Storage Industry Trends

As EMC updated its VTLs with data dedupe and spin-down drives, users at EMC World say they're in the midst of re-evaluating backup architectures with a focus on energy savings.

HDS merges separate storage management software applications into one package with a shared back-end database and will support solid-state drives in high-end disk arrays later this year.

Storage users on a data deduplication panel say it's important to look beyond dedupe inline and post-processing features when evaluating systems, and to check out built-in replication, backup optimization and vendor interoperability.

Storage announcements this week include EMC rolling out DR software for IBM mainframes and Hifn Inc. certifying DR compression cards for Microsoft's DPM snapshot product.

Quantum pins its hopes for a revenue turnaround on a data deduplication OEM deal with EMC and a new enterprise dedupe disk backup system.

CommVault says it's continuing to win business from competitors in data backup and is now looking to new markets, such as data deduplication, information and records management, and SaaS.

Setting up a data protection service-level agreement is a two-step process. First data protection is aligned with the business, then the data protection methods are chosen.

Some users are deploying Caringo's CAStor CAS software instead of clustered NAS systems for nearline storage.

With its launch at Storage Decisions of 8 Gbit switches and 8 Gbit HBAs, Brocade claims to provide end-to-end 8 Gbit connectivity, although storage array controllers don't support 8 Gbit yet and Fibre Channel hard drives will probably never go beyond 4 Gbit.

VMware's DR management software is not meant to replace traditional disaster recovery approaches; the company is targeting organizations running large numbers of virtual machines that are not mission-critical.

EMC qualifies 8 Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs; Zmanda offers CDP for MySQL databases; Hitachi rolls out 7,200 rpm notebook drive.

Managed service provider Yellow Fiber Networks finds Reldata's approach to file system performance the answer to a customer's demanding NAS requirements.

SunGard and VMware forge a partnership for DR services based on VMware's Site Recovery Manager, and SunGard says the duo will offer a cloud-based option for secondary data centers.

HP's StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System, which combines HP blade servers, clustering software and big chunks of JBOD storage, may be HP's answer to EMC's upcoming Hulk.

Mimosa's NearPoint data compliance archiving system allows customers to fold in file data along with email for litigation support and storage management.

Riverbed claims that analyst-validated testing indicates its WAN optimization competitors have the same problem deduping AutoCAD 2007 drawing files.

Brocade, Emulex add support for Virtual Machine Manager; Dell/EqualLogic integrates Exchange snapshots; Bocada reports on DPM inside Microsoft.

EMC releases MozyHome for Mac workstations in the SaaS backup space and says it plans to address integration between its Mac Retrospect product and Mozy.

Now that the acquisition of SaaS player MessageOne has closed, Dell plans to roll out services to protect data and manage systems remotely. Some view Dell's SaaS rollout as an attempt to create a tiered customer support model.

Sun pushes a do-it-yourself approach by offering OpenSolaris customers online documentation and support services for creating open source storage.