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IT Jobs

Remember, remember the fifth of November? Well, you should, it was only a few days ago. And more remembrance tomorrow on Poppy Day. But can you remember what's happened in the storage market this week? Thought not. That's why we have a roundup neatly listed below:

The need for speed

Fastest NAS on the planet? Exanet has announced record-breaking SPEC-SFS figuress for its EX600FC clustered network-attached storage (NAS) system. How many OPS (operations per second)? 203,182 for a single file system. Not content with that it also announced more record-breaking SPEC SFS results with its two and four-node clustered NAS products.

Fastest SATA on the planet? NexSan, the SATA supplier, has produced its SATAblade with up to 3.2TB capacity per blade - that's 3.2 terabytes. It's offering a bundled SATAblade product with three blades, 24 drives (9.6TB) in a 3U rack shelf delivering sustained throughput speeds of 1048 Mbit/s and 125,000 IOPS, making it the fastest Serial ATA product on the planet.

Fastest storage application accelerator on the planet? NetEx launched HyperIP, an accelerator for IP traffic across WAN distances. NetEx says it uses compression and much else to provide up a 1,000 percent improvement in replication across a WAN. You'll need a minimum $20,000 to use it though.

Fastest SSD on the planet? TMS has doubled the capacity of its RamSan 320 solid state disk (technology used by Echelon and the US Dept of Homeland Security) to 128GB. Eight of these new RamSan 325 units can be combined into a 1TB Tera-RamSan. The IOPS figure is a mind-boggling 250,000 per RamSan 325 and 2 million IOPS for the Tera-RamSan. Imagine your massive database sitting on one LUN and access to it accelerated by up to 2,500 percent.

Meanwhile, back down to earth...

DataCenter Technologies has released a software-only version of its DC-Protect Appliance. It means customers can archive fixed content from any system on their network to any type of disk storage. Previously archived files only have the changed data stored to minimise network and disk take up.

EqualLogic added new products to its PS iSCSI storage line. The company says these are enterprise-ready products in terms of capacity, speed and reliability. They should be cheaper than Fibre Channel too.

CommVault launched its second generation QiNetix Unified Data Management software suite. Customers can place data on the optimum storage medium, matching cost, access and recoverability to data access service level requirements. CommVault says it is more integrated than competing products which are basically non-integrated collections of point products. There are lots of appreciative words from storage industry authorities quoted about it on CommVault's website.

EMC launched an update to Documentum's ApplicationXtender. Version 5.2 integrates in its Records Manager (a Department of Defence 5015.2 certified records management and administration product) and a new Web-based workflow client.

In the world of tape

Exabyte which supplies the VXA PacketLoader, has introduced an LTO2 autoloader, the Magnum 1x7 - meaning 7 LTO2 cartridges - with 1.4TB native capacity. Street price should be under $5,000 - that's under £3,200. Exabyte reckons that's a dramatic price drop for LTO-class product.

Qualstar adds [pdf] Sony's AIT-4 to its library range. The TLS-4000 Series now has a storage density approaching 60TB/sq ft of floor space, with capacity up to 300TB (compressed) plus rom up to 12 drives and 600 tapes. The RLS rackmount libraries can have up to four drives and 70 tapes, meaning a 36GB capacity and near 250Mbit/s transfer rate. Great news if you have an AIT-3 system maxing out.

And in the disk world

IBM chooses Seagate Savvio small drives for its BladeCenter systems.

Western Digital has announced its Passport portable USB hard drives. These contain Scorpio 2.5 inch EIDE drives offering 40GB or 80GB capacity, good enough to backup up notebook data, PC data or be used as a data transfer device. They'll be available next month in retail stores - $249 (£156) for 80GB.

Switchless SAN
What on earth is this strange beast? DotHill has announced a switchless SAN. Its SANnet II uses SATA disks and is for Windows and Linux servers. DotHill creates Fibre Channel (FC) networks for the server ports within the SANnet II. Integrating FC networks inside these storage systems creates an internal or "embedded" SAN that supports up to 12 servers without external switches. The result is a cheaper, albeit limited, SAN.