished systems, have a place in a sound, economical storage strategy.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Flash storage arrays take center stage at Storage Decisions
Solid-state storage was a hot topic at the Storage Decisions Conference in Chicago last week, as expert presenters explained its benefits while warning attendees not to go overboard in deploying expensive flash storage arrays.
Presenters suggested instead using flash as a tool in a sound, economical storage strategy that also includes spinning hard disk drives, tape archiving and cloud services.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
HP turns StoreOnce into virtual storage appliance
Hewlett-Packard (HP) today added to its disk and tape backup portfolios with a virtual appliance version of its StoreOnce deduplication technology and a midrange tape library.
The StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) is a software appliance system that runs as a virtual machine (VM) on industry standard hardware. The StoreOnce VSA runs the same software as HP's StoreOnce disk-based dedicated backup hardware appliances, so it includes federated deduplication and cross-family replication.
HP slapped the software-defined storage tag on the VSA.
HP brings out 3PAR all-flash array
Hewlett-Packard (HP) today joined the all-flash storage array parade with a version of its 3PAR StoreServ system configured specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs).
The 3PAR StoreServ 7450 is a scale-out all-flash array that can provide up to 550,000 IOPS with less than 0.7 milliseconds latency, according to HP, and it utilizes the same core architecture found in HP's 3PAR hard disk drive (HDD) arrays.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Whiptail Technologies scales flash array down to SMB
Whiptail Technologies Inc. today added a smaller version of its all-flash array platform for small and medium-sized businesses and branch offices. The WT-1100 is a 1U box that runs on the same Racerunner operating system as Whiptail's midrange Accela and enterprise-level Invicta arrays.
The WT-1100 will be available with 2 TB or 4 TB of multi-level cell, or MLC, flash supplied by Whiptail investor SanDisk Corp.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Pure Storage upgrades FlashArray as competition increases
Pure Storage, which sold all-flash storage systems when it was a niche market, today rolled out a larger, faster FlashArray system with the intention of bringing its products into the mainstream.
Along with the Pure Storage FA 400 series storage controllers, the startup upgraded its Purity operating system and added a cloud support model.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Law firm uses NexGen hybrid array to keep cases moving
Chief Information Officer Rich Wills said he doesn't consider his law firm on the cutting edge of technology. But rapid data growth pushed Keating Muething & Klekamp PLL (KMK) to buy a hybrid flash array from startup NexGen Storage Inc. when traditional hard drive arrays failed to keep up with his IOPS requirements.
"We're a law firm," Wills said. "We don't really do new stuff. Cutting-edge [technology] and law firms do not necessarily exist in the same technology plan."
However, data growth and e-discovery are common in law firms, and that was the case with Cincinnati, Ohio-based KMK.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Micron ships first MLC PCIe flash card
Micron Technology Inc. has expanded its flash product line with its first MLC PCIe Express NAND card, two years after launching its first SLC PCIe flash card.
The P420m multi-level cell (MLC) card should help Micron sales because MLC cards are more commonly deployed than single-level cell (SLC) in the enterprise. MLC cards are cheaper than SLC and software enhancements have improved MLC's reliability and performance. Micron was slow to the MLC market, as most of its major competitors already have MLC PCIe flash cards.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Dell Foglight management tools upgraded, rebranded
Several Dell Foglight applications -- picked up in last year's Quest Software acquisition -- were upgraded and rebranded this week. The upgrades include Foglight for Storage Management and Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition.
The Dell Foglight products were part of the vendor's $2.4 billion acquisition of Quest in July 2012. Quest picked up the virtualization management technology when it acquired vKernel in November 2011. The storage management technology was acquired by Quest when it scooped up the assets and staff of Monosphere Inc. in January 2009.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Kaminario K2 flash array replaces PCIe with SAS SSDs
Kaminario this week launched new versions of its K2 all-flash arrays and operating system, bringing out a modular 1U design while switching from PCI Express flash cards to hot-swappable SAS solid-state drives.
The startup uses commodity hardware and its SPEAR (Scale out Performance and Resilient Architecture) OS to build its Kaminario K2 arrays.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Storage virtualization vendors look beyond VMware support
Although VMware remains the dominant server hypervisor, customers are turning to alternative hypervisors and frequently using more than one. When they do implement a hypervisor that's not from VMware, will they find the same depth of support from storage virtualization vendors?
The June 2012 "Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2012-2016 Forecast" from Framingham, Mass.-based analyst firm IDC pointed to Microsoft's November 2012 release of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 as a significant factor in the 2013 market.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
HGST pumps out 12 Gbps SAS SSDs
Western Digital Corp.'s HGST subsidiary this week launched what it claims are the industry's first 12 Gbps SAS solid-state drives.
The 25 nm Ultrastar drives use multi-level cell NAND flash and range in capacities from 200 GB to 1 TB. HGST is pitching the drives for high-performance applications, such as online banking, big data analytics and cloud computing.
Intel to sell LSI Nytro MegaRAID PCIe flash cards
LSI Corp. and Intel Corp. today expanded their OEM partnership to include the LSI Nytro MegaRAID PCI Express flash card. Intel will sell the server-side flash device with two of its RAID solid-state drive storage cache controllers.
LSI's Nytro MegaRAID PCI Express cards sit in the server PCIe slots to accelerate storage directly attached to the server. Intel previously offered LSI MegaRAID controller cards for SATA, SAS or solid-state application acceleration with RAID-on-chip data protection technology. Nytro MegaRAID cards add on-board NAND flash, SandForce flash storage processors and intelligent caching for faster application acceleration. LSI acquired flash controller chip vendor SandForce in October 2011.
Tintri adds asynchronous replication for virtual machines
Virtual machine-aware storage vendor Tintri Inc. is adding the ability to asynchronously replicate individual virtual machines between its VMstore arrays with version 2.0 of its operating system.
Tintri's ReplicateVM feature builds on its cloning and snapshot capabilities, and allows customers to replicate virtual machines (VMs) to another array or multiple arrays.
Friday, March 29, 2013
Storage Radio: SSD vs. HDD, QLogic and more
This week's edition of Storage Radio focuses on a network-led, server-side flashing product and the solid-state drive versus hard disk drive comparisons many users are making.
Storage Media Group senior news director Dave Raffo and news writer Todd Erickson spoke with associate site editor John Hilliard about solid-state drive (SSD) adoption and hard disk drive (HDD) purchasing decisions, as well as Erickson's story this week on QLogic Corp. and it's server-side-flash cache-sharing technology.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Nimbus adds management, analytics for Gemini all-flash array
All-flash array startup Nimbus Data upgraded its HALO operating system today, adding system analytics, an open application programming interface and a mobile management feature.
The new features are a sign that early all-flash vendors such as Nimbus realize that having solid-state drives (SSDs) in their arrays are not enough to make them all-purpose storage providers. They also must develop management and monitoring features to hold off competition from larger vendors, such as EMC and NetApp, who are coming into the all-flash market.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
QLogic Mt. Rainier FabricCache pools PCIe flash cache across servers
QLogic Corp. today launched the first product based on its Mt. Rainier server-side flash cache-sharing technology. The FabricCache QLE10000 Fibre Channel host bus adapter enables pooling of cache across solid-state PCI Express cards.
QLogic refers to the FabricCache card as a "caching SAN adapter." Clustered servers running FabricCache adapters can access and utilize all of the combined caches in the cluster.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Sanbolic gives Melio clustered file system a distributed architecture
Sanbolic Inc. today launched its Melio 5 clustered file system and volume manager software with a new distributed architecture to turn commodity hardware into scale-out storage systems that take advantage of such flash resources as PCI Express cards and solid-state drives.
Melio 5 is host-based distributed software that creates storage nodes on commodity hardware, then clusters the nodes and provides RAID data protection capabilities for high availability. Melio 5 is designed to scale up to 2,048 nodes or 65,000 storage devices.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Hospital deploys Pure Storage all-flash storage for EHR, VDI
After finding that even a hybrid flash array failed to prevent its most important application from slowing to a crawl during activity spikes, Riverview Hospital switched to an all solid-state array to reduce latency and handle writes faster.
Riverview Hospital is a full-service county hospital in Noblesville, Ind., with 154 beds, 20 off-site facilities and nearly 1,200 employees.
Early this year, the hospital switched to an 11 TB Pure Storage FlashArray to increase the IOPS available for a few critical applications, mainly its Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc.'s Pro electronic healthcare records (EHR) system, a 550-seat VMware Inc. View 4.6 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment, and Citrix Systems Inc. XenApp virtual servers.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Micron brings out 2.5-inch SAS SSD, anticipates decline of SATA SSD
Looking to go where the market appears to be heading, Micron has added a 6 Gbps Serial-Attached SCSI drive to its solid-state storage lineup with the release of the P410m solid-state drive. The 2.5-inch, 7 millimeter SAS drive is available in 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB capacities.
The P410m uses 25 nanometer multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash, and is the Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) version of Micron's P400m SATA interface solid-state drive (SSD). It is Micron's first SAS SSD and uses the company's XPERT performance and reliability technology, which includes on-board power-loss protection, and a redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN), the flash equivalent of a RAID.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Atlantis Computing handles virtual desktops' persistent data in RAM
Atlantis Computing this week launched a version of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software that speeds performance and reduces storage requirements for persistent virtual desktops.
Atlantis ILIO Persistent VDI 4.0 runs as a virtual machine (VM) inside local server memory, and creates and delivers persistent desktops within that server RAM. The ILIO virtual desktops are registered and created as network file system, or NFS, data stores for provisioning by Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenDesktop and VMware Inc.'s View desktop virtualization platforms.
Monday, February 25, 2013
GreenBytes launches virtual appliance to reduce storage for VDI
GreenBytes is rolling out a virtual appliance version of its IO Offload Engine hardware device built to store virtual desktop images more efficiently and transmit them faster.
VIO is software that runs inside VMware Inc.'s ESXi hypervisor. It offloads virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) swap disk and operating system I/O to flash storage, such as PCI Express cards, local solid-state storage disk, or networked storage solid-state storage controllers.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Virident pumps up caching, sharing software for PCIe flash cards
Startup Virident Systems Inc. today launched a software suite to provide high availability, pooling of storage across servers and caching for its PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards.
The FlashMax Connect software suite includes three modules: vHA, vShare and vCache. The product's vHA (high availability) module allows server-side flash synchronous mirroring between two servers. Its vShare module enables remote access to partitioned PCIe flash resources to scale performance and capacity. As for vCache, the module allows the creation of transparent block cache on back-end direct-attached storage (DAS) devices and storage area networks (SANs) for write-back, write-through and write-around caching.
Friday, February 15, 2013
U.S. Army conquers virtualized desktop challenges with hybrid tiers
To give its doctors more time to treat patients, the U.S. Army is converting its desktop health care patient record application system to a virtual desktop infrastructure.
The project takes advantage of tiered storage with RAM, solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard drives. It includes NetApp storage arrays, Atlantis Computing's ILIO Diskless virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) storage optimization software, Hewlett-Packard (HP) blade servers with SSDs, and Citrix Systems' XenDesktop and XenApp software to virtualize desktops and applications.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
VMware software-defined data center bolstered by Virsto acquisition
VMware Inc. characterized its acquisition of storage software startup Virsto Software Corp. this week as a piece of its software-defined data center strategy. Perhaps it is also a move to keep Microsoft at bay now that Hyper-V is gaining recognition as a viable alternative to VMware's hypervisors.
Virsto refers to its software as a "storage hypervisor" because it sets out to virtualize storage the way VMware and other vendors' hypervisors virtualize servers. Virsto consists of a storage software appliance and a service that runs inside the hypervisor on the physical host, and promises to optimize block-storage performance, capacity utilization and provisioning.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Intel re-brands, expands SSD caching software picked up from Nevex
Intel Corp. today released a Linux version of the solid-state caching software it acquired from startup Nevex last year, rebranding the application as Intel Cache Acceleration Software. The software is a companion to Intel solid-state drives and PCI Express cards.
Cache Acceleration Software (CAS) for Linux 2.0 is the first new caching application released by Intel since it acquired Nevex last October. At the time of the acquisition, Nevex had a CacheWorks application for Windows, but the Linux version was still in beta. Intel released CacheWorks 2.0 -- already in the works when the acquisition closed -- last December. That product is now called CAS for Windows 2.0.
Monday, January 28, 2013
STEC launches 2 TB SSD, PCIe card for bulk storage
STEC Inc. today became the first enterprise storage system provider to offer 2-terabyte enterprise solid-state storage devices today, with the introduction of its s1120 PCI Express card and s840 SAS solid-state drive.
The s1120 is a half-height, half-length PCI Express card (PCIe card) based on STEC's proprietary ASIC controller. The company claims its CellCare flash management technology uses advanced digital signal processing, or DSP, and media management techniques to improve flash endurance by up to 13 times. STEC's on-card data protection features include RAID-like Secure Array of Flash Element (SAFE) technology and full power backup.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Storage hypervisor solves city's VM management and performance problem
Moving its physical servers into a VMware vSphere virtualized environment three years ago caused a problem for the city of San Luis Obispo, Calif., IT team. City Network Services Supervisor Miguel Guardado found he constantly needed more spindles for his Dell Compellent storage array to keep up with IOPS requirements.
He eventually solved the problem by letting Virsto Software Corp. VM management software do much of the work, but not until after he made several hardware additions.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tegile hybrid SAN SSD solves contractor's VDI performance issues
Despite his initial skepticism that a change in storage systems would make a difference, Egan Company CIO Jim Nonn said a Tegile Systems Zebi hybrid SAN array significantly improved his sluggish 220-seat virtual desktop infrastructure setup.
Nonn said the switch to the combination solid-state and hard drive system reduced response times and capacity requirements for the Brooklyn Park, Mich.-based construction contractor.
Egan has about 20 computer-aided design (CAD) workers and 200 general knowledge workers using VMware Inc. View 5.1 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software. Nonn said his legacy 50 TB Dell Inc. Compellent storage array wasn't providing the performance his VDI environment required. VMware View Client boot times were taking more than five minutes, and performance was sluggish.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Storage Networking 2012 Products of the Year Finalists
There are only two data networking equipment category finalists in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2012 Products of the Year competition. The networking equipment category covers switches, host bus adapters (HBAs), network interface cards (NICs), security devices, converged network adapters (CNAs) and virtual I/O products. Finalists are listed in alphabetical order.
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