Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

LOS GATOS, Calif., May 28, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, today announced that it has signed Xdata Corporation as the latest addition to its roster of resellers for the award-winning Swarm™ secure iSCSI appliance product line. Xdata, based in Greenwood Village, CO, is a storage solution specialist with a core competency in business continuance. Using proven methodologies and best practices developed from real life experience, the company designs and implements custom solutions for data storage, backup and recovery, data replication, storage management, SANs, NAS, iSCSI, IP SANs, compliance, and disaster recovery. By signing on to Hifn’s Channel 100 Partner Program for the company’s Swarm products, Xdata Corp. gains access to a broad range of reseller resources, such as training webinars, lead generation, product spiffs, joint customer visits with Hifn storage experts, discounted demo units, public relations and telemarketing support...

igorous testing verified that both implementations will support XenServer 4.1 virtual machines with virtual storage and advanced storage services critical to demanding virtual server environments, such as fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, disaster recovery replication, SANmotion data migration, thin provisioning storage pools and high speed caching for performance acceleration. The momentum continues to build for DataCore virtual SAN solutions delivered in combination with Citrix XenServer environments. Recent customers include Citrix, Sherron Associates, Inc., Digital Control, Integra Pacific Mortgage, Weishardt Group, Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, DocuLegal and Douglas County. “Now more than ever, storage virtualisation is being adopted hand-in-hand with server, desktop and application delivery virtualisation,” said George Teixeira, president and CEO DataCore Software. “Our storage virtualisation software, which can be implemented as a virtual...

LOS GATOS, Calif., April 28, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, will feature its new Unified Storage Bundle, a complete go-to-market secure iSCSI solution for OEMs, the award-winning Swarm, an encrypted iSCSI SAN/NAS appliance and the Express DR data reduction accelerator cards at the Microsoft Management Summit 08, April 28 through May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Booth #111. Attendees are encouraged to stop by the Hifn booth and test drive the Swarm™ iSCSI software. Highlights of the software include storage consolidation, centralized management, remote replication capabilities, advanced data protection and seamless integration with Microsoft Windows environments. The company will also have on hand experts to discuss the role of encryption for compliance. Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is the premier event for Windows Systems Administrators. For nine consecutive years, MMS has built a leading reputation by offering attende...

Parsippany, N.J. – April 28, 2008 — RELDATA, the leading provider of unified storage solutions that deliver iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication from a single virtualized storage platform, today announced YellowFiber is now a customer for RELDATA’s 9240 unified storage solutions. YellowFiber is a hosting company that provides managed high availability clusters for ebusiness and web infrastructures. “Previously we had a series of disjointed storage islands,” explains Zak Thompson, CEO of YellowFiber. “Storage pools were connected to different machines in the same cluster for load balancing and redundancy, and it became painfully complex to keep these in sync. This complexity was compounded by a lack of scalability in the file system. As the capacity requirements of some clusters grew, we were forced to constantly break out applications onto a new file server.” Faced with individual customers demanding 10 to 50GB of storage growth per week and an overall demand for as much as 900GB of new...

LeftHand Networks, a provider of iSCSI SANs, announced that Anite, an IT services and system integration company, has deployed LeftHand Networks' Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) in two of its data centers using a VMware virtual server environment. Based in the United Kingdom, Anite is an international software and solutions company whose primary business is the provision of industry-specific solutions for wireless telecoms, public sector and travel markets. "Historically Anite has had little islands of IT," said Jeremy Moss, group IT director for Anite. "We run some fairly standard business applications, including customer support systems." Link

It is cute to see this title though: DataCore Announces Portable, Feature-Packed VM Starter SAN That Runs on VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, and Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platforms, Hardware Servers and Blades Actually reading: Folks we support anything, even your grandma's external disk with a ganny-SAN ;-). But seriously I don't blame these guys at all, the industry is so totally confused that complementary vendors want to do everyone at once! Market Impact No other vendor makes embracing storage virtualization as easy and as risk-free as DataCore does, period. Many vendors are talking about ‘ one off ’ virtual appliances. DataCore software is portable – offering the best out-of-the-box experience on the market, whereby any DataCore solution runs on any physical or virtual hardware of choice: hardware servers, blade servers or VMs. Users can mix-and-match any hardware in their deployments. Moreov...

This blog post from LeftHand Networks gets me thinking: Fibre Channel is to iSCSI what Beta is to BlueRay. The Fibre Channel guys are running scared. Customers see the tremendous savings offered by iSCSI, not only in acquisition, training, and operational costs, but savings from advanced virtualization technologies like thin provisioning, resource aggregation and high availability; It’s about doing more with less and solutions that allow storage to be managed independently of the hardware in the same manner as the new matriarch of storage--VMware. Fibre Channel vendors have seen the writing on the wall and are now trying to save their ship by hopping on the Ethernet bandwagon. The technology is called FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet.) Catchy name, huh? Which presumably will allow application severs to connect to Fibre Channel SANs over standard Ethernet, helping reduce the need for costly HBAs and switches. The hyped advantage is the elimination of TCP/IP overhead. Will iSCSI ki...

“A total virtualization environment across servers and storage really gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of what we can do,” K.C. Roestenberg, director, business IT shared services, County of Orange. The Orange County Data Center (OCDC) hosts many different servers – both virtual and physical – using a combination of VMware and physical hosts that support other outlying agencies within the County of Orange. Before DataCore was added to virtualize, consolidate and mange the SANs, OCDC had two HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) storing their data and they had just finished purchasing their third EVA – supporting their third separate storage area network. Bottom-line: OCDC had three business objectives for deploying DataCore’s SANsymphony™: 1) Consolidating multiple SANs for ease of management and improved utilization; 2) Alleviating data migration issues from SAN-to-SAN and making that more efficient; 3) The third reason for DataCore’s adoption had to do with disaster recovery. Th...

DataCore Software, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization SAN solutions, today announced that OSI International Foods GmbH, a large manufacturer of convenience food and major supplier for McDonald's, Kraft, Tesco, Metro and Hard Rock Cafe, has chosen DataCore's SANmelody(TM) disk server software for its European IT headquarters located in Germany. DataCore's partner, KUMAtronik has implemented the SME solution to increase performance and optimize storage capacity utilization for OSI's business critical ERP systems. Following this successful implementation, the company has recommended installation of SANmelody for storage projects across OSI's subsidiaries worldwide. Link

StoneFly, Inc., a leading supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc. (DNF), today introduced two new IP SANs as well as upgrades to its existing products. The Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) 801 is a new system designed for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in need of transitioning from direct attached storage to an entry-level IP SAN, while the High-Availability Storage Concentrator (HSC) 1601 delivers the industry's highest levels of redundancy to organizations in need of maximum data protection. Now available, the new ISC-801 is an easy-to-deploy "IP SAN-in-a-Box" that provides everything customers need for enterprise-class SAN storage, at an entry-level price. It installs in minutes and features centralized storage management and integrated business continuity, with support for eight drives and up to 4TB of storage. "The ISC-801 gives growing companies the perfect intr...

And rightly so, why on earth would you spend huge amounts of money to put all those multiple copies of VMs (I know, developers, they are ALL important) on that expensive storage system! IT business services provider T-Systems, for example, made the architectural decision to go with NFS a couple of years ago when it was designing its VMware-based Dynamic Services managed hosting platform. "We really felt that networked NFS was the best option," said Dr. Gregory Smith, Dynamic Services director. "SAN [storage area network] has the advantage in terms of throughput, but in terms of flexibility and management, NFS is much better." As an industry-standard shared file system, NFS volumes are easy to mount and dismount, are supported by any number of clients, and are well understood by IT staffers. Link

The "day-in-the-life" scenario at Cashman prior to DataCore was one in which those in charge of IT infrastructure saw that things were growing too large for the data pool and knew that there was a need to re-allocate some storage that was going unused on any given machine to other machines. The tipping point for the SANmelody selection came after the company had investigated using a VMware ESX server environment. "While researching how to go with ESX, we started looking at storage area networks (SANs)," said Amira. "When doing so, we realized that all the storage area network products we were exposed to were products you had to buy from scratch -- at a cost of, on average, $40,000 for 10 terabytes." With one-hundred terabytes of direct attached storage that he was not looking to replace (just better utilize), Amira and his team wanted to go with something that supported VMware and a VMotion environment. It was then that they started looking into iSCSI stor...

IBM and VMware announced that IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is the first storage virtualization product to be fully certified with VMware as part of its new storage virtualization certification program launched last week. SVC has recently been added to VMware's hardware compatibility list with support for Windows guest operating systems, QLogic host bus adapters (HBA) and VMFS. Link

To exploit the "peak" years of double-digit Fibre Channel growth -- which Villars projects will continue through 2009 -- switch makers are going to have to enhance the ability of users to work with virtual technologies. "Part of the value of server virtualization is the whole mobility angle," he said, "so that [you] can take an application running on one server and then -- because of a failure or planned downtime or performance change -- nondisruptively migrate it to another server." Villars recommends that storage administrators make sure that network rules and SAN connectivity rules agree with each other. To date, Villars said, "that's proven to be one of the big disconnects -- VMware wanting the network to look one way, and the people running the SAN wanting to configure it in a different way, because it gives them some assurances about protection or load-balancing." CW Link

Who You Calling SCSI? We can forgive some omissions because The MD3000i does strike an even balance between features and price. Automated I/O path failover, automatic array failure detection and rebuild using a standby hot spare are available out of the box. Premium features like snapshot technology and volume-copy functionality can be purchased as software upgrades. In the lab, we were very impressed with the simplicity of Dell's MD Storage Manager application. The Java-based management GUI was very simple to navigate and performed as quickly as a well-written client/server application. As for setup, we managed to rack and configure the device and get a server connected to an array in just one hour. We opted to read the manual, but if you're pressed for time, Dell offers a Remote Implementation Service in which a technician connects to your management station via WebEx and guides you through configuration of your array and host servers. Best of all, RIS is free. Who ne...

SANs built using LeftHand’s SAN/iQ software are able to distribute and protect data across a cluster of industry-standard storage servers, LeftHand Networks said. The company’s patented architecture increases data availability, allows users to start small and grow the SAN seamlessly, and helps to simplify management. LeftHand SAN is ideal for server consolidation and virtualization projects, Microsoft Application environments, and disaster recovery solutions, the company said. The combined solution offers customers highly available and completely scalable virtualized server and storage environments that enable a number of powerful capabilities, Virtual Iron said. Virtual Iron enables the provisioning of new virtual machines to meet increasing application demands in the data center, or to create new environments for software development and testing, Virtual Iron said. SAN/iQ supports these capabilities by allowing users to clone storage volumes almost instantaneously, and with minimal u...

Server virtualization solutions allow enterprises to aggregate server workloads within their physical server platform and improve agility of virtual machine migration across physical systems. Platform virtualization solutions create new economy of scale and dynamic configuration challenges for storage area network (SAN) integration.This session details key integration and management dimensions around the core Windows operating system, Virtual Server, future Windows virtualization, and Virtual Machine Manager. The ANSI T11 N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) standard extends a powerful complementary capability to associate multiple virtual N_Ports to a single hardware-based N_Port over the same FC switch connection. Through this standard the SAN-managed controls around zones and masks can be coordinated and specific SAN resources mapped to different virtual machine workloads while maintaining SAN best practices. Microsoft will discuss key platform virtualization design criteria and fundamen...

This user/poster seems to have discovered some issues with this... So you just upgraded the VMware's VI3 (ESX Server 3), you've linked the host to a 50TB SAN, and everything is sunshine and roses, right? Perhaps not. In the past, VMware ESX has fully supported and operated with concatenated LUNS on a single volume store, adding additional LUNs as "extents" to the original assigned space. This is all and well until VI3 loses a LUN, and your redundancy is shot. Hitachi calls it "stepping on a LUN," VMware dances around the issue by strongly recommending against multiple extents while still claiming to support them... Read the rest and do comment !

VW seems to have succeeded in building a Virtualized SAN with SANmelody from Datacore. VFS UK runs two data centres in Milton Keynes to support internal staff and provide application support to the UK retailer networks. In compliance with the Financial Services Act, the organisation ran two mirrored data-recovery sites to support the 100 servers comprising its storage network. The organisation has installed a solution from storage specialist Datacore, called SANmelody, which automatically manages the space allocation in each server, balancing the storage load and reducing the chance of failure. Check out the rest here .

Introduction of 64-bit, multi-core processors, PCI Express host bus and improved memory architectures have greatly benefited server consolidation and its rapid adoption in the virtualized datacenter. In the storage networking space, the evolution of consolidated server deployments and the move to 4Gb Fibre Channel switches and storage arrays is demanding a need for higher scalability in server connectivity to storage. To meet these ever-growing demands in consolidated and virtualized environments, it is imperative that enterprise IT managers deploy a scalable, high performance HBA architecture; an HBA architecture that can address the demands placed by multiple virtual machines (VMs) or guest OSes, and applications in virtualized environments running simultaneously on a single physical server. Go get this whitepaper from Qlogic.