Channel Strategies for the CIOStorage channel news roundup for Jan 13 to Jan. 19, 2011
Enterprise data storage 2010 Products of the Year finalists
Many will look back on 2010 as the year of big storage acquisitions, but the wheeling and dealing was only part of the story. Data storage vendors turned out a slew of ingenious
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enterprise data storage products to address some of
the key issues users have been grappling with in their storage shops.
From nearly 200 entries, the judges of Storage magazine's and SearchStorage.com's 2010 Products of the Year awards have selected 43 products as finalists. All products are distinguished by their innovation, value and capabilities.
This year's finalists are eligible to win gold, silver or bronze awards. The Products of the Year competition considers products in five data storage product categories: backup and disaster recovery (DR) software and services, backup hardware, disks and disk subsystems, storage management tools and storage networking equipment.
Read more about the 2010 Products of the Year finalists.
EMC combines Clariion, Celerra into VNX unified storage
When EMC Corp. unveils its VNX unified storage platform, it will sharpen the competition with NetApp -- which offers block and file capabilities in its FAS platform -- and kick off a debate over what is truly a unified system.
EMC hasn't briefed media members on the new release, allowing its competitors to frame the debate in the week leading to the launch. NetApp bloggers and executives have taken the opportunity to position themselves as unified pioneers and hail their FAS systems as true unified storage and say EMC is merely following their lead.
But while EMC has been silent, SearchStorage.com has obtained product sheets EMC issued on the VNX models, and gathered more information by talking to industry insiders who have been briefed by EMC and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Read more about unified storage appliances in this article.
Symantec adds FileStore NAS appliance, expands backup appliance family
Symantec Corp. extended its appliance platform with its first FileStore NAS appliance and two additions to its NetBackup appliance family. The new appliances are the FileStore N8300 Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with integrated features that include Enterprise Vault archiving, storage tiering and security, the NetBackup 5200 preloaded with NetBackup 7 and the NetBackp 5020 data deduplication device.
Symantec started down the appliance route last September when it launched the NetBackup 5000 deduplication backup appliance. Symantec's strategy is to offer customers more choice, and to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership by shipping pre-integrated software with hardware, according to Yogesh Agrawal, vice president and general manager of Symantec's FileStore Product Group. The vendor uses standard x86 server hardware from Chinese vendor Huawei for its appliances.
Read about the best NAS systems in this article.
EMC Data Domain goes after long-term data retention with Archiver product
EMC Corp.'s Data Domain data deduplication backup appliances have led a charge to replace tape with disk as the most popular data backup medium. Now Data Domain is taking aim at tape's role as the most popular data archiving medium with the release of the Data Domain Archiver long-term data retention system.
EMC is also refreshing its top-end deduplication target backup devices with faster processors. Its new systems are the DD890 and DD860 single controller systems, plus a new Global Deduplication Array (GDA) based on two clustered DD890 controllers. Also, EMC said the GDA now supports a virtual tape library (VTL) option and all Data Domain systems natively support IBM Power systems using the IBM i operating environment. EMC first launched the GDA last April based on DD880 controllers and DD Boost software.
Read more about data deduplication and data reduction in this tip.
JFK Library digital archive project goes live, requires data protection
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's digital archive that went live online last week is the result of a four-year, $10 million project to digitize hundreds of thousands of documents, audio tapes, film, photos and other artifacts collected in the 50 years since JFK's inauguration. And with millions of documents yet to be digitized, the archiving process is likely to continue for decades.
The Digital Archive Project team from the JFK Foundation uses storage from EMC Corp. and an Iron Mountain disaster recovery (DR) center to archive and protect the data. AT&T provides the web hosting, and Raytheon designed and implemented the system.
The foundation's digital archivist Erica Boudreau said the goal was to make documents that had only been available to visitors of the JFK Library in Boston open to anybody with an Internet connection.
Read more about the JFK Library digital archive project.
High school deploys TwinStrata CloudArray cloud storage gateway
Essex Agricultural and Technical High School in Danvers, Mass., was using removable disk for offsite storage of backup data, but Kyle Jones, technology manager at the school, was not entirely happy with that process. "It was a step in the right direction from where the school was when I started here," he said. "Back then, their idea of offsite storage was to put backup tapes in a vault at a bank about a mile away. I don't think that meets disaster recovery best practices by anyone's standards." Though the removable disk system worked fine, he was looking for something more streamlined that was more suitable from a disaster recovery standpoint.
Jones looked into renting a rack in a data center or collocation facility but the total cost was beyond school's budget. So, he evaluated the school's needs for data protection and in light of budgetary constraints, cloud storage, paired with a cloud storage gateway, made the most sense. After some initial research, he tested cloud gateway products from Nasuni and TwinStrata. These products are designed to present cloud storage as local storage to applications.
Read more about cloud data storage in this article.
Additional storage news
Check out last week's storage channel news roundup.
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