Storage Industry Trends

Financial analysts' research shows organizations are still buying storage despite an overall slowdown in IT spending, thanks to deduplication, disaster recovery and compliance. But one analyst says the third quarter "may be ugly."

Larry Cormier, vice president of worldwide marketing for LeftHand Networks, explains why FCoE is not a threat and why iSCSI SANs may be the killer app for server virtualisation.

Seagate's 1.5 TB 3.5-inch Barracuda hard drive marks the largest jump in hard drive capacity in the history of hard drives, representing a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1 TB for a 3.5-inch drive.

As part of its open storage initiative, Sun brings out a new Thumper storage server and dense JBODs as storage for systems built with Open Solaris and ZFS.

Clustered storage vendor DataDirect Networks has gained a foothold in the rich media and Web 2.0 markets that larger storage vendors like EMC and NetApp are trying to move into.

Despite Brocade's claims that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is still years away from reality, Cisco says it has customers close to adoption on the server side with FCoE storage arrays coming next year.

With its data archives growing by terabytes a week, the research center at Johns Hopkins University uses Caringo CAStor clusters to manage archived and active data.

NetApp officials say to expect OnTap 8, which will integrate NetApp's GX clustering software into its primary operating system, in 2009.

Pillar promises customers more than 80% utilization on the Axiom 600 disk array, which can support up to 832 TB of raw storage.

Despite speculation, QLogic isn't killing the SANBox 9000 Fibre Channel switch. It has, however, given up trying to compete as an enterprise director and is setting its sites on SMBs.

Nexsan's first disk array combines high-performance SAS disks and spin-down for power savings. With it Nexsan is trying to fill the gap between Tier 1 transaction processing storage and bulk SATA secondary storage.

Yellowbook adds Silver Peak's WAN optimization boxes to run EMC's SRDF replication software and ponders optimization of VoIP and video on demand.

Exchange and SQL Server play nice with VMware; Voltaire certifies InfiniBand; Bakbone enhances Oracle 11g recovery features; HP brings out Emulex-based HBAs for Integrity servers.

BridgeHead Software's PACStore can index images from different PACS programs, a feature that appeals to healthcare IT administrators with growing data archives.

Xiotech's Virtual View can help users of its ICON disk array management software centrally manage storage resources used by VMware virtual machines. The provisioning application shows storage administrators which storage volumes and LUNs are allocated to which ESX hosts.

Verari integrates Xsigo's I/O virtualization into its blade servers in an effort to reduce connections and increase manageability of I/O between blades and storage.

A compilation of this week's news in the storage world.

The new version of EMC's Application Discovery Manager can report on virtual hosts, but hasn't yet been integrated with VMware storage utiilization reporting.

OhioHealth ties a Fibre Channel SAN into an optical network for disaster recovery and business continuity between its data centers.

EMC's product roadmap for email archiving includes plans for a Documentum Archive product, next-generation archiving for Exchange and Lotus Notes, and XML encapsulation.