SNW Dallas: A First Look

As IT professionals gather in Dallas this week, suppliers will be promoting equipment and services geared to every aspect of data storage and protection. Besides security, which we'll feature in a separate article today, vendors will pull out the stops on 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, backup, energy-efficient storage, and SMB solutions -- to name just a few key areas. Here, grouped by topic, is a selection of some of the announcements coming over the next few days:

8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel

Brocade will announce an 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel blade for its 48000 Director today, citing increasing demand for high-speed data center interconnects.

Bill Dunmire, Brocade's senior product marketing manager, tells Byte and Switch that demand for 8-Gbit/s is being driven by a number of factors, including the coming LTO-5 tape drives and virtualization.

"Where 8-Gig has a lot of immediate benefit is in virtualized server environments, where you have a number of virtual machines running on physical servers," he says, explaining that increasing the available bandwidth can significantly reduce the number of links needed between switches."Customers will also be adopting LTO-5 drives, when they become available next year, to increase their backup speed," explains Dunmire, adding that the fast transfer rates on the LTO-5 drives will need increased bandwidth. "IBM has also announced that 8-Gig will be coming to its mainframes next year."

Brocade's blade is available now to the vendor's OEM partners. "All of our major OEM partners will be carrying the new 8-Gig blade," says Dunmire, noting that Brocade will continue to support its 4-Gbit/s blade for the 48000 Director.

The vendor also announced enhanced interoperability between its 48000 Director and the legacy McData directors and switches.

"Users are now able to connect natively between the different devices -- they won't need a router in their environment," says Dunmire, adding that Brocade has upgraded the 48000's Fabric Operating System (FOS) to link natively with the McData products.

Like the 8-Gbit/s blade, the software upgrade will be available through Brocade's OEM partners.Backup

EMC will announced NetWorker support for de-duplication and CDP -- via links to its Avamr and RecoverPoint products. Basically, anyone using Avamar or RecoverPoint will be able to set policies and control the management of those products through NetWorker.

EMC has enhanced HomeBase, its bare metal recovery solution that works with NetWorker and Avamar. Version 6.0 supports non-English operating systems and comes in a new entry-level version for fewer than 30 servers.

EMC also is unveiling the EMC Disk Library, a VTL system that supports 1-Tbyte SATA II disk drives and features compression and RAID 6. And the vendor has upgraded its Backup Advisor package for backup reporting, monitoring, and analysis. Version 3.0 supports CA, CommVault, Symantec, and NetApp software and can provide utilization metrics for the EMC Disk Libaray.

Symantec will use this week's event to flesh out its backup and data protection roadmap following the recent acquisition of management software specialist Altiris.The vendor will take the wraps off the snappily titled Backup Exec System Recovery Integration Component for Altiris later this week in an attempt to tie its flagship backup offering much closer to Altiris's software. "It's all integrated into one pane of glass," says Mark Magee, senior director of product management at Altiris. "Users can now use the same Web-based interface to manage backups as well as network endpoints."

Next up will be integration with Symantec's Endpoint Protection offering, with a solution expected to start shipping within the coming weeks. "There are several other integration points on the horizon that we will be targeting," explains Magee, without revealing specifically which Symantec technologies will be involved. "We're finding that users want to have deep integration."

The Integration Component for Altiris will be available in early November. The software solution, which is a set of code to connect Symantec's offerings with Altiris's Notification Server, will be available free of charge to existing Backup Exec and Altiris customers.

Symantec will also reveal the results of its recent disaster recovery survey tomorrow, painting a worrying picture for CIOs and their bosses. The survey of more than 1,000 IT managers will reveal that most firms test their disaster recovery plans just once every eight months.

"They are not testing frequently enough," says Sean Derrington, director of the vendor's storage management solutions. "You have to test your disaster recovery plan frequently to ensure that you're able to failover effectively in the event of a disaster."Energy-efficient storage

This week Fujitsu will announce its Eternus 2000 SAN system. Aimed at the SMB market, the Eternus 2000 includes MAID capabilities. "This will bring data center quality and performance to small and medium-sized enterprises," says Dave Egan, senior vice president of storage solutions at Fujitsu.

The Eternus 2000 will fill out the low end of Fujitsu's Eternus line and sit below its 4000 offering. The SMB device comes in two versions: the 100, which scales from 2 Tbytes to 18 Tbytes; and the 200, which scales from 2 Tbytes to 54 Tbytes.

Fujitsu's rival Copan will also be busy at the show, demo'ing its Revolution 300 device, which contains a MAID-based version of de-duplication.

Xyratex will use the Dallas event to demo its recently launched OneStor Extensible Storage Platform (ESP) family of products, which it is touting as a way for users to control their energy costs.The first offering in Xyratex's range, the 4U OneStor SP1424s, supports up to 24 Tbytes of SAS and SATA disk storage. The device also uses monitors to keep its temperature under control, according to Mike Alvarado, Xyratex's senior product marketing manager. "There's intelligence [in the hardware's] control module that monitors the temperature at various points in the chassis, and it controls the speed of the fans," he says. "It runs them only as fast as it needs to remove the heat from the system."

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SAN

HDS will introduce the Hitachi Simple Modular Storage system, a single- or dual-controller 2U SAN designed for SMBs. HDS is peddling the new system's plug-and-play capability, drawing on the vendor's expertise in consumer electronics.

The systems each feature a Windows-like GUI, support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service, and integration with Windows Native Backup and Symantec Backup Exec. They also feature iSCSI interfaces, and HDS says Fibre Channel will be offered in the spring of 2008.The new HDS SMB SANs support SAS and SATA drives (up to 300 Gbytes and 750 Gbytes, respectively). They will be priced from about $5,000 to $10,000 per system.

SAN specialist Xiotech will launch its Magnitude 3D 4000 system in Texas this week, boasting enhancements around management and automated provisioning.

The vendor has added a feature called Intelligent provisioning to the 168-Tbyte device, which takes over from the Magnitude 3D 3000 as Xiotech's high-end system. "It's a Web services application," explains Michael Hoch, Xiotech's vice president of marketing, adding that users can now set quotas for automatically allocating storage within the system. "It eliminates the risk of over-subscription."

Xiotech is also offering something called ICON manager on the 3D 4000, which is essentially a souped-up user interface. This removes the need for users to deal with both array management and server management interfaces, according to the vendor.

Three versions of the 3D 4000 will be launched today. At the low end, the 4000e Edge comes with up to 84 Tbytes of storage, 124 server connections, and 256 Mbytes of memory. The midrange 4000e also offers 84 Tbytes and 124 server connections, although it has 512 Mbytes of memory. At the high-end, the 4000s contains up to 168 Tbytes of capacity, 248 server connections, and 2 Gbytes of memory.Pricing for the 3D 4000 offerings, which are available now, starts at $35,000 for a system with 4TB of SATA storage.

Dot Hill will also take the wraps off SAN hardware today, unveiling its 2330 device, an iSCSI version of its 2730 Fibre Channel product that was launched last year.

"A lot of the enterprise accounts are using iSCSI to reach out to provide SAN connectivity to remote operators and branch offices," says Dave Osekavage, Dot Hill's manager of product management. "It's expensive to extend Fibre Channel out to these locations."

The 2-rack-unit-high 2330 supports up to 9 Tbytes of SAS and SATA disk drives per chassis, although this can scale up to 42 Tbytes by connecting a number of 2330 chassis together. Dot Hill has also added RAID 6 support to the 2330.

Pricing for the 2330, which will be available tomorrow, ranges from $13,000 to $21,000, depending on the type of drive used.Dot Hill will also unveil its 81-Tbyte 5730 midrange system today, which contains up to 108 SAS and SATA drives. The device will be available sometime in the fourth quarter, priced from $32,000.

Other storage networking vendors will also be busy this week. SAN/NAS specialist Agami Systems will announce that its flagship Agami Information Server (AIS) device now supports the STN-6000 data compression appliance from Storwize, formerly known as Storewiz. Agami claims that this will offer its existing AIS users a capacity boost of up to 90 percent.

RAID specialist Pivot3 will announce today that it has clinched a deal with the City of Long Beach, Calif. to supply the storage hardware supporting the city's video surveillance efforts.

Removable Media

ProStor will demo its recently launched InfiniVault 30 device at SNW, joining a growing list of vendors that have recently been promoting alternatives to tape. The 5-rack-unit-high device contains between 10 and 30 slots for RDX hard disk cartridges and offers a storage capacity between 5 Tbytes and 11 Tbytes."The existing disk archives in the marketplace are targeted at large enterprises -- they are too expensive," says ProStor's CEO Steve Georgis, explaining that the InfiniVault 30 is the first offering in a family that will come up against the likes of EMC's Centera.

Available in the first quarter of next year, pricing for the InfiniVault 30 will start at $30,000.

The vendor will also announce integration with Microsoft's Storage Server 2003 R2 and Quest Software's Archive Manager this week.

Memory specialist Fabrik will take the wraps off its range of SimpleTech Pro Drives today. The drives come with both USB 2.0 and eSATA II interfaces and offer a storage capacity up to 2 Tbytes. Pricing for a 500-Gbyte Pro Drive is around $230.

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Component supplier JMR Electronics will unveil its PeSAN hardware, which it describes as a RAID controller-style solution. The vendor is touting PeSAN as a way to boost the performance of storage systems. "PeSAN is a technology that takes the PCI-express bus on a server and extends that externally," says Stuart Fisher, JMR's vice president of sales and business development. "That way you can add more RAID controllers, put a switch on there, and increase the throughput of the overall storage on that server head."

JMR has already been in OEM discussions with storage vendors, according to the exec: "Were talking to a number of Tier 3 storage vendors, but they are not likely to have products out by the end of this year -- most of them are targeting Q1 next year."

The vendor will be doing a joint demonstration of the PeSAN technology with AMD at SNW this week, as well as demo'ing its recently announced BlueStor storage enclosures.

Rasilient Systems, which develops hardware for OEMs, will take the wraps off two new products this week, the RASTOR 7500 RAID Array and the RASTOR 200e Expansion Enclosure. The two-rack-unit-high 7500 can accommodate up to 60 SAS or SATA drives and up to 4 SAS expansion chassis.The 200e device, also two rack units high, can contain up to 12 SAS or SATA drives. The vendor has not yet released pricing or availability for the hardware.

PMC-Sierra will also be busy this week, demonstrating its PM8010 SRC 8x6G RAID-on-a-Chip Controller and its PM8000 TachyonSPC 8x6G, an eight-port SAS/SATA Protocol Controller.

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