A Wave of Storage Products Hits Dallas

Axxana, a startup coming out of stealth mode after two years, may have the most unusual product -- an indestructible disaster recovery system that is build like the "black box" flight data recorder on airplanes. The company, which was founded by tech veterans and is based in Israel, plans to provide a sneak preview of its "storage black box" and Enterprise Data Recorder software at the show; the product won't be available until next year. The purpose is to protect data during and immediately after a disaster hits.

The Axxana Black Box is connected to the storage array through a variety of means and copies all data that's being transmitted to the regular backup or DR site. The problem with most DR systems is they start to lose data the minute a disaster hits, said CEO Eli Efrat. "All our black box does is copy the data that didn't make it to the other side."

The box is built to withstand fires, earthquakes, building collapses, lack of power, and other disasters and transmit the data it holds wirelessly to a secondary site so no data is ever lost. The company is closed-mouth about the details of what technology is being used inside the box, but it says it can provide enterprises with better data security at lower prices than many of them are now paying.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is introducing three mid-range products to its AMS line and enhanced its USP V and VM lines. The AMS Series 2000 products -- the 2100, 2300, and 2500 -- include dynamic load balancing to eliminate bottlenecks, what is claimed to be the industry's first 3 Gbyte/s SAS backplane in a mid-range storage products, and flexible tiered storage with support for SAS and SATA II drives. Hitachi plans to add dynamic provisioning to the systems to allow virtual storage to be allocated based on applications needs.

"There are a lot of mid-sized businesses, like a credit union, that need high-level features and top data protections, but may not need all of the capacity and performance of enterprise-level systems," said Mark Adams, a senior product marketing manager at Hitachi. "Our modular approach lets them get what they need at an affordable price." He said prices typically will run from $15,000 to $20,000 and can go as high as $200,000, depending on the amount of disk space.Hitachi also is adding new encryption of data-at-rest to its Universal Storage Platform V and VM and will start offering services to eradicate data, destroy disk drives, and recycle what is left over. It also is adding support for 450 GB Fibre Channel drives that spin at 15,000 rpm.

Cleversafe Inc. is upgrading its Dispersed Storage Network technology, which is designed to let enterprises create a more efficient way of replicating and storing rich media and unstructured data. The company slices up data using special algorithms that describe the data but don't copy the data, and then transmit the descriptions to various nodes on a grid. It claims it can accurately recreate the data even if some of the pieces are missing.

The company says using conventional replication and RAID means making at least three copies of a file and buying four times the storage you need to copy and protect a file. Its dispersal technology only uses 33 percent overhead, sharply cutting the money, space, and people needed to backup and protect digital content, said Russ Kennedy, vice president of product management and marketing.

Cleversafe is adding better support for file and object workloads, enhanced management features, and more configuration options. The new CS Slicestor "slicer" has a list price of $9,996 for four Tbytes. Customers also need a CS Accesser and a CS Manager (each $12,300) for each node. The company says most customers have two or three nodes, but at least one has 12 scattered around the world.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) is adding new disk encryption and centralized key management features to its StorageWorks XP24000 and XP20000 disk arrays."The enterprise data center will see encryption at lots of places in the stack," said Carlos Martinex, senior product marketing manager, "and IT administrators need a way to centrally manage those keys regardless of where they do the encryption."HP believes that data breach disclosure laws will cause more companies to encrypt their data and that centralized key management will be essential to handle the complications that result from encryption more disks and tapes. The company's Secure Key Manager v 1.1 can now handle up to 2 million keys for HP tape libraries, and each SKM appliance starts at $57,000, down from $100,000. The StorageWorks Embedded Encryption, which adds another layer of protection to drives that are lost or stolen, starts at $23,000.

"The combination of encryption and key management provides the most secure way for companies to protect stored data across their entire organization as regulatory compliance and privacy requirement become more stringent," said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik in a statement.

LSI Corp. (NYSE: LSI) upgraded its StoreAge storage virtualization manager software suite with centralized volume management, storage pooling, snapshot, volume copy, data migration, thin provisioning, and mirroring applications. It also introduced the Engenio 7900 Storage System, which offers a four-fold performance boost over previous systems. The system can deliver 6.4 Gbit/s sustained reads from disk and can grow to 256 FC or SATA drives. LSI mainly sells its products to other vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Teradata.

One key new feature, said Don Fautt, director of software marketing, storage solutions, is the introduction of My SVM, which will let IT administrators create secure user domains and allocate storage capacity to those domains and set rules on what is permitted in those domains. "Applications owners can now have their own domains with a pool of storage and permissions to copy, take snapshots, do mirroring. The local IT guy doesn't have to ask the centralized IT guy to do all of these things," he said.

Nirvanix Inc. CEO Patrick Harr is using the show to announce the general availability of CloudNAS, software that will give companies access to the company's Storage Deliver Network by turning a standard network server into "an infinite-capacity NAS filer" for backup and archiving. "The box model is dead," said Harr. "It has given way to the storage service model, which will let IT administrators manage the business and not storage growth."Nirvanix CloudNAS for Linux lets storage administrators use standard file, directory, or access permissions to let users gain access to the on the Nirvanix network from existing applications or storage processes. It also offers automated file replication, a single global namespace, and storage of encrypted data on one or more of Nirvanixs globally clustered storage nodes.

The company launched its network last year and claims more than 500 business customers. It charges 25 cents per Gbyte stored per month and 18 cents per Gbyte transferred.

FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC), one of the leading providers of virtual tape libraries, is announcing that its Network Storage Server now works with the multi-site clustering features in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to provide disaster recover over wide area networking for physical and Hyper-V virtual servers. Initial licenses range from $2,000 to $12,000 per node and $1,000 per managed Tbyte, and the SAN replication and cluster protection software is designed to automate the failover process at the block level.

"What we are adding is support for a new capability from Microsoft that can migrate workloads between physical and virtual servers. We can do databases and messaging services, not just file services, because we take application aware snapshots. It should have great appeal for small and mid-sized businesses," said Fadi Albatal, director of marketing for the company.