Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Boston , December 16, 2008 – Seanodes, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced that cloud services provider Aenigma has developed a new multi-tiered storage infrastructure backed by Exanodes™ software to increase the reliability and performance of its High Availability Application Hosting Platform for as little as one-twentieth the cost of a similarly configured Fibre Channel SAN. Delivering Software as a Service Aenigma provides an alternative to on-premise software deployment offering all the benefits and advantages of high availability and enterprise-grade business tools such as Microsoft Project Server, Office Sharepoint Server and Exchange Server on demand, at a competitive price. As a member of the VMware Service Provider Program Aenigma provides companies with on-demand Virtual Infrastructure, which can support any operating system, Windows or Linux and any compatible software stack they need. This “pay as you go” model r...

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STORServer introduced an upgrade to its STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup, designed to increase usability and performance. Highlights of these upgrades include a new license server and online help system. Introduced in September 2007, the STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup integrates IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and VMware Consolidated Backup. To address the challenges of protecting VMware environments, the Agent improves the usability of Consolidated Backup by providing centralized management, reporting and scheduling of virtual machine backups and eliminates cumbersome pre- and post-processing integration scripts. The Agent includes an easy to use graphical user interface for the management and reporting of virtual machine backups; a scheduler; and a database containing client configurations, logs and scheduling information. Source

Dave Graham, a Cloud Computing member at the Google Group has been working on some neat COS (Cloud Optimized Storage) mindmap. Check it out here , he isn't done yet but has spent good amount of time there. So I thought, we do and talk about signaturing on storage level, how about signaturing the whole Data Center? With Feds and Governmental interventionism looking rather inevitable, we would rather work on some pretty much well signatured data centers! This is my first attempt to start on the Xing Mindmap stuff, I guess it will keep me busy the coming days. So say hello to the rather embroyonic version of " Cloud SIGnature Framework" The final draft will be posted on the Xmind site

So, Big Blue cranked up its PR machine, and pulled some statistics out of its, er, sales database and wanted everyone to know that more than 5,000 companies worldwide have replaced iron from HP, Sun Microsystems, and EMC since 2004 and moved to them to IBM alternatives. Breaking this down a little, IBM is claiming that in less than one year, more than 150 customers have moved onto its System z mainframes from HP and Sun platforms. When pressed for more details about where these customers were coming from, IBM's PR people said they would get me some answers, but all I got was static. And since the inception of the so-called Migration Factory that IBM set up "several years ago," more than 1,300 customers have been moved to Power-based servers from Sun and HP platforms, and this year alone, another 800 customers have moved onto System x iron (which presumably also includes BladeCenter blade servers). Yes, IBM is mixing different categories and different time scales, but this...

With U.S and many other nations in deep recession, we should not fool ourselves and our consumers. We ought to also help them also take a look at the storage management capabilities and strengths of industry leader sponsored initiative. Surprisingly enough, HP and EMC aren't yet on the board. Brocade CA Cisco Emulex Fujitsu IBM LSI Logic NetApp Novell YottaYotta Check out their demos here and here and also the installation demo is here I do see that their blog is not frequently maintained, the project schedule says that it should be going RTM by Jan 2009 .

When the decision was made to go with VMware at ManageNet Hyper-V was not ready for production environments. The company had also considered Virtual Iron, but was not confident in the level of local support compared with VMware. Dell wins in the end Despite their differences in virtualisation software selection, both companies at least have one thing in common - Dell. UXC purchased Dell rack-mounted servers and blades for its new infrastructure build out and ManageNet commissioned iSCSI storage systems from the Dell-owned EqualLogic. Rick Becker, Dell's vice president for software and Solutions, said internally the company migrated 326 PowerEdge 2650 servers to 21 blade servers saving an estimated US$800,000 in operating expenses. "We believe by adopting technology and negating the need for server space we will never need to build another data centre," Becker said. Source

Los Gatos, Calif., November 18, 2008 – Storwize Inc., the leading provider of real-time capacity optimization solutions, today announced that it has relocated its corporate headquarters to a larger facility in Los Gatos, California. The move supports the company’s rapid growth and continued investment in sales, marketing, and support. Storwize solutions help organizations dramatically reduce costs by providing up to 15-times more capacity from their existing storage infrastructure, creating cost and operational benefits throughout the data lifecycle. “Even with IT budgets down almost 30% over the past two years, organizations still have to support continued data growth without increasing cost, and they’re turning to capacity optimization as a solution,” said Peter Smails, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Storwize. “The phenomenal success we’ve experienced based upon corporations’ aggressive cost-saving measures necessitated our move to a larger facility to support our rapid...

SAN DIEGO – November 11, 2008 – Nirvanix, the premier “Cloud Storage” platform provider, and Arkeia Software, the leading provider of powerful, innovative data protection software, today announced that they have partnered to deliver backup protection of business-critical data to the secure, scalable Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network™ (SDN). The first of its kind solution utilizes the Arkeia Network Backup software solution and the Nirvanix CloudNAS™, a software application that turns any server into a virtual NAS gateway to the cloud, to provide unlimited, cost effective storage for long term retention of backups and archives. Combining Arkeia Network Backup, an enterprise-ready network backup solution with Nirvanix’s CloudNAS, organizations gain ready access to powerful data protection via secure, scalable storage at 80-90% cost savings over traditional storage solutions. Additionally, the joint solution safeguards a company’s digital assets with the ability to automatically replic...

This battleground is getting hotter and hotter. Storage vendor SanDisk unveils its secret juice of ExtremeFFS. El Reg reporting: The flash is multi-threaded, incorporating a non-blocking architecture, so that the 4 to 10 channels from the controller to the NAND chips can be doing different things simultaneously. They can be used for reading, writing or garbage collection. Think of garbage collection as being akin to checking the bookshelf and removing unwanted books thus creating empty space. Or think of the Wallace and Grommit cartoon where new railway track is continuously being laid down in front of a speeding locomotive. That's what the garbage collection does; create fresh track for the speeding (writing) locomotive by pulling up used track from behind the train. So there are always, or should always be, empty pages for small random writes to be written into quickly without having to do an erase before the write. That's been done already in the background. Without this...

After narrowing the field of vendors to four, "I discovered Compellent's [Eden Prairie, Minn.] virtualized SAN," Newberry says. "Compellent went beyond thin provisioning to also provide policy-based information lifecycle management, where stale data is automatically demoted to lower-performance disk drives. ... While many vendors supported such features as bolt-on afterthoughts, Compellent designed its SAN to completely automate management." By July 2007 products from Compellent and VMware had arrived. "From the box to beginning the conversion to the virtualized environment went much faster than expected," Newberry reports. "It only took days to initiate and only a few months to complete." During an otherwise uneventful deployment, a hiccup occurred when VMware's connection to the SAN destabilized. "Within minutes of my report to Compellent, they had ... isolated it to a problem with a third-party networking component," says New...

Saving Money Through Technology New technologies and approaches also anticipate lean times ahead. Diane Bryant, CIO of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), spoke to a global workforce increasingly collaborating and sharing data and information. The world is going green, said Bryant, and Intel's goal is to efficiently manage information and data to enable business growth and agility. Bryant outlined an approach for managing the explosion of information based on policies and procedures for information lifecycle, data, capacity, security and rights management, and engineering innovation through SAN/NAS virtualization, thin provisioning, next-generation backup and recovery, fabric unification, and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) featured a multi vendor FCoE demo, and the SNW Hands-On Labs featured FCoE exercises from Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Intel, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC). An FCoE case study presented by SNIA (Storage Networking I...

Here are the latest news on the storage vendors chasing the SMB market. I deal with a lot of SMB scenarios and know for sure that it is not just shipping offerings in the market but also articulating them to sell effectively to the customers, si the key to expanding presence together with the SMB market. The SMB market is a lot punishing and will not spare you, shoudl you screw up: Hitachi : The Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers up to 4x the performance compared to prior generations, and also offers storage consolidation for iSCSI, NAS, and Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) connections. The AMS Series 2000 is comprised of three models: the Hitachi AMS 2100, the Hitachi AMS 2300, and the Hitachi AMS 2500. The entire portfolio of midrange storage systems meets the benchmarking standard "Five 9's" of availability, 99.999 percent uptime. The new Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers the following technology breakthroughs: * The industry’s Hitachi Dynamic Load Balancing C...

Stock markets taking a beating, companies cringing at the thought of investing in newer technologies and applications/systems/storage in desperate need of a "refresh" makes it all very hard to decide who will "Go to the market". Well Netapp is doing its part here, and pretty good though. Enthusiasm for virtualisation has dipped slightly of late, and NetApp wants reinforce the benefits of its storage-efficiency technologies, saying they will reduce overall storage usage while improving performance. “The pressure for cost reduction has led to the rapid adoption of storage-efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP, and Snapshot, which come standard on NetApp systems,” says Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer of NetApp. Source

AUSTIN, Texas--Caringo Inc., the leading provider of content storage software, today announced the availability of an interface between CAStor™ and Alfresco, a leading open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management that eliminates the cost and complexity of traditional ECM systems. XeniT, a valued member of the CaringoConnect developer community, built the interface and has registered it at Alfresco Forge. The interface replaces the traditional file-system based document store of Alfresco enabling all content such as business records and documents to be stored in CAStor. End users store and retrieve documents using the standard Alfresco interfaces with no impact to their behavior. The solution delivers a comprehensive infrastructure to manage business critical content and ensure it is retained and preserved in a compliant storage repository. The interface implemented by XeniT, is in production at one of the largest Belgian insurance companies, which is managing three million...

Boston, September 30, 2008 – Seanodes™, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced that Pack Solutions, one of France’s financial advisor firms, has selected Seanodes Shared Internal Storage technology to create a shared highly reliable storage pool across the company’s one dozen Linux servers allowing future plans to deploy Xen’s virtualization platform. Pack Solutions turned to Seanodes for a better storage solution after suffering with the limitations and reliability issues of its previous collection of a dozen application servers with direct-attached storage and NFS servers. Supporting multiple application servers and attempting to adequately provision storage capacity for each server was an overwhelming issue for which Pack Solutions lacked the equipment, expertise and budget. The storage difficulties that Pack Solutions had to deal with are typical of what most SMB users face every day with a highly complex storage infrastructure but ...

HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks Inc., a leading provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions. LeftHand Networks' solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments. Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers. A pioneer of iSCSI SAN technology, LeftHand Networks delivers scalable storage software on industry-standard hardware that supports existing technology environments. LeftHand Networks' portfolio extends HP virtualization solutions to the midmarket with software that runs on...

· Please tell us briefly about yourselves. FalconStor Software was founded in 2000 by a team of experts in data protection software solutions. They originally joined forces at Cheyenne Software, where ReiJane Huai, now FalconStor CEO, was chief architect of ARCserve, the industry’s first backup server. Cheyenne Software was later acquired by Computer Associates International, Inc., which still sells and supports ARCserve to this day. FalconStor’s integrated suite of data protection solutions gives businesses a competitive advantage by maximizing data availability and system uptime, ensuring nonstop business productivity, improving efficiency and reducing operational costs. FalconStor’s TOTALLY Open data protection solutions reduce vendor lock-in and give organizations the freedom to choose the applications and hardware components that make the best sense for their business, now and as they grow into the future. FalconStor's TOTALLY Open approach ena...