EMC, Cisco Target Data Center Needs at SNW

Large organizations that need peak performance to manage and move data are the targets of new products rolled out this week by EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO). EMC has embraced the emerging Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet standard in a new switch, while Cisco is using its so-called Data Center 3.0 networking technologies to speed the transfer of data for backup and disaster recovery over wide-area networks.

EMC's Connectrix NEX-5020 is the company's first FCOE switch and can transfer data among physical servers, virtual servers, and storage systems over 10 Gbit/s Ethernet networks. For storage managers, the advent of FCOE hold the promise of eliminating the dual networks -- Fibre Channel and Ethernet -- present in many data centers. Consolidating data and storage networks on a single wire can cut infrastructure costs and simplify network management. The NEX-5020 is based on Cisco's Nexus 500 data center switches.

"The Connectrix NEX-5020 is designed to help address immediate challenges our customers are facing around infrastructure sprawl, asset utilization, and the related power and cooling issues in the data center," said Barbara Robidoux, EMC vice president for storage product marketing, in a statement.

Emulex Corp. (NYSE: ELX) and QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC) are supplying what EMC calls converged network adapters, or CNAs, which are a combination of an Ethernet network interface card and a Fibre Channel host bus adapter.

Cisco, meanwhile, said on Tuesday that it is offering Wide-Area Application Services software for two of its appliances that can cut bandwidth needs and data replication times to improve disaster recovery, security, and regulatory compliance. The new WAAS software works with the company's WAE-7341 and -7371 appliances and offers a Replication Accelerator mode to shorten data center replication windows. It has been tested with EMC's SRDF and NetApp Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP)'s SnapMirror applications."This has been designed to help move large chunks of data," says Mark Weiner, director of Cisco Data Center Solutions. "We've focused on several key things -- accelerating application response time over the WAN, shrinking bandwidth requirements, and helping to improve backup and replication."

With the new software, the appliances eliminate data redundancy on the fly before it's sent over the WAN, reducing bandwidth needs. "Some companies that were using a fiber link for WAN backup can now do it over the Internet or a private line," Weiner said. It also allows companies to reduce their backup window and move their data centers farther apart. Weiner said one large office-products company was able to boost its WAN backup speed from a California data center to a site in the Midwest from 37 Kbit/s to 600 Kbit/s and cut its backup window and replication time from 78 hours to 1.3 hours.

Other notable news coming out of Storage Networking World in Dallas this week includes:

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) and 3PAR Inc. this week will announce plans to upgrade their software to permit thin provisioning and the automated reclamation of unused storage space. Symantec is enhancing its Veritas Storage Foundation with a thin provisioning-aware feature called SmartMove and introducing the Veritas Thin Provisioning API, developed with partners such as 3PAR.

The Veritas file system is cross platform (Windows, Unix, Linux) and doesn't reserve storage until it's needed. The SmartMove feature is designed to automatically grab unused storage during online migrations from conventional storage to thin storage and reallocate it to improve storage utilization. The Thin Provisioning API can be leveraged by hardware vendors to allow servers and storage arrays to work together to monitor storage usage, spot unused blocks, and automatically return unused storage to the free storage pool in the array.Tarmin Technologies Ltd. introduced the GridBank, a "universal" software product designed for active archiving and intelligent storage. The software takes data files on any secondary storage and turns it into content-addressable storage so it can automate the movement from tier to tier. It can implement policies for compliance, audit trails, data retention, and disposition; can handle search and e-discovery by indexing all files as they enter the system; and can compress and encrypt data. The company says the system can scale up to 20 PBs and more than 32 billion files.

IDC projects the archiving market to grow from around $1 billion last year to $2.8 billion in 2021, and Tarmin thinks a comprehensive product offering that reduces capital expenditures and operating expenses can grab share if priced competitively. List price for a license for 1 TB of data, after its reduced and compressed, will run around $60,000 for an unlimited number of hosts and servers.

Copan Systems Inc. introduced a virtual tape library for remote offices that includes data deduplication and spin-down disk capabilities to cut power and cooling needs. With 70 percent of corporate data residing outside of headquarters, reducing the amount of data transmitted over the WAN is essential for reducing bandwidth costs and speeding backups. Copan says it can reduce data by up to 15 times.

Open-E GmbH enhanced its Data Storage Server with automatic failover for high-availability clusters, write-once, read-many support, and support for the Network Data Management Protocol, which lets the DSS control backup and recovery streams between primary and secondary storage data servers. NDMP is supported by many major storage vendors. DSS is both a file and block storage manager.