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.

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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.

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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.

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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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