Channel Strategies for the CIOStorage channel news roundup for March 10 to March 16, 2011
Seagate has SLC/MLC flash enterprise solid-state drives
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launched its first home-built enterprise
solid-state drive (SSD) platform, delivering multi-level
cell (MLC) and single-level
cell (SLC) Pulsar SSDs as part of an enterprise drive rollout.
Seagate also added Savvio 2.5-inch 6 Gbps SAS and 4 Gbps Fibre Channel hard drives, as well as 3 TB 3.5-inch SAS and SATA Constellation capacity hard drives. Seagate characterizes the drive launch as including Tier 0 (SSD) for the highest performance, Tier 1 (Savvio) for a balanced load and Tier 2 (Constellation) for capacity.
But the SSD platform is the most significant part of the launch. While it's the market share leader in enterprise drives, Seagate has been late with SSDs. Rival STEC Inc. already has OEM deals with EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and others. Seagate rivals Hitachi GST, Toshiba and smaller companies are also shipping enterprise SSDs. Seagate's only previous enterprise SSDs were SATA drives using Sandforce controllers that had limited shipments to select OEMs.
Read about SSDs vs. HDDs in this tip.
Avere adds global namespace to NAS accelerator appliances
Avere Systems Inc. added a global namespace capability to its FXT Series of tiered NAS accelerator appliances, making it easier to manage data across heterogeneous filers.
Avere's FXT clustered tiered storage devices work as a high-performance cache and reside between the client and heterogeneous NAS filers. Global namespace is part of the 2.0 release of the Avere Operating System. Avere CEO Ron Bianchini said the lack of global namespace complicated management of files between users and filers because administrators had to change mount points when files moved across filers.
The global namespace now gives a single namespace view across all the filers to unify NAS systems from one or more vendors. The global namespace provides a logical abstraction layer between the file system and storage.
Read more about network-attached storage filers in this article.
SonicWall CDP appliances get new data management, dedupe features
SonicWall upgraded its continuous data protection (CDP) appliances last week, adding centralized policy-based data management and client-side data deduplication with the firmware upgrade. SonicWall CDP 6.0 runs on the same hardware as the previous version, but SonicWall executives said the improvements could help the larger systems scale beyond their traditional small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customer base.
The CDP appliances now use the same SonicWall Global Management System (GMS) that manages SonicWall’s line of security appliances.
Ken Dang, product manager for SonicWall’s CDP products, said the GMS integration gives administrators more flexible policies. They can set backup control rules and decide what data can be restored by end users or how many versions of a file to keep, and give users greater control over those features.
Learn more about backup strategies and CDP in this expert podcast.
Data dedupe software comes of age
Data deduplication has turned into one of the most important topics related to data backup and recovery because it offers simplification and cost savings at a relatively modest cost. Dedupe appliances were the big dog for a long time, but dedupe software has come on strong more recently, offering many useful capabilities, often at a lower cost than an appliance.
Perhaps most crucially, just about all backup software products have now integrated deduplication as a feature at this point (Hewlett-Packard Data Protector is a rare exception), making deduplication easily accessible.
Read the full story on data dedupe software and learn more about data deduplication software in this expert video.
Additional storage news
Check out last week’s storage channel news roundup.
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