Kevin Komiega's Storage Blog

IBM Stakes its Cloud Storage Claim

2010-11-12T10:12:00.000-08:00

There are several industry organizations and vendors hard at work developing cloud storage standards and the race is on to determine how data will be moved and secured in the cloud. The most recent race entrant in this race is a little company called IBM.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched a joint research initiative of 15 European partners to develop a so-called “smart cloud storage architecture.” The effort centers on delivering storage services within and across cloud boundaries through a better understanding what’s inside the data.

The EU-funded initiative, called VISION Cloud – Virtualized Storage Services for the Future Internet, has been formed to develop a new approach to cloud storage, where data is represented by smart objects that include information describing the content of the data and how the object should be handled, replicated, or preserved. The end game is to improve delivery of data and storage services across boundaries of countries and vendors (See Alan Earls’ recent piece for Enterprise Storage Forum, “Could Borders Bring the Cloud Down to Earth?” for more on that subject).

The VISION Cloud storage cloud architecture concept combines (a) a rich object data model, (b) execution of computations close to the stored content, (c) content-centric access, and (d) full data interoperability.

The VISION Cloud initiative will be spearheaded by scientists at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, and supported by partners, including SAP AG, Siemens Corporate Technology, Engineering and ITRicity, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Orange Labs and Telenor, RAI and Deutche Welle, the SNIA Europe standards organization. The National Technical University of Athens, Umea University, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and University of Messin, will also contribute to the effort.

A noble effort, to be sure, but Big Blue has some big vendors trying to make their architectures and delivery methods the de facto storage standards in the cloud.

Oracle staked its own claim to the cloud in recent weeks when the computer giant proposed the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, which covers the common elements of a cloud implementation by specifying the relevant machines, storage volumes and networks. Specifically, the spec submitted to the DMTF describes how a machine can be provisioned from an image; how a volume can be attached to a machine; and how a machine can connect to a network (see “Oracle Proposes Cloud Management Standard”).

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) said the goal of its proposal is to encourage open standards, noting the Oracle Cloud API follows the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture style and uses HTTP methods to interact with the resources to achieve provisioning, associating, modifying, and retiring of entities.

Meanwhile, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has been quietly putting in work via the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI). The CSI recently completed work on its first cloud standard, the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface). The CDMI provides standards for the data path to clouds, includes the ability to manage service levels that data receives when it is stored in the cloud, and includes a common interoperable data exchange format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements between clouds.

The CDMI is based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, and requires providers to implement stringent access controls and encryption of data for security purposes. The standard enables developers to mark cloud storage containers and data objects with Data System Metadata to enforce service-level requirements for the data (see “SNIA Advances Cloud, Green Storage Standards”).

It will be interesting to see how the co-opetition plays out. Is a common management method for the cloud on the horizon? Or, are we doomed to proprietary clouds with proprietary data formats?

EMC Breaks Q3 Revenue Record

2010-10-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

EMC has reported record revenue for the third consecutive quarter as rumors swirl around the company’s potential $2 billion acquisition of Isilon Systems.

EMC (NYSE: EMC) today announced all-time record Q3 revenue, 58 percent profit growth, record year-to-date operating and free cash flow, and substantial margin expansion. As a result, EMC increased its earnings expectations for 2010 as it now expects consolidated revenues of $16.9 billion.

All in all, EMC met analyst estimates. For the third quarter, consolidated revenue was $4.21 billion, an increase of 20 percent compared with the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income attributable to EMC for Q3 was $649.4 million, an increase of 35 percent a year ago and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.30, a 30 percent increase year over year.

EMC’s execs point to the cloud as the main driver of its growth. In a statement, David Goulden, EMC’s executive vice president and CFO, said, “For the third consecutive quarter EMC achieved our ‘triple play’ – we gained market share, invested aggressively to capitalize on the shift to cloud computing, and increased profitability. Cloud computing is driving a fundamental change in the way IT is designed and managed, represents a massive opportunity, and is happening now in various phases across the globe.”

For the full earnings recap, “EMC Continues Record Revenue Streak” at Enterprise Storage Forum.

Big Blue to buy BLADE Network Technologies

2010-09-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

IBM announced plans to acquire privately-held networking vendor BLADE Network Technologies for an undisclosed sum as it continues to build out its end-to-end cloud computing portfolio.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) expects to close the deal in the fourth quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

BLADE provides blade server and top-of-rack switches as well as software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads. It boasts a customer roster that includes more than half of the Fortune 500 and, along with IBM, counts HP, NEC and SGI among its OEM partners.

IBM and BLADE have worked together since 2002 and have thousands of joint clients. More than 50 percent of IBM System x BladeCenters currently attach to or use BLADE products, according to Big Blue.

In a statement, Brian Truskowski, general manager for IBM System Storage and Networking, said "BLADE will help IBM better integrate networks with its systems, optimizing them for workloads that require high-speed and low-latency performance such as cloud computing and business analytics. For example, faster data transport enables faster decisions important for analytics workloads. He continued, "BLADE will increase IBM's System Networking development, sales, support, skills and awareness and help IBM build smarter systems that are optimized for client requirements."

BLADE provides software that helps address the virtualization requirements of cloud computing environments. BLADE software allows servers to more closely integrate with the network so that clients can deploy thousands of virtual machines (VM) to run large application workloads in the cloud.

BLADE recently began shipping VMready 3.0 with Virtual Vision, a technology for automating, provisioning and securing data center networks in virtual environments. The Virtual Vision technology “sees” virtual machines (VM) as they migrate from server to server and protects them as they move throughout the data center. The software automatically synchronizes network policies and configurations across both physical and virtual networks.

VMready 3.0 equips a single switch or a stack of switches for live VM migration, and now with Virtual Vision, can unify physical and virtual networks across an entire data center and even between geographically dispersed data centers, according to the company.

VMready works with BLADE’s RackSwitch Ethernet switches or BLADE switches for IBM BladeCenter, HP BladeSystem or NEC SIGMABLADE.

BLADE’s switch-resident VMready 3.0 with Virtual Vision is available for BLADE’s RackSwitch and embedded blade server switches for the IBM BladeCenter, HP BladeSystem and NEC SIGMABLADE.

VMworld and the Storage Industry's Perfect Storm

2010-09-03T12:02:00.001-07:00

Server virtualization and cloud computing have created a perfect storm for storage vendors with VMworld at the eye of that storm as we now look to the show to predict which way the IT industry will turn.

As Drew Robb pointed out in his "Top 10 Takeaways" from his trip to VMworld in San Francisco this week, the flood of storage news that came out of VMworld equaled the volume of storage announcements that used to coincide with the once-mighty Storage Networking World (SNW) conference.

The show featured a collection of new applications for virtual environments, a heightening of the buzz around the cloud, a couple of acquisition announcements from VMware (NYSE: VMW), and a litany of storage vendors trying to hone in on the action.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) was first out of the gate, announcing a beta program for EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) 2.0, which promises unified management of the networking, computing and storage layers of the Vblock cloud platform.

The storage giant also unveiled a set of reference architectures and best practices for using new EMC storage technologies to reduce the per client cost of virtual desktops in VMware View 4.5 environments.

Scale Computing’s big news was about a small node. The company is taking its unified SAN/NAS storage cluster downstream with a new, entry-level system aimed at SMBs in need of shared storage for virtualization deployments.

Referred to by the company as a “JBOD killer for the SMB,” the Scale Computing N05 Starter Cluster is made up of three 500GB N05 storage nodes. A minimum configuration of a Scale Starter Cluster includes 1.5TB of usable storage capacity at a price of $7,500 and includes the same software set as the company’s larger S-Series product line.

Cloud storage service provider Zetta added data protection to its repertoire with the debut of the Zetta Data Protect solution, which the company bills as a low-cost replacement for traditional backups. Zetta Data Protect brings the company’s storage service into the backup space through use of a technology called the ZettaMirror agent, which protects data by securely replicating disparate enterprise data sources to the Zetta Storage Service, creating an online, available, and verified copy of the data.

The I/O virtualization vendors were active as well. Xsigo Systems unveiled an Ethernet version of its line of virtual I/O directors. Xsigo positions the virtual I/O directors as an alternative to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) approaches to converged networks and cloud computing architectures. Unlike FCoE, Xsigo’s I/O directors do not require adapters to be installed in the attached servers.

Meantime, Xsigo competitor Virtensys launched a dedicated appliance that consolidates and virtualizes network connectivity and provides up to 80Gbps of sustained Ethernet bandwidth per server.

The new Virtensys VIO-4004 converts servers to high-performance and stateless compute nodes that can be interconnected by pooling, consolidating and abstracting servers’ I/O resources and state.

If I listed all of the announcements here it would make for the longest blog in InfoStor’s history. Here’s a brief rundown of the rest of the storage news.

There was a wave of cloud, scale-out storage and iSCSI announcements from the likes of BlueArc, Emulex, Infortrend, Isilon and HP.

See “VMworld storage product highlights: Round 1”

Arkeia, FalconStor, NetApp, Neverfail, QuoromLabs, Sysncsort and Veeam led launched a range of data protection, backup and recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery products.

See “VMworld storage product highlights: Round 2”

Our coverage of news from Aberdeen LLC, ATTO Technology, BLADE Network Technologies, Compellent, Coraid, SolarWinds and Zmanda included new support for vSphere 4.1, a promotional campaign that offers a free petabyte of storage and a free tool for bouncing VMs from your desktop.

See “VMworld Storage Product Highlights: Round 3”

After a week of covering VMworld and HP’s 3PAR acquisition, I’m ready for a long labor-less Labor Day weekend. But first, I have to deal with a storm of my own. It’s time to execute my BC (Backyard Continuity) plan by migrating my patio furniture to a safe location until Earl skips up into Canada.

Good luck, Dennis, MA!

HP’s bid for 3PAR not its first

2010-08-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

After a bit of tap dancing, HP revealed that today’s $1.6 billion blockbuster bid for 3PAR was not its first.

HP published its offer letter today in which executive vice president, chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robinson wrote:

“We propose to increase our offer to acquire all of 3PAR outstanding common stock to $24.00 per share in cash. This offer represents a 33.3% premium to Dell’s offer price and is a “Superior Proposal” as defined in your merger agreement with Dell.”

In a conference call with media and analysts, Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Server, Networking and Storage Business, said HP had “done due diligence on this deal prior to anything you’ve seen announced publicly” and “had multiple meetings with [3PAR’s] senior management.”

Finally, when asked whether HP had an outstanding offer on the table when Dell made its move for 3PAR, HP’s Steve Fieler, vice president, investor relations, admitted that there was “another offer on the table.”

Donatelli also said he expects HP’s relationship with Hitachi would continue. “There is always going to be overlap in storage solutions. That’s been happening for the past 20 years and I don’t have any concerns about it. I actually view that as a positive because it makes sure you have a seamless offering and that you don’t have any competitive gaps.”

He also said HP “looks forward to the response” from Dell.

Dell declined to comment on HP’s counteroffer.

For the full story on the HP-3PAR-Dell triangle, see “HP, Dell in Bidding War for 3PAR.”

You can hear a replay of the conference call/webcast on HP’s website.

Like Cisco, Brocade Falls Short

2010-08-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

Cisco’s Q4 sales fell short last week and Brocade followed suit with its Q3 earnings, missing analyst forecasts and lowering its revenue expectations for its fiscal year. But why?

Some industry insiders think customers are biding their time as they watch how the whole converged networking/unified fabric push plays out.

In a statement regarding Brocade’s (NASDAQ: BRCD) earnings, CEO Michael Klayko said, “Q3 was another solid quarter for Brocade in which we achieved better-than-expected results from our storage area networking business and continued to make progress in our Ethernet go-to-market initiatives. As we look to Q4, we expect a strong finish to our fiscal 2010. Despite operating in a challenging global economy with variable IT spending patterns, we are confident that our sales and marketing strategies as well as our product portfolio are aligned well with customer imperatives.”

Cisco’s (NASDAQ: CSCO) CEO John Chambers also cited uncertainty in the economy as well asmixed signals in the market and customer expectations as the reason for Cisco’s Q4 sales miss. However, Chambers said he’s confident that Cisco will succeed by continuing to “aggressively move into new areas where the network is becoming the platform.”

Brocade’s Numbers:

- Q3 revenue was $504 million, increasing approximately 1% sequentially and 2% year-over-year.

- Q3 GAAP EPS (diluted) was $0.05, sequentially level, and increasing from a loss in Q3 2009.

- Q3 non-GAAP EPS (diluted) was $0.13, sequentially level, and increasing 8% year-over-year.

- Q3 non-GAAP operating margin was 17.3% versus 20.5% in Q2 2010 and 20.3% in Q3 2009.

- Q3 effective GAAP tax rate was (220)%; non-GAAP effective tax rate was 0.2%.

- Q3 Adj. EBITDA was $102 million, down from $116 million in Q2 2010 and $119 million in Q3 2009.

- Q3 total Storage Area Networking (SAN) port shipments were approximately 1.0 million.

For the full Q3 financial results, including prepared comments from Brocade executives, go to http://www.brcd.com.

For more earnings news, check out Dave Simpson’s blog on NetApp’s Q1 bonanza.

The Battle for OpenSolaris

2010-08-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

All's been quiet on the OpenSolaris front since Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but there's a reason for that. The company has been focused on getting Solaris 11 out the door, according to John Fowler, Oracle's executive vice president of systems.

Fowler led a webcast earlier this week in which he outlined Oracle's Systems Strategy roadmap, including its plans for tape, ZFS, and the continued evolution of the Exadata database machine. It was nothing we haven't heard before. What was interesting, however, was the live chat session that ran alongside Oracle's webcast.

Tweet-chants like "Oracle needs to communicate with the OpenSolaris community!" came fast and furious as Fowler detailed Oracle's roadmap, including next year's release of Solaris 11, which is said to include a number of technologies developed by the OpenSolaris community.

Fowler admitted to sister site InternetNews.com that Oracle has "been a little quiet on the open source front. It's not that we're not investing in Solaris, we're just investing to make sure that we have all the major components for the new release."

Fearing the worst for OpenSolaris, a new open source community has formed to provide alternatives to the closed components of OpenSolaris. The community, dubbed the Illumos Project and spearheaded by Nexenta Systems' new senior director of engineering Garret D'Amore, a former Sun engineer and a leading contributor to the OpenSolaris operating system for the past five years, claims that the core concern of the OpenSolaris community is that critical components of the platform aren't open at all.

However, D'Amore maintained Illumos is not an Oracle competitor. "We would love to have Oracle and its employees as peers. They can't own it, but they can participate. We want the technology to be usable by Oracle and taken back upstream," he said. "We want to create the insurance that the industry desperately needs in case the tap gets shut off."

There's a subplot to this drama. The underpinnings of Nexenta Systems' NexentaStor software are based on the OpenSolaris ZFS file system, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle between Oracle-Sun and NetApp.

NetApp fired another salvo recently by threatening to take legal action against Coraid, a storage startup that was about to begin selling NAS products based on Nexenta's technology. The NetApp legal threat stopped Coraid in its tracks.

Illumos has its own plans for ZFS. "At the moment, the code is identical. In the future, there may be additional enhancements and innovations in Illumos beyond what Oracle has. We have some concrete ideas we are exploring, but we're not quite ready to provide concrete details yet," D'Amore said. "We want to be a self-hosting Solaris derivative without any corporate dependencies. In my ideal world, anybody could use this code for whatever they want."

It seems to me that the concerns of the Illumos folks may be valid. In recent months, Oracle has forced Lustre users to buy Oracle hardware if they want to continue to be supported, as well as shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for PostgreSQL, the open source database software.

IBM to Acquire Storwize

2010-07-29T07:15:00.001-07:00

Sometimes the rumor mill gets it right. IBM made another move in the storage optimization space with the acquisition of Storwize, adding real-time compression to Big Blue’s arsenal.

The announcement, first reported by WikiBon’s Dave Vellante and followed shortly thereafter by an IBM press release, came amid a solid month of rumors about the potential deal and speculation spiked when Dell announced plans to buy Ocarina Networks last week.

Financial terms of the IBM-Storwize deal were not disclosed, but there are some numbers being bandied about.

Read more at Enterprise Storage Forum, "IBM to Buy Storwize for Real-Time Data Compression".

EMC breaks Q2 revenue record

2010-07-21T05:12:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2010 -- Led by customer demand for its high-end Symmetrix portfolio, Avamar and Data Domain product families, and VMware, EMC has reported record financial results for the second time in as many quarters with consolidated revenue for Q2 hitting $4.02 billion, an increase of 24% compared with the year-ago quarter.

According to EMC (NYSE: EMC), GAAP net income attributable to EMC increased 108% year-over-year to $426 million; and GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.20, up 100% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income attributable to EMC for the second quarter was $596 million, an increase of 66% compared with the year-ago quarter, and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.28, an increase of 56% year-over-year.

During the quarter, EMC achieved all-time record year-to-date operating cash flow and free cash flow of $2.1 billion and $1.6 billion, which grew 44% and 47%, respectively, compared with the year-ago period.

The company completed the quarter with $10.3 billion in cash and investments.

EMC has reported growth in several areas. Here are the Q2 highlights:

• The high-end EMC Symmetrix storage product portfolio increased 32% compared with the year-ago quarter and the EMC mid-tier storage product portfolio grew revenue 33% year-over-year.

• The combined second-quarter revenue run rate for EMC Data Domain and Avamar backup solutions exceeded the billion-dollar revenue run rate the company reported in the first quarter of 2010.

• VMware (NYSE:VMW), which is majority-owned by EMC, contributed second-quarter revenue of $673 million, increasing 48% compared with the year-ago quarter.

• Additionally, EMC's RSA information security solutions grew revenue 18% year-over-year.

EMC consolidated second-quarter revenue from the United States reached $2.1 billion, an increase of 28% year-over-year, representing 53% of consolidated second-quarter revenue. Revenue from EMC's business operations outside of the United States reached $1.9 billion, an increase of 19% year-over-year, representing 47% of consolidated second-quarter revenue. Within this, revenue increased 18%, 20% and 22% year-over-year, respectively, in EMC's Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA); Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ); and Latin America regions.

EMC's revised outlook

EMC also announced that it expects to exceed its previous outlook for 2010 revenue, consolidated GAAP EPS and consolidated non-GAAP EPS.

EMC's CFO David Goulden said:

"Moving forward, we remain confident that we have the right business and operating model to continue delivering annual double-digit revenue and earnings growth over the long term."

For 2010, EMC expects to exceed its previous outlook of $16.5 billion in revenue; $0.84 in consolidated GAAP diluted earnings per share, and $1.18 in consolidated non-GAAP diluted earnings per share, which excludes the impact of restructuring and acquisition-related charges, stock-based compensation expense, and intangible asset amortization.

More info can be found on EMC's website.

For the latest news on EMC:
EMC Doubles Performance of Midrange Data Domain Systems
Top Ten Revelations from EMC World
EMC Sees SSDs, Ethernet Taking Over Data Storage
Deduplication, Storage Tiering and VPlex Star at EMC World
EMC Mozy Speeds Up Online Backup, Adds Local Disk
EMC, NetApp Strike Storage Networking Deals
EMC Says Private Clouds Are the Future of Storage, Data Centers
EMC Keeps Storage Networks Up and Running
EMC Buyer's Guide: EMC Goes x86

Open season on open-source ZFS?

2010-07-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

July 8, 2010 -- A one-page legal letter from NetApp has sparked a debate over the use of open-source ZFS technology and put at least one storage startup in a bit of a bind.

Earlier this week, Coraid informed its customers that it has suspended sales of its recently announced EtherDrive Z-Series NAS appliances, which are based on ZFS. The decision was made after Coraid received a "legal threat letter" suggesting that the open-source ZFS file system planned for inclusion with the EtherDrive Z-Series infringes NetApp patents (see "NetApp threatens Coraid over sales of open-source ZFS technology").

So why single out Coraid? The Z-Series NAS solution is based on Nexenta's software, but, according to Nexenta, the company "has not at this time received communications yet from NetApp."

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Terri McClure wonders why NetApp didn't hit Nexenta with the same letter since Nexenta supplies its ZFS software to multiple storage vendors.

"If NetApp did it would make sense – stop a number of vendors instead of just one. It certainly makes you wonder why they would single out Coraid, people could read into this that NetApp sees Coraid as a threat. Coraid's NAS product is pretty new but the underlying platform has been on the market a while and is solid, at a really aggressive price point," said McClure.

"[NetApp] just spent a couple of hundred dollars in lawyer's fees and took a competitor out of the market. Quick and easy, but a little disappointing, too. At the end of the day, ZFS is open source, and while there is no way to predict how the settlement talks between Oracle and NetApp will turn out, you can't really un-open source ZFS," she said.

There's still no word from NetApp on the matter.

Nexenta CEO Evan Powell supplied Enterprise Storage Forum with the following statement:

"I am not a patent law expert and cannot comment specifically on NetApp and Oracle's legal battle. However, I find NetApp's behavior consistent with what typically transpires when established legacy technology companies are confronted with innovation that threatens their price structure and profit margins. They first protest that the technology is unproven and unstable, then it lacks enterprise features, then adequate support and services and finally, when all else has failed, that it is violating their intellectual property. This is the path that NetApp has taken in the last two years with the ZFS file system.

"Based on the explosive and sustained growth in adoption of Nexenta's Open Storage software based on the ZFS file system, it is clear that our partners and customers are confident that this case will reach a settlement that follows the trajectory of almost every technology market in the last 15 years-- low cost, high innovation and open solutions that provide a clear and competitive alternative to closed, proprietary and expensive technologies."

You can read more from Nexenta's Powell in his latest blog post.

Related articles:
Coraid Combines ZFS With Ethernet SAN Technology
Coraid Delivers EtherDrive Storage Arrays, HBAs
Nexenta Leverages OpenSolaris and ZFS for Enterprise Storage
Compellent Offers Open-Source ZFS-based NAS
Nexenta Adds Data Dedupe to NexentaStor 3.0 with ZFS
10 Reasons Why ZFS Rocks

Storage lessons learned from the dot-com era

2010-06-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

June 18, 2010 -- We're 10 years removed from the dot-com era and the storage landscape barely resembles that of a decade ago. At this week's BD Event here in Boston, Peter Bell, a General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, gave advice to storage startups and recounted some of the lessons learned from his time at the helm of StorageNetworks, the first–and–last of the true storage service providers (SSPs).

Bell was the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of StorageNetworks, were he guided the SSP from concept to a huge IPO in June of 2000, raising more than $700 million in funding along the way.

But, in 2003, the way-before-its-time SSP model (can you say cloud?) failed. StorageNetworks closed its doors and its competitors shifted to a software model or vanished into the ether (from the way-back machine, see: "The last–and first–SSP calls it quits").

In his current role, he represents Highland on the boards of Desktone, ExaGrid Systems, Gigamon, InXpo, Ocarina Networks, SCVNGR, Virtual Computer, VMTurbo, and is actively involved with a number of Highland's other investments.

Bell said the funding for storage startups just is not the same today.

"No startup is immune to what's going on in the market. The venture capital dollars going into software and networking startups in 2000 were about $35 billion. In 2009 they were $4 billion," he said. "The lessons learned from StorageNetworks are still relevant today. We raised $700 million in 21 months, but I don't think you can do that today."

Taking a startup public is a much longer process these days. Bell said it takes about 10 years, double the average length of time it took to go public during the dot-com boom. "It takes a lot longer and [a startup] needs to be bigger and raise more capital to reach an IPO."

Bell bets there are storage vendors out there that have filed S1s, but are waiting for the economic climate to improve before they take the plunge. There is an added bonus for the lucky few who reach an IPO. Bell said valuations are higher to the tune of about 25%.

Most startups, he said, look to acquisition as the most likely path to growth/exit strategy.

It's not all doom and gloom. Bell is still bullish on the storage market. "In 2008, it was virtually impossible for a tech startup. 2010 has been a little better, but it's still tough," he said. "But people are addicted to storage and it's legal. There aren't that many businesses out there like that."

Bell points to companies who have been acquired or are experiencing growth like Acopia, Compellent, Diligent, Data Domain, EqualLogic, Isilon, Onaro, and XIV, as recent "winners" in the storage market.

Storage startups looking for an angle should consider a few hot technologies as their foot in the door. Bell believes solid-state storage, automated tiering, open-source storage, video storage and, of course, cloud storage/virtualization, are the next big things.

Bell emphasized the importance of the management team and business model as the keys to raising venture capital.

"It's the company you keep. Pick your partners and executives very, very carefully. The business model is as important as your team, but it's often not given enough thought," said Bell. "Long, unpredictable sales cycles lead to very short CEO tenures."

Related articles:
F5 to buy Acopia for file virtualization
Compellent adds ZFS-based NAS
IBM acquires Diligent for de-duplication
NetApp bows out, EMC to acquire Data Domain
Dell to acquire EqualLogic for $1.4 billion
Isilon adds enterprise features to scale-out NAS
NetApp expands SAN strategy with Onaro acquisition
IBM buys XIV for fixed digital content

Brocade tries to One up Cisco in virtual data centers

2010-06-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

June 10, 2010 -- Brocade answered many lingering questions in the past 24 hours about the integration of its Foundry platforms, its plans for converged network fabrics, its take on virtual machine (VM) mobility, and whether it had an answer for the Cisco-led Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition's Vblock strategy.

The company has introduced Brocade One, an architecture that brings together its operating system and management tools. The bottom line: put more smarts in the network to manage VMs in virtualized data centers.

"Brocade One represents one, unified company with one OS and one set of management tools under one architecture," said Bob Braham, vice president of product marketing at Brocade.

As part of Brocade One, the company introduced Brocade Virtual Cluster Switching, a software technology that collapses the access and aggregation layers of the network to create a masterless and distributed control plane.

Brocade VCS continuously synchronizes state, status and configuration information between nodes to enable converged fabrics to be self-forming, auto-healing and self-configuring – think VM metadata, network and storage policies.

Braham says VCS can be used to create true converged data center fabrics that are inherently multi-pathing and resilient, effectively eliminating the need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP).

Also new is the Brocade Virtual Access Layer, a logical layer between Brocade converged fabric and server virtualization hypervisors. The Virtual Access Layer makes sure a consistent interface and set of services for VMs connected to the network. Brocade VAL will support all major hypervisors through industry-standard technologies, including the Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) and Virtual Ethernet Bridging (VEB) standards.

There was a lot of high-level speak about Brocade One, but there was one clear message – they plan to take on the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition's Vblock initiative directly. Brocade and its partners are prepping what the company calls Brocade Open Virtual Compute Blocks – tested and verified data center blueprints for VM deployments on converged fabrics.

The switching component of the Compute Blocks will be based on the Brocade 8000 Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Switch and blade (for the Brocade DCX Backbone), the Brocade NetIron MLX Series and Brocade Converged Network Adapters (CNAs).

Braham says the Brocade-based stacks will be available by year's end.

Brocade's been busy. Here's a taste of InfoStor's recent related news coverage:

Brocade, EMC lay groundwork for private clouds
Brocade increases density, throughput of DCX Backbone
Brocade CNAs qualified by EMC, HDS, IBM, NetApp
EMC expands converged networking deals with Brocade, Cisco
Dell taps Brocade for FCoE, CEE gear
Weighing the pros and cons of unified computing

HP cuts 9,000 jobs in data center consolidation effort

2010-06-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

June 1, 2010 -- HP is cutting 9,000 jobs and taking a charge of $1 billion as it begins refitting its data centers on the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture.

Described by HP as an "initiative is designed to enhance the client experience and better position Enterprise Services for growth," the company announced plans to consolidate its Enterprise Services' commercial data centers, management platforms, networks, tools and applications to "create a more scalable, modernized and automated IT infrastructure that will better serve its clients' needs (see "HP strikes back with Converged Infrastructure Architecture")."

The unfortunate side effect will be the elimination of approximately 9,000 positions over the next few years.

Tom Iannotti, senior vice president and general manager for HP Enterprise Services, said "Over the past 20 months, we focused on integrating EDS and improving profitability. Now that the integration is largely complete, we have identified significant opportunities to grow and scale the business. These next-generation services will enable our clients to benefit from the combined technology and services leadership that only HP offers."

HP bought EDS for $13.9 billion in 2008 and rebranded it HP Enterprise Services in September of last year.

To fund the consolidation HP will take a charge of approximately $1 billion over a multiyear period that will be included in its GAAP financial results. HP expects that, once completed, the transformation will generate annualized gross savings of approximately $1 billion and net savings after reinvestment in a range between $500 million and $700 million.

HP's most recent earnings report was strong, as it posted net earnings of $2.2 billion for fiscal Q2 (up 28% from the prior year) with $4.5 billion in revenue in the Enterprise Storage and Server segment. However, software was down 1% from '09 and services only grew 2% to $8.7 billion. See Dave Simpson's blog: "Solid storage growth in HP's Q2 report."

HP will reportedly create a few thousand new positions in support of the consolidation effort.

There may be a silver lining for any storage pros facing unemployment. Sister site Enterprise Storage Forum reports that the job market for storage networking pros is on the grow. Brocade, CommVault, EMC, NetApp, Oracle and VMware all appear to be hiring (see "NetApp Leads Rebound in Storage Networking Jobs").

EMC World Redux

2010-05-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

May 14, 2010 -- Just when you think you're out, I'm going to pull you back in. Here's a roundup of all of our EMC World coverage, including articles and lab reviews on VPLEX, Unisphere, Data Domain and a couple of Ionix and Atmos announcements that flew under the radar.

There's a clearinghouse of links with all of our articles and lab reviews related to the 10th annual EMC World conference below, but let's tackle the news we haven't covered. While sequestered in the hotel adjacent to the show, a couple of things went right by me.

First up, EMC built out its partner ecosystem for the EMC Atmos cloud storage platform with a new crop of service providers and ISVs.

The service providers – including AT&T, CBICI, Hosted Solutions, Peer1 and Unisys – are using Atmos technology to deliver cloud services to their customers, while the ISVs now pledging support for Atmos include Acuo Technologies, Atempo, Aspera, Cloudera, CommVault, Gladinet, Emulex, EnterpriseDB, Informatica, lifeIMAGE, Metalogix, MedCommons, Nasuni, RainStor, Riverbed Technology, Seven10 Storage, Signiant, StorSimple and TwinStrata.

EMC is also making a new edition of Atmos available in its efforts to entice more partners in the form of the EMC Atmos Virtual Edition.

EMC claims the Virtual Edition "extends the ability to deliver web-accessible, elastic cloud storage qualities to customers using EMC Symmetrix enterprise storage and EMC Celerra unified storage platforms. Running in a virtual environment, Symmetrix and Celerra customers can extend their platforms to address new workloads such as content-rich web applications, storage-as-a-service, cloud archiving and access to external Atmos-powered cloud services."

Secondly, EMC announced version 2.0 of the EMC Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor. The new software automates the validation of storage configuration best-practices in physical and virtual environments, utilizes agentless discovery to simplify storage deployment and management, and provides detailed reports and trend analysis that improve storage change and configuration management processes, according to EMC.

Ionix Storage Configuration Advisor 2.0 offers coverage of the storage infrastructure from the virtual guest, to the VMware vSphere host, and down through the storage array and detects infrastructure vulnerabilities.

It also provides an audit trail of SAN changes and rule violations, flagging potential service-affecting events as they occur.

Now for the recap.

EMC kicked off the show with the launch of VPLEX, a new appliance with a scale-out architecture that can "teleport" applications from one data center to another.

EMC unveils VPLEX appliance for global storage networks

EMC World: EMC takes the wraps off VPLEX

And here's a VPLEX/VMotion lab review from Enterprise Strategy Group…

EMC VPLEX Metro and VMware ESX: Enabling 100 km VMotion with New Distributed Storage Federation

After VPLEX, EMC made some moves in the unified fabric market with a pair of newly expanded partnerships with Brocade and Cisco:

EMC expands converged networking deals with Brocade, Cisco

Also of note was the introduction of Emulex's first hardware-based encryption HBAs, as well as its first design win for the adapters with EMC.

Emulex secures EMC design win for encryption HBAs

In the midrange, the rumors were right on. EMC unified the management of its Clariion and Celerra storage platforms and upgraded its FAST technology.

EMC debuts Unisphere, FAST for Clariion, Celerra

In disk-based backup/deduplication, EMC integrated its Data Domain products with NetWorker.

EMC boosts Data Domain deduplication

Finally, EMC added some SharePoint capabilities to its SourceOne family:

EMC launches SourceOne for SharePoint

Our sister site, Enterprise Storage Forum, also covered the news of the week. Check out their articles from the show:

EMC unveils VPLEX appliance for global storage networks

EMC boosts Data Domain deduplication

EMC World: Tucci focuses on clouds, virtualization

Deduplication, Storage Tiering and VPlex Star at EMC World

EMC World: EMC takes the wraps off VPLEX

2010-05-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

May 10, 2010 -- Beam me up, Joe Tucci. EMC kicked off its "Journey to the Private Cloud" at its 10th annual EMC World conference in here in Boston with another offering upon the altar of virtual storage – EMC VPLEX, a new scale-out architecture that can "teleport" applications from one data center to another.

The VPLEX appliance creates scale-out clusters with up to 8 nodes (N+1 and N-1) that EMC says can be dropped into an existing data center, virtualize third-party storage arrays (even the ones made by the "bad guys") and non-disruptively move/relocate virtual machines (VMs), their applications and associated information.

For full coverage of the VPLEX product launch, see "EMC Claims Answer for Latency in Global Storage Networks" from sister site Enterprise Storage Forum.

I'd love to get some reactions from actual EMC users, but the media has been set up in a comfy ballroom in the hotel next to the convention center for our convenience, of course.

We're free to stroll over to the show floor, but that might be a bit tough to do and still make it back in time for the live video feed of the rest of the day's presentations.

Some tidbits from the show:

• There are two versions of the VPLEX appliance available today. 1.) A local configuration for "simplified mobility," meaning technology refreshes and rollovers inside the data center. 2.) The Metro version that connects synchronous data centers over distances of up to 100km.

• VPLEX only does block storage, no support for file or object-based storage.

• List prices start at $77,000 for a VPLEX local configuration and EMC is also offering a software subscription service for $26,000.

• EMC expects revenues for VPLEX to ramp in 2011, but expectations for 2010 are "quite modest."

• EMC also claims that their approach with VPLEX is to "really drive standards like SMI-S" – Brian Gallagher, president, EMC's storage virtualization product group…SMI-S? Really?

• Pat Gelsinger, president and COO, EMC information infrastructure products said a new version of EMC's FAST (fully automated storage tiering) technology is set to be announced tomorrow.

More to come. – KK

The InfoStor newsletter is going daily!

2010-05-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

May 7, 2010 -- For nearly 15 years, InfoStor has provided readers with extensive coverage of storage trends and technologies. Now we're expanding to give you much more than that. Our Storage Daily newsletter is a concise aggregation of everything that enterprise storage professionals need to know. Delivered to your inbox by 9 a.m. each day, the newsletter is also packed with research, white papers, news from around the IT industry, and more.

The new daily format, which is set to begin on May 18, 2010, is designed to offer a single-page presentation of the critical storage-related news and information that technology managers need every day.

The Storage Daily newsletter will feature a combination of the following:

• Breaking news about the latest developments in storage technologies and business developments

• Expert columns and features offering perspective and advice about critical issues facing enterprise storage users and channel professionals

• Insightful blog posts about the state of the data storage industry – from emerging technologies to best practices.

• eBooks and white papers covering emerging trends such as cloud storage, virtualization and much more.

• How-to and management advice to ensure you get the most out of your data storage assets

• Leading research from organizations, such as Gartner and IDC, detailing cost-conscious and effective storage strategies

• A list of the latest IT job openings from across the U.S.

We hope the newsletter serves you well. As we continue to offer new features and products, we value your feedback. Please feel free to write our Editor-in-Chief, Dave Simpson, at dsimpson@internet.com.

New alliance calls for online access to all archived data

2010-04-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

April 30, 2010 -- A cadre of storage vendors has formed the Active Archive Alliance with the goal of turning offline archive and backups into visible, accessible extensions of online storage systems.

The newly created organization claims that developments in active archive applications and in tape and disk technologies – most notably the ability to see and access data on tape through a file system interface – make it possible for users to cost-effectively maintain all data in online storage for fast, easy search and retrieval.

The group says tying applications to tape via a file system interface mitigates the delays and problems normally associated with retrieving data off tape media.

The first thing that popped in to my head was "HSM all over again," but the group states that active archives differ from hierarchical storage managers. "An Active Archive contains production data, no matter how old or infrequently accessed, that can still be retrieved online."

They also maintain that Active Archiving is a collaborative solution offered by software and hardware vendors and can be put in place using existing equipment.

Spectra Logic's Molly Rector, a founding member of the group, says we can soon expect to see Active Archive best practices and guidelines for end user education, white papers, webinars, videos and educational materials on ActiveArchive.com.

Founding members of the Active Archive Alliance include Compellent Technologies, FileTek, QStar Technologies and Spectra Logic.

The Alliance is taking all comers. Membership is open to providers of file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, high-density tape and disk storage, as well as individuals and end users.

For the latest developments in the world of archiving, visit InfoStor's Tape & Archiving page.

EMC, IBM, NetApp – Storage growth across the board

2010-04-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

April 22, 2010 -- All signs are pointing to recovery in the data storage market as EMC, IBM and NetApp are all reporting big – in some cases record breaking – earning and sales.

EMC this week reported all-time record Q1 revenue, 92% profit growth, record quarterly free cash flow and an increase to its full-year 2010 business outlook.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci called the past few months "the best first quarter in company history" and credited the double-digit growth to EMC's "private cloud strategy and focus on four multi-billion dollar markets."

For the full details of EMC's Q1 results see "EMC breaks first quarter sales records."

IBM is also feeling the storage love. Big Blue announced its earnings this week, including an 11% jump in revenue growth for its System Storage hardware business for 1Q 2010.

Rewind seven weeks and NetApp topped expectations with Q3 GAAP revenues of $1.01 billion compared to $746 million in the same period last year (see "NetApp hit$ a home run").

The big boys are pulling in big bucks. The data storage market isn't recession-proof, but data doesn't stop growing and there's always a need for storage capacity despite advances in data reduction technologies and consolidation efforts.

So what's behind the record-breaking numbers? Are we in the midst of a hardware refresh cycle? Has the storage market really rebounded? On the other hand, is it just a proverbial case of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" (or any other tier 1 vendor)?

NetApp to acquire Bycast for cloud storage software

2010-04-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2010 -- NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.

NetApp announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Bycast for an undisclosed sum. According to NetApp, the plan is to expand NetApp's reach in unified storage by adding object-based storage software to the mix.

NetApp claims that Bycast's products will strengthen its ability too serve vertical markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.

"The addition of Bycast's products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings," Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp, said in a press release today.

Bycast's flagship product is its StorageGRID storage virtualization software. StorageGRID virtualizes heterogeneous storage devices – everything from high performance disk to tape – and runs on industry standard servers and provides a virtualization layer that sits between applications and the underlying storage hardware.

Applications store and retrieve data from the StorageGRID grid using CIFS, NFS, and HTTP. The system manages stored data using configurable policies that determine the degree of replication, geographic placement, and the storage tier on which data is stored.

Bycast positions StorageGRID as a cloud storage platform for service providers based on its ability to deliver multi-tenant digital archives across multiple sites.

Bycast claims to have about 250 customers under its belt and has OEM partnerships with HP and IBM, both of which sell the StorageGRID software under their own brands.

HP and Bycast have a strategic OEM partnership focused on medical image storage and archiving under the HP brand Medical Archive Solution (MAS).

IBM's System Storage Multilevel Grid Access Manager Software (Grid Access Manager Software) is based on StorageGRID and the IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS) combines IBM's TotalStorage and IBM System x servers plus the Grid Access Manager Software. In addition, IBM also uses Bycast's File System Gateway technology to provide a standard CIFS/NFS interface for the IBM System Storage DR550.

According to NetApp, the company will determine whether it will continue the existing Bycast partnerships as it works through the closing of the transaction. The deal is expected to close in May 2010, subject to closing conditions.

According to an e-mail statement to InfoStor, NetApp plans to keep "most of the Bycast team" and does not plan to lay off existing NetApp employees because of the acquisition. NetApp is planning "to eliminate a small number of positions at Bycast. While Bycast employees' roles are not changing as a result of the acquisition, Bycast groups are being integrated into NetApp's organization."

The company plans to turn Bycast's Vancouver headquarters into a technology center for responsible for existing Bycast products and future product development.

Bycast's engineering and product management groups will report to product operations, solutions specialists will report to field operations, sales resources will report to sales, and so on.

NetApp announced its cloud storage intentions earlier this year when it formed a cloud partnership with Cisco and VMware (see Dave Simpson's article "NetApp, Cisco, VMware collaborate on the cloud").

The partnership is based on developing the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture, a reference design with the goal of enhanced security in cloud environments.

Dell also entered the object-based storage fray recently with last month's debut of the Dell DX Object Storage Solution, a new homegrown system that uses metadata to store fixed digital content in a scalable, flat address space (see "Dell jumps into object-based storage").

Microsoft extols the storage virtues of Exchange 2010

2010-03-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

March 31, 2010 -- Microsoft is out to dispel some of the storage myths surrounding Exchange 2010 and promote the use of low-cost disks to reduce storage costs while actually improving the availability of Exchange.

According to a recent blog posted by Microsoft's Exchange guru, Astrid McClean, the software giant has been getting some interesting feedback regarding the storage capabilities – or lack thereof – of the company's the latest version of the company's Exchange e-mail application.

McClean maintains that not only does Exchange 2010 not require high performance storage, but also that IT admins can actually give users bigger mailboxes using low-cost storage systems.

Microsoft claims that built-in features including high availability and disaster recovery, storage system improvements, and self-healing from disk faults let customers use large, inexpensive disks in configurations that maximize data redundancy.

Some of the more interesting tidbits from Astrid's blog:

Exchange 2010 doesn't support NAS…but it does support a large range of storage options including SAN and DAS. Depending on your high availability model, storage can be configured using RAID or RAID-less (JBOD) storage. Different customers will require different solutions based on their requirements, but everyone has the ability to deploy large mailboxes at low cost.

Exchange 2010 supports up to 100,000 items per folder, up from 20,000 in Exchange 2007. In addition to this, Outlook 2007 SP1 Feb09 update, Outlook 2007 SP2 & Outlook 2010 provide good performance for Cached Exchange Mode for mailboxes up to 10 GB in size, and even larger (25GB) using faster disks like 7.2K drives or SSD.

McClean also says the Exchange 2010 store was improved to support very large mailboxes (100 GB+).

InfoStor conducted an interview with McClean prior to the launch of Exchange 2010 outlining some of the new storage features (see "Q&A: The storage implications of Exchange 2010").

In addition to McClean's blog, Microsoft has published a white paper outlining the storage features of Exchange 2010.

In related news, EMC recently became the first storage vendor to take advantage of an Exchange API that allows for integrated SAN-based replication with Exchange 2010 (see "EMC integrates replication tools with Exchange 2010").

Fibre Channel free-for-all

2010-03-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

March 19, 2010 -- The Fibre Channel SAN market is experiencing record growth and, as it does, the main players in Fibre Channel networking are fighting harder than ever for market share as converged networking gains traction.

Recently released data from the Dell'Oro Group shows that the Fibre Channel SAN market experienced a broad-based, record sequential revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, with both Fibre Channel switch and host bus adapter segments posting large increases.

According to the firm's "SAN Quarterly Report," Brocade, Cisco, Emulex and QLogic, had "strong sequential performances that helped propel the market to expand more than 15% quarter-over-quarter."

Seamus Crehan, vice president of Dell'Oro Group, said "the server upgrade cycle that started in the second quarter of 2009 was…a key driver of the Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter growth, especially 8Gbps."

Even more interesting is expected impact of unified fabric/converged networking technologies, specifically Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) running on converged network adapters (CNA).

The Dell'Oro Group's "SAN 5-Year Forecast Report," predicts that FCoE will be "a major growth contributor to both the Fibre Channel HBA market and the Ethernet network adapter market."

In a recent discussion about the HP-Cisco divorce, Taneja Group founder and consulting analyst Arun Taneja said converged networking is creating its own set of wars in the IT industry.

"The industry has become smart enough to say that Fibre Channel is not going anywhere. It's a sacred technology, but if you give me the same Fibre Channel that I am used to today and you want to put it on a different fabric, that's okay with me – hence Fibre Channel over Ethernet," he said. "Two worlds have collided in the form of one card called a converged network adapter that can act as a NIC for Ethernet traffic and support iSCSI or FCoE for Fibre Channel traffic. Broadcomm, Intel, Emulex, and QLogic are all vying for that market."

Taneja said customers are starting to take sides and that the market me be ripe for vendor consolidation.

"The winds are blowing fast and furious for Emulex and QLogic at the expense of Broadcomm and Intel," he said. "Ultimately, the one thing I can see that would bring everything back to a calm state is if Intel was to buy QLogic and Broadcomm buys Emulex."

Check out InfoStor's recent coverage of the Fibre Channel SAN market and FCoE:

HP to resell QLogic's enterprise FC switches

EMC taps QLogic for 8Gbps FC switches

Emulex: Running the Table at HP?

FCoE CNAs: HP/IBM tap Emulex, Cisco taps QLogic

Broadcom makes hostile bid for Emulex

Broadcom Enters Converged Network Adapter War

QLogic sues Emulex, but not over technology

Cisco-HP partnership implodes

Analysts weigh in on HP-Cisco breakup

NAS grows as external controller-based disk market slides

2010-03-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

March 11, 2010 -- Unstructured data is becoming the reigning storage hog in the data center as the network-attached storage (NAS) market continues to grow, while the market for block-access, controller-based disk arrays continues to decline, according to the latest numbers from Gartner.

According to the research firm's latest report ("Quarterly Statistics: Disk Array Storage, All Regions, All Countries, 4Q09 Update") the external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market took a severe hit as the economic downturn whacked the market for an 8.6% year-over-year decline from $18 billion in 2008 to $16.3 billion in 2009 – the first annual decline for the market since 2002.

Gartner research vice president, Roger Cox, says the large monolithic/frame-based disk array market declined 21.1%, and for the first time since Gartner has been reporting on the ECB disk storage market, the segment represented less than 30% of the total market.

Cox says, "This result, in part, reflects the advancements that the lower-cost modular disk array systems have made in performance and capacity scalability, as well as robust data services associated with local and remote replication."

Gartner says unstructured data growth is boosting the NAS market as the segment grew 1.4% in '09, while the block-access modular ECB disk storage segment declined 2.8%. The special purpose disk archiving system segment experienced a big drop-off, falling 31.6% in revenue.

EMC remained the market leader in 2009, in part because of its leadership in the monolithic/frame-based, block access modular disk array and special-purpose disk archiving storage systems markets and the acquisition of Data Domain. IBM is second in market share, growing 11.9% in the fourth quarter, according to the report.

Gartner ECB disk storage reports reflect hardware-only revenue, as well as hardware revenue associated with financial leases and managed services.

On a related note, IDC recently released its latest Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker report that shows the external and internal disk array markets experienced the first year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2008. The report also states that the NAS and iSCSI SAN array markets posted modest year-over-year growth (See Dave Simpson's latest blog: "Who are the top 5 array vendors?").

For more info on the ECB disk storage market, check out the full report on Gartner's website. The report includes vendor market share by data access method, price band, channel and operating system segmentation.

SGI snaps up Copan's assets for $2 million

2010-02-26T12:50:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2010 -- In a deal that flew under the radar, SGI announced this week that it has purchased what is left of defunct virtual tape library (VTL) vendor Copan Systems for a price of about $2 million – that's right – $2 million.

SGI gobbled up Copan's assets in a private foreclosure sale from Copan's secured creditors. SGI did not assume any debt of Copan in the acquisition and assumed a limited number of liabilities.

Copan's claim to fame was its energy-efficient Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for long-term storage of persistent data and its ability to power down disk drives when not in use.

"In my mind, they were a bit of a one-trick pony in that they had a purpose-built platform that incorporated MAID with drive spin-down," says Forrester Research senior analyst Andrew Reichman.

According to Reichman's research, the power benefits didn't match to cost of the system.

"It didn't take off because the power cost of 100TB of storage is about 1% of acquiring that 100TB. It's a drop in the bucket," he says. "What's more, most of the data center buyers are different than the facilities team and therefore don't pay the power bill. That put a barrier in place."

The surprising piece of this puzzle is the price tag. Two million seems a bit low for a company that raised more than $100 million in five rounds of funding, the most recent of which came about a year ago. That's a lot of money lost for Copan's investors.

Reichman believes SGI bought Copan at a bargain basement price in the hopes of using the technology down the line.

Copan's offices in Longmont, Colo., will be retained, and SGI "intends to hire select Copan employees," according to the company.

Reichman thinks Copan customers should start thinking about migrating their data.

"I've talked to customers and, not surprisingly, they're concerned. It's a bad situation to be in. I hate to leave gear with usable life on the table, but my message to [users] is to start with a migration plan now to move off of the [platform]," he says.

SGI's CEO, Mark J. Barrenechea, outlined its plans for the Copan technology earlier this week in a letter to customers on the SGI website. Barrenechea wrote:

"The Copan assets will allow us to provide our customers access to Copan's approach to data backup, recovery, and active archive. Copan products are based on an Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) platform, which is ideally suited of solutions like Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), Disk-to-Disk (D2D) backup and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management). When integrated into the SGI InfiniteStorage Total Control Suite with software like DMF and LiveArc, as well as our high performance NAS, SAN and bulk storage solutions, SGI has increased the ability of our customers to fully exploit the value of their data."

Are you a Copan customer? Sound off! Drop us a line with your questions or concerns.

Cisco-HP partnership implodes

2010-02-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

February 19, 2010 -- Months of rumored bad blood between Cisco and HP has finally boiled over as InfoStor has learned that Cisco Systems will not renew its System Integrator contract with HP.

Citing "changes in the IT landscape and the evolving role of the network and the implications to our partnering strategy with HP," Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of Cisco's Worldwide Partner Organization, said Cisco recently notified HP that it will not renew its System Integrator contract when it expires on April 30, 2010, resulting in HP no longer being a Cisco Certified Channel or Global Service Alliance partner.

The statement was made in a video blog posted on Cisco's website late last night and appears to be the result of a flurry of activity sparked by John Furrier's siliconAngle blog yesterday morning.

Upon reading John's blog, I fired off questions to both Cisco and HP. While Cisco did not respond directly to my questions, it's safe to say Goodwin answered them – and then some – in his video missive.

Goodwin went on to say "[Cisco is] taking this action to be transparent to both partners and customers – we will compete with HP for future business."

HP supplied me with a written statement late yesterday. However, in all fairness, they had yet to see Goodwin's blog on Cisco.com.

HP's statement is as follows:

"History has proven that customers and the market demand both co-opetition and collaboration between IT vendors. Most major players compete in one deal, and partner in others to best serve the client's needs. We do not believe it is in the customer's best interest to take a proprietary stance.

We will provide clients with consulting, integration, management and support services for their heterogeneous environments and ensure that our hardware and software platforms are optimized for all leading networking platforms.

Our strategy and platforms will continue to be market driven to create advantage today and into the future for our clients."

So what does this mean for customers?

Goodwin said Cisco has reached out to HP to start discussing a "new agreement that ensures business continuity for existing customers and better reflects the current state of our relationship."

He also maintained that Cisco will honor existing customer service contracts with HP for their duration.

"Our commitment is clear: we will continue to work with HP wherever our customers expect it and where it makes sense for our business," he said.

A brief history of the HP-Cisco shadow war

Cisco seems to have started this tussle with its entry into the server market in March 2009 with the debut of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), which combines compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single system based on a new line of blade servers developed by Cisco.

Cisco's move into the server market caused some waves across the industry and left many partners – most notably HP – with a lot of questions.

Cisco added to the UCS platform last October with the launch of UCS rack-mount servers, memory extension technology, and a line of converged network adapters (CNAs).

Subsequently, HP made some big moves of its own. Last November, the company put its own twist on unified computing with the announcement of the HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and a set of associated services and partner offerings that create a virtualized, on-demand data center.

HP then added to its own arsenal with the $2.7 billion to acquisition of networking vendor 3Com, as HP continued on its path toward data center convergence.

The latest move from HP was yesterday's announcement of a new deal with QLogic, under which HP will is now selling QLogic's 5800V and 5802V Series stackable 8Gbps Fibre Channel switches.

What's your take on this whole mess? Drop us a line: kevink@pennwell.com.

Cloud computing courses cropping up

2010-02-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

February 5, 2010 -- UC Irvine has become the latest school to add cloud computing to its curriculum as the concept continues to gain steam in the IT industry. However, the momentum of the cloud seems to be vendor-driven as recent research shows end user customers are still hesitant or unwilling to turn storage over to the cloud.

This week, the University of California, Irvine Extension announced a new eight-week online course titled "Cloud Computing," beginning Monday, April 12. According to the school, "the course was created to arm participants with an advanced level of knowledge and hands-on experience in understanding, designing and implementing a cloud-based software system."

Specifically, the course will outline current industry techniques and practices, future challenges and survey applications deployed by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The aim is to arm students with "an understanding of cloud computing models, techniques and architectures, and its application by providers in delivering common business functions such as data storage, computing resources and messaging online."

UC Irvine is not alone. There are a wealth of cloud computing resources and courses cropping up on the Web. UC Berkeley has the cloud on its radar and IT education companies like Stratos Learning and Plularsight also offer cloud-related courses. Not to mention the storage industry's efforts including the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Cloud Storage Initiative.

It's no surprise that cloud technologies are finding their way into the realm of higher learning, but is the cloud phenomenon a result of industry hype or end user interest when it comes to cloud storage?

Editor-in-Chief Dave Simpson highlighted some interesting research from Forrester that points to the former. In his recent piece, "Survey: Users not very interested in cloud storage," Dave cites a Forrester survey that shows about 43% of the respondents said that they were categorically "not interested" in adopting pay-per-use hosted storage capacity. Another 43% said that they were interested but had no plans to implement cloud storage.

It's and interesting dichotomy. The storage pros aren't ready and have concerns about security, compliance and portability, but the vendors are all about the cloud.

There's too much invested in the cloud moniker to have it fall by the wayside in favor of some new flavor of the month, but the vendors may have to drag users into the cloud in the coming years, especially when it comes to entrusting their critical data to a hosted service. Regardless, having a cloud credential or two on the resume can't hurt.

For news and feature articles on cloud storage, visit InfoStor's cloud storage Topic Center.

Unified fabrics: 10GbE iSCSI vs. FCoE

2010-01-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

January 29, 2010 -- The consensus is that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) will be the basis for unified fabrics/converged networks, but which storage protocol will become the de facto standard for SAN/LAN convergence?

In a recent study "Benefits Of SAN/LAN Convergence," conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Dell, 10GbE iSCSI ranks highest among users as the protocol of choice for unified fabrics.

Forrester conducted an online survey with 213 storage professionals in the US, UK, China, and the Netherlands, and 10 in-depth interviews of the same audience. The results show that more than double the respondents selected 10GbE iSCSI (56%) versus the next closest choice, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) (27%).

The study also revealed that 66% of respondents overall said that they are very interested or moderately interested in the concept of unified fabric or SAN/LAN convergence.

The reason for the iSCSI interest is mostly due to the adoption of server virtualization technology. Forrester claims that iSCSI is growing as protocol of choice for virtual server deployments. In a Forrester Research survey from January 2009, Fibre Channel led strongly in protocol selection for virtual server connection. This time around, Fibre Channel still leads the way, but iSCSI is closer behind.

According to Forrester, the data points to strong interest in unified fabrics, as well as interest in iSCSI in 10GbE format as a viable alternative to Fibre Channel storage.

Travis Vigil, a senior manager with Dell responsible for the company's line of EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products, says iSCSI was one of the few segments of the storage market to experience year-over-year growth of approximately 25%.

"The economic situation was an accelerator for iSCSI growth as customers looked to eliminate cost and complexity from their environments. The other contributing factor to the growth of iSCSI is server virtualization as we've seen more and more customers choose iSCSI as their fabric of choice," he says. "First time server virtualization customers find iSCSI to be a cost-effective technology."

Vigil also says iSCSI 10GbE will only make iSCSI better as Ethernet becomes the basis for unified network fabrics. "Fibre Channel over Ethernet is still developing, but iSCSI is here and now. Ten Gigabit Ethernet is only going to make iSCSI better," he says.

For users with legacy Fibre Channel gear, FCoE leads the way as the Ethernet choice. If they move to an Ethernet SAN, 44% chose FCoE, but 30% chose iSCSI, at a close second, and 26% chose NFS, in third.

The shift to unified fabrics is definitely underway, but it will be interesting to see how iSCSI fares as FCoE products become fully baked.

IBM, FujiFilm demo 35TB tape cartridge

2010-01-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

January 22, 2010 -- As the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program announces licensing details for the next generation of 3TB LTO 5 tapes, IBM and FujiFilm are unveiling new technology that makes it possible to hold up to 35TB of uncompressed data on a single tape cartridge.

The world record breakthrough was made possible by an improvement in the precision of controlling the position of the read-write heads, according to IBM. The pinpoint control yields better than a 25-fold increase in the number of tracks that can be squeezed onto the half-inch-wide tape.

The scientists have also developed new detection methods to increase the accuracy of reading the tiny magnetic bits, an advance that increases the linear recording density by more than 50%.

The tape also uses a new, low-friction read-write head developed by IBM Research.

IBM claims the demonstration (view the IBM Research video) was performed at product-level tape speeds (2 meters per second) and achieved error rates that are correctable using standard error-correction techniques to meet IBM's performance specification for its LTO Generation 4 products.

Tape still has the advantage over hard disk drives (HDDs) when it comes to cost. IBM claims today's tape systems cost one-fifth to one-tenth the price of disk-based storage systems, not to mention the power savings associated with magnetic storage.

The concept of storing that much data on a single tape may stave off the "tape is dead" argument for another decade – at least that what IBM is hoping.

Survey: DR plans slipping through the cracks

2010-01-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

January 13, 2010 -- I happened to be on the phone with Symantec last week to discuss the results of their annual State of the Data Center Study when an earthquake shook California. In my mind, the event reiterated the need for frequent testing of disaster recovery (DR) plans. That's why I was surprised to learn that a growing number of users are letting DR plans go untouched for long periods of time.

Once the quake subsided, Matthew Lodge, a senior director with Symantec's information management group, told me that DR plans are vulnerable and have become a victim of a decrease in funding.

According to the Symantec 2010 State of the Data Center Study, which is based on surveys of 1,780 data center managers in 26 countries in November 2009, there is room for improvement in disaster recovery.

One-third of those surveyed said their DR plans are undocumented or need work and important IT components, such as cloud computing, remote office and virtual servers are often not included in the DR plan. To make matters worse, almost 33% of enterprises haven't re-evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the last 12 months.

"One of the hardest hit areas of the data center in terms of funding is disaster recovery," said Lodge. "A lot of companies haven't refreshed or reevaluated their DR plan in quite some time."

It seems IT staffers are focusing their efforts elsewhere. The survey revealed the top concerns in the data to be increased complexity and too many applications.

One-third of all enterprises say staff productivity is hampered by too many applications. Adding to the complexity is the continued increase in data causing 71% of organizations to consider data reduction technologies such as deduplication, according to Symantec.

Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as somewhat or absolutely important and 50% expect "significant" changes to their data centers in 2010.

Lodge said 50% of all enterprises say applications are growing somewhat/quickly and half are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

Mid-sized enterprise data centers are weathering the storm best. Lodge said mid-sized enterprises are more agile, show more activity, and predict major changes to the data center and new applications in 2010. Mid-sized enterprises also place a higher importance on staffing and training than their small or large enterprise counterparts.

Mid-sized enterprises are more aggressive and pioneering than either small or large enterprises. They are adopting new technology initiatives such as cloud computing, replication, and deduplication at 11-17 percent higher rates than small or large enterprises.

Not surprisingly, Symantec's answer to the aforementioned challenges is software. "Let the software help you out. Users need to look for more areas of integration and need to adopt an automated, policy-based approach to management rather than going for a raft of individual tools for the data center," Lodge said.

Some additional tidbits from the Symantec 2010 State of the Data Center Study:

Security, backup and recovery, and continuous data protection are the most important initiatives in 2010, ahead of virtualization.

Staffing and budgets remain tight with half of all enterprises reporting they are somewhat/extremely understaffed.

Virtual machine protection continues to be a focus for enterprises, with 82% of enterprises considering virtual-machine technologies in 2010

Check out the InfoStor disaster recovery page for the latest news and view on the state of DR.

Join the InfoStor Group on LinkedIn!

2009-12-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

December 24, 2009 -- Many of you are already following InfoStor on Twitter for up-to-the-minute breaking news and information about the data storage industry. What you may not know is that InfoStor now has a LinkedIn Group up and running where end users and experts can meet to discuss trends, technologies and the issues facing storage professionals.

Join the InfoStor Group on LinkedIn for daily news updates, lab reviews, guest blogs, and to add your two cents to the discussion threads.

Speaking of guest blogs, Editor-in-Chief Dave Simpson is now soliciting end user bloggers for InfoStor.com. More information on guest blogger opportunities can be found on LinkedIn. Feel free to drop Dave a line and make your voice heard!

Happy Holidays from the InfoStor team!

Dell, KOM Networks are turning old storage into food

2009-12-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

December 16, 2009 -- KOM Networks is teaming up with Dell and recycling partner the Technology Conservation Group (TCG) to turn optical jukeboxes and other storage gear into food for needy children.

The companies have announced the "Junk-A-Juke" program, which provides free archive and storage systems in exchange for donated end-of-life optical jukeboxes or legacy storage devices.

Under the program, the vendors will collect and recycle obsolete and legacy storage equipment and donate all the money generated from raw materials to Feed The Children.

In exchange for the older equipment, KOM offers a new Dell Powered KOMpliance Archive (based on the Dell PowerVault NX3000 NAS) with equal capacity, an enterprise class server and archive solution free-of-charge with a three year maintenance agreement.

The goal, according to KOM, is to collect and recycle enough hardware to feed one million children.

TCG will pick up and track each piece of equipment through destruction to ensure that nothing ends up in a landfill. TCG is an ISO registered recycler of electronic scrap and a member of NAID, the National Association for Information Destruction, a trade association providing the standards and ethics for the information destruction industry to ensure total compliant destruction of functional drives.

Gartner: External disk storage market recovering

2009-12-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

December 3, 2009 -- Storage vendors have something to be thankful for as yet another indicator that the storage market is rebounding from the economic downturn has emerged. Gartner's latest research shows there are signs of recovery in the external controller-based disk storage market.

According to Gartner, worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue totaled more than $3.9 billion in the third quarter of 2009, a 7.3% decline from the same period last year.

In a statement from principal research analyst for Gartner's global Storage Quarterly Statistics program, Donna Taylor, the economic downturn's impact on the disk array storage market is slowly subsiding.

She says, "The year-over-year decline of 7.3% indicates that the economic downturn's impact on the disk array storage market is loosening its grip. The prior two quarters in 2009 showed declines in the double digits. This is good news for storage vendors, because it's the first sign of a light at the end of the tunnel."

EMC still leads the pack with 26.7% revenue market share. IBM takes second place followed by HP, Hitachi and Dell.

For the full list of market leaders, check out Gartner's website.

IDC issued its 2Q numbers in September, which revealed similar signs of recovery in both the storage hardware and software markets.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker showed year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09) with revenues of $2.8 billion, representing –9.8% growth over the same quarter one year ago.

On the hardware front, worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posting a year-over-year decline of 18.3% in the 2Q09, totaling $4.1 billion, according to the IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker.

In addition, a recent survey of 47 enterprise VARs conducted by Robert W. Baird & Co. showed that VARs are upbeat about fourth quarter prospects. See Dave Simpson's blog "VARs upbeat about Q4."

What are the market drivers for virtualization and cloud computing?

2009-11-18T09:35:00.000-08:00

November 18, 2009 -- Everyone is on board the virtualization train and it seems IT vendors are slapping the "cloud" tag on every storage platform and service they come up with, but what drives the end user towards virtualization and cloud storage?

Recent research from IT automation specialist Shavlik Technologies outlines the market drivers behind virtualization and cloud computing initiatives. Shavlik conducted a survey of more than 290 IT pros and the results reveal that data, server and licensing consolidation and disaster recovery functionality are the leading drivers behind new investments in virtualization technology.

According to Shavlik, an overwhelming 93% of IT organizations are using virtual machine technology. Seventy-five percent of those organizations have more than half of their production servers as virtual machines.

Fifty-three percent of survey respondents say server and licensing consolidation is the driving force behind their virtualization deployments, while backup ranked as the second major driver, reported by 52% of those polled.

The principal lure of cloud computing seems to be TCO. The survey revealed that the reduced IT costs associated with cloud computing is the principal reason IT managers are turning to the cloud for the delivery of IT services.

Cloud computing is being examined for adoption by 58 percent of survey respondents, according to the Shavlik research.

EMC, Cisco, Vmware cause waves with cloud coalition

2009-11-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

November 3, 2009 -- Competitors are already calling the EMC – Cisco – VMware Virtual Computing Environment coalition and its Vblock compute systems a veiled approach to vendor lock-in, but the trio begs to differ.

EMC, Cisco and VMware caused a commotion when the companies announced the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition and a new set of systems that operate as building blocks for virtualized cloud computing infrastructures.

The companies have been collaborating to create a virtualized, cloud infrastructure platform based on their respective technologies. The result is a series of integrated "Vblock Infrastructure" packages comprised of storage and networking systems and server and storage virtualization software.

We've been fielding comments from across the industry and it didn't take long for the competition to react.

EMC rival NetApp fired a shot at the VCE by classifying Vblocks as nothing more than a reference architecture rather than a full stack of server, network, storage, and virtualization technologies.

Jay Kidd, vice president Storage Solutions group and chief marketing officer, NetApp:

"We view today's announcement as a clever attempt by Cisco to sell UCS servers into EMC's install base. We also feel that this announcement further validates the trend that we're seeing as more and more enterprises move to a virtualized dynamic data center infrastructure. NetApp has been at the forefront in helping enterprises realize this shift through our close partnerships with Cisco and VMware. With VMware we have virtualized large data centers for customers like T-Systems, BT, and Sprint, and have expanded on these architectures with several integration partners to include Cisco UCS servers. Open partnerships, not closed coalitions, are what customers need and want to make the transformation to a virtualized data center."

More of Jay's thoughts on the VCE and Vblocks can be found in his latest blog post.

Dell – a huge EMC partner – calls the VCE/Vblock news an attempt to lock users into proprietary technologies.

Dell's vice president of enterprise storage and networking, Praveen Asthana, says, "The VMware, Cisco and EMC joint venture assumes that customers are looking for closed technology architectures that lock them into a restricted vendor stack. This proprietary implementation of industry standard architectures is a throwback to the 1990's and creates complete vendor lock-in. As the leading provider of Cloud infrastructure, Dell knows from its customers' insights that cloud compute workloads are best served by open, standards-based solutions – not by repackaging high-cost infrastructure as a cloud solution."

The coalition members beg to differ. They are in lock step with a message of openness.

VMware's president and CEO, Paul Maritz, says Cisco, EMC and VMware all remain committed to working in an "open way."

"We maintain our commitment to working in an open way with existing partners by making our technologies available to other parties who want to put together solutions," says Maritz. "There is no need or reason for our relationships to change. At the same time, we are adding to the options for our customers and not removing them."

EMC's CEO Joe Tucci claims the VCE and the Vblock systems offer customers more "choice."

"On the choice side, we know this is an open world and we are committed to openness," he says. "We are still offering an a la carte menu. For example, you can take EMC storage and choose another server. We are not removing choice."

However, open does not mean the ability to use just any technology to create a Vblock.

"We are not substituting on the Vblock side. If you want to use somebody else's storage you have to buy from the [a la carte] side of the menu, but you're not buying a Vblock," says Tucci. "That's the distinction. You give up certain things if you don't order from the fixed menu."

Storage pro on the lam

2009-10-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

October 30, 2009 -- There is an IT operations manager/storage professional on the run this Halloween and he has 30 hours to get as far away from Manchester University as possible.

Simon Painter, an IT engineer for storage vendor BlueArc, is participating in a "jailbreak" this weekend in an effort to raise funds for KidsCan, a pediatric cancer treatment research organization based in the UK.

Painter and his friend David Wood are competing with 100 others in a race to get as far away from the starting point as they can without spending any money. They may raise some eyebrows, as they will be donning orange prison-like jumpsuits and flip-flops for the trip.

Aside from travel documents and an emergency credit card, the duo will be toting a mobile phone with them as they beg, borrow and "blag" their way across Europe. The team will use the phone to update their location on Twitter and Facebook.

Painter hopes to make his way to Zimbabwe by the end of the contest. Participants have reportedly made it as far away as New Zealand and Australia in past races.

You can sponsor Painter's "escape," track his progress and see a live map of his location on the Jailbreak for KidsCan website.

One vendor too many?

2009-10-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

October 23, 2009 -- The end users I speak with approach the buying process in different ways. Some opt for a single vendor – the so-called "one throat to choke" strategy. Others buy storage from multiple vendors to keep everyone honest. Most feel the multi-vendor approach is the way to go, but it's a slippery slope. How many vendors does it take before the pros outweigh the cons?

In a new report, "How Efficient Is Your Enterprise Storage Environment?," Forrester Research senior analyst Andrew Reichman outlines some best practices for "multisourcing" along with ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for storage efficiency.

Reichman believes multisourcing storage can give customers the upper hand in negotiations and reduce vendor lock-in, but there is a risk to having too many vendors in the mix.

He says having too many vendors on hand can dramatically increase cost of management and reduce overall efficiency. For instance, managing different storage platforms can require different skill sets. More platforms in the data center require higher management and training costs.

He also says that negotiating a better price is a balancing act. Reichman writes, "Vendors often give deeper discounts to those who buy more of their gear. So, while negotiation power can be improved with competition, actually buying from many vendors can limit volumes and therefore discounts over time. Bids should be competitive, and exit strategies considered, but it makes sense from a pricing perspective to pool purchases with a smaller number of vendors once the negotiations are done."

No two environments are the same, but a good rule of thumb is to have no more than three different types of storage on the floor to keep costs under control and minimize complexity.

Multisourcing is one piece of the puzzle. Forrester's storage analysts also offer best practices for measuring capacity utilization and allocation, tier ratios, and staffing.

The full report can be found on Forrester's website.

Brocade, Cisco eye mobile services market

2009-10-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2009 -- Cisco jumped into the Fibre Channel market with the MDS family. Brocade jumped into the Ethernet market with the acquisition of Foundry Networks. Both companies are jockeying for position in the nascent converged networking (CEE and FCoE) market. And, it appears, the companies are escalating the fight in yet another area – wireless networking and mobile computing.

Brocade and Cisco each added to their respective mobile arsenals this week. Brocade took the partnership route, while Cisco opened up its wallet.

Cisco announced a deal to acquire Starent Networks, a supplier of IP-based mobile infrastructure solutions for mobile and converged carriers. Cisco paid roughly $2.9 billion for Starent and the acquisition is expected to close during the first half of calendar year 2010.

Starent's stock-in-trade is providing multimedia intelligence, core network functions and services to manage access from any 2.5G, 3G, and 4G radio network to a mobile operator's packet core network.

A quote from Cisco's official announcement:

"Cisco and Starent Networks share a common vision and bring complementary technologies designed to accelerate the transition to the Mobile Internet, where the network is the platform for Service Providers to launch, deliver and monetize the next generation of mobile multimedia applications and services," said Pankaj Patel, senior vice president/general manager for Cisco's Service Provider Business.

Cisco says service providers have been actively investing in the market as global mobile data traffic is expected to more than double every year through 2013, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

Brocade has noticed the market potential as well. The company inked an OEM deal with the Enterprise Mobility Solutions business unit of Motorola this week to collaborate on wireless LAN (WLAN), voice-over-WLAN, mobile unified communications/fixed mobile convergence (FMC), cloud computing and wireless broadband technologies.

The companies established an OEM reseller agreement, through which, Brocade will rebrand and resell a number of Motorola's enterprise wireless LAN solutions and resell Motorola wireless security products as an extension of its own IP/Ethernet product portfolio.

According to the companies, "this collaboration also lays the foundation for a new category of wireless and mobility services delivered by service providers using cloud enabled infrastructure solutions from Motorola and Brocade."

The companies plan to use cloud computing architectures and enable voice, video and data applications to work over 3G, 4G or WiFi networks.

The future of storage is cloudy

2009-10-09T12:48:00.001-07:00

October 9, 2009 -- Cloud computing and cloud storage are here to stay. The number of vendors with cloud offerings continues to multiply and I don't envy the end user trying to evaluate vendors and services.

Just this week we have seen a big push in the cloud storage market. IBM officially announced its cloud storage intentions with a declaration that it will enter the storage cloud space with the launch of the IBM Smart Business Storage solution, IBM Information Archive and new consulting services.

The IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud based on low-cost components with support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files and scale-out performance. Big Blue's storage cloud is based on technologies including the IBM General Parallel File System have and storage and server technologies like XIV and BladeCenter.

Earlier in the week, Symantec released Veritas FileStore, a new clustered file system aimed at enterprise customers looking to build public or private storage clouds. FileStore is comprised of software-based appliances that run on commodity x86 server nodes and talk to clients using CIFS, FTP, HTTP or NFS. On the back-end, the FileStore nodes aggregate existing Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs and JBODs as a shared storage pool. A FileStore system can scale up to 16 nodes and 2PB of total capacity.

Seagate also chimed in. Seagate's storage software arm, i365, announced a cloud storage-based replication service for medium-sized businesses as part of its push into the cloud storage space.

Terry Cunningham, i365's senior vice president and general manager, told me i365 is changing the way it approaches the cloud.

"Our offerings have been rip-and-replace in the past, and that is an unreasonable request for customers. Now we're agnostic and work with legacy backup packages," he said. "We can now get to the cloud without gutting the infrastructure."

All of these storage clouds are here or on the horizon and there are a few questions customers should be asking themselves as they try to pick a vendor. What types of metadata is required to ensure portability, compliance and security in the cloud? Can data be provided back to users in a format that can be ingested by a new service provider?

The storage industry is aware of some of the cloud confusion out there. It's a concern from both a perception and a technical standpoint.

"Cloud storage is not a fad like the one we may have witnessed with xSPs and storage service providers back in the year 2000 timeframe," says SNIA chairman Wayne Adams. "Cloud storage is here to stay and we need to develop common terminology and standards for building cloud infrastructures."

Stay tuned for more information about what the SNIA has in store for the cloud in our Cloud Storage topic center. The cloud news is sure to be fast and furious from next week's Storage Networking World conference.

SMB DR preparedness is not what it seems

2009-10-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

October 2, 2009 -- Perception is not reality when it comes to disaster recovery preparedness in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) world.

In a former life, I stocked shelves and handled inventory for a large, upscale retail outfit. Being the geek that I am, I took notice of the IT setup in the store, including a small tape drive buried under boxes and irregular garments. It was painfully obvious that it was not being used properly. In fact, I doubted whether any of the staff knew what it was.

Eventually I asked a manager about it and was informed that yes, it was part of the store manager's job to perform daily tape backups of the store's transaction and sales information.

However, in my tenure as stock-boy extraordinaire that tape drive was never used. Not once. It boggled my mind. But it seems that some things never change.

According to the findings of Symantec's "2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey," reveal that SMBs are confident in their DR plans. Eighty-two percent of respondents say they are somewhat/very satisfied with their disaster plans, and 84% say they feel somewhat/very protected in case of a disaster.

The reality of the situation, despite how confident they feel, is grim. According to the survey, SMBs do not back up their computer systems as frequently as they should: Only 23% backup their computer systems daily and less than half back up weekly.

The average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes being virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters. The approximate impact on the bottom line per outage is $15,000 per day. That's real money for small businesses.

The large retail chain I worked for is still in business. They continue to thrive. I can't speak to whether they have experienced outages or whether downtime has cost them cash or customers.

Perhaps the perception-reality gap is more evidence that consolidating and centralizing the backup process makes sense. Having a tape drive at a remote location doesn't ensure your data will be protected when an outage hits.

Symantec makes several useful recommendations to SMB customers in its report, which can be found on the company's website.

Keep up on the latest DR and business continuity news in our DR topic center.

Survey: SMBs keeping data in-house

2009-09-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2009 -- Some interesting tidbits from the small and medium-sized business (SMB) world. It would make sense that SMBs are a prime target for cloud computing services – storage included. But a new survey reveals that while SMBs are using the cloud in some way, most plan to keep their data in-house.

Spiceworks, a company that targets SMB users with free, ad-supported network monitoring and management software, recently released a market research report on current technology purchasing, usage and staffing trends among SMBs across the globe.

The company polled 1,130 SMB IT managers found that while 57% use one or more cloud computing service, 75% plan to store data on premise.

In fact, most SMBs are turning to the cloud for security and e-mail services. Among the aforementioned 57%, the three most popular cloud computing services in use or on the purchase list include anti-spam (43%), hosted email (25%), and online backup (20%), according to the report.

On the storage front, 25% of respondents are planning backup and recovery purchases within the next six months. Of these, 75% plan to store data on premise and 25% plan to utilize cloud-based storage solutions. In addition, 4% of SMB data will be stored on NAS or SAN devices, with 38% in DAS, 7% offsite and 13% on tape or other media.

The full Spiceworks report can be downloaded from the company's website.

Keep track of the latest cloud storage news in InfoStor's Cloud Storage Topic Center. There you will find a new analysis piece by Evaluator Group managing partner Russ Fellows, in which he outlines the technology hurdles that need to be resolved before cloud computing and cloud storage become a common part of the IT landscape.

Come together? Not now...in IT

2009-09-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

September 18, 2009 -- Apologies for the blog title, but the recent tsunami of Beatles media hype has Abbey Road rattling around in my head. All puns aside, TheInfoPro (TIP) just released some interesting research regarding the organizational dynamics in the data center. The most interesting bit may be that most users believe there is an upside to maintaining separate data and networking management groups.

It's interesting to me because experts have predicted that different management groups within IT will eventual merge as the lines between the server, storage and network domains blur. But, as technologies such as server virtualization and unified networking emerge, end users seem to be taking an opposing view.

In its first "Organizational Dynamics Study," TIP looked at the structural issues facing IT organizations. According to the firm, "the study gives insight into the impact that technology and financial considerations will have on the evolution of storage organizations and shows ranges and optimal cost levels of support staffing."

Some snapshots of the research reveal:

• 54%of study respondents see a significant or major impact on addressing storage needs because of server virtualization.

• 78% of respondents said they do not expect storage and networking teams to combine.

• 77% said they do not have a separate virtualization group.

• 60% of respondents said their organization sees major operational benefit in having a separate data management group.

Myron Kerstetter, TheInfoPro's Managing Director of Organizational Studies says: "Looking toward the future, we found that important shifts in the organizational structure will occur in the next three to five years, particularly in the larger storage groups. But despite the hype, many organizations did not expect the creation of formal virtualization teams or the merging of storage and networking groups."

We'd love to hear your take on the topic. Shoot us an e-mail with your opinions.

More information on TIP's latest research can be found on their website.

IDC: Sweet spots appearing in storage software, hardware markets

2009-09-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2009 -- Growth in the storage software market is still on the decline, as are factory revenues for the worldwide external disk storage systems market, but there are some bright spots in both sectors, according to the latest research from International Data Corp. (IDC).

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker shows another year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09) with revenues of $2.8 billion, representing –9.8% growth over the same quarter one year ago. But Michael Margossian, research analyst for Storage Software at IDC, says the storage software market is showing signs of recovery with positive growth over the first quarter of this year.

In addition, the replication market grew 5% compared to 1Q09 led by NetApp, which has been refocusing its efforts and grew 20% from the previous quarter, according to Margossian.

IDC puts EMC atop the overall market with 22.4% revenue share in 2Q09, followed by Symantec, IBM, NetApp and CA.

On the hardware front, things are revenues continue to slip with worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posting a year-over-year decline of 18.3% in the 2Q09, totaling $4.1 billion, according to the IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker.

In a statement from IDC, Liz Conner, research analyst for Storage Systems, said, "The enterprise storage systems market continued to feel the impact of current economic conditions, posting its third straight year-over-year decline. However, certain sweet spots in the market continue to thrive. iSCSI SAN and FC SAN both showed strong year-over-year growth of 57.2% and 66.8%, respectively, in the entry level price bands as customers continue to demand enterprise level network storage at a more economically friendly price point. Similarly, midrange NAS enjoyed solid year-over-year growth of 20.7% as file-level data generation continues to be a hot topic for many customers."

IDC's data shows that EMC claimed the number one spot in the external disk storage systems market with 21.5% revenue share in the second quarter, followed by IBM and HP with Dell and NetApp in a statistical dead heat for the number four position.

EMC also led the way in market share in the total network disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) with 26%. The network disk storage market declined 15.3% year over year in the second quarter to more than $3.2 billion in revenues.

In the total worldwide disk storage systems market, IBM and HP finished the second quarter in a statistical tie with 17.3% each followed by EMC with 15.7% market share.

EMC scoops up FastScale Technology, Kazeon

2009-09-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2009 -- The EMC acquisition machine has been busy this week. The company has inked two acquisition deals in as many days, snapping up FastScale Technology and Kazeon Systems.

Today EMC announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held eDiscovery software Kazeon. EMC plans to integrate Kazeon's technology into the EMC SourceOne product family. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2009.

The full Kazeon announcement can be found here.

The Kazeon deal came fresh on the heels of yesterday's acquisition of FastScale Technology. EMC's press release states:

"Designed from the ground up to accelerate the journey from physical to virtual to private cloud, with the addition of FastScale, the EMC Ionix portfolio will simplify end-to-end management and maximize the performance, density and efficiency of applications and software deployed on unified infrastructures."

EMC also beefed up the Ionix software portfolio via an extended partnership with VMware. EMC and VMware announced a new reseller agreement whereby EMC is now reselling VMware's vCenter AppSpeed as part of the EMC Ionix portfolio.

EMC, VMware tighten software ties

2009-08-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2009 -- EMC and VMware kicked off this week's VMworld conference with news of an expanded business and technology alliance that will have EMC reselling VMware's vCenter AppSpeed software and will tighten integration between VMware's vCenter product family and EMC's Ionix IT management software.

The pair is teaming up to nudge customers down the path toward migrating tier-one applications to VMware's vSphere 4 cloud operating system by using their respective software products to streamline configuration and compliance management and automate IT processes.

EMC will sell VMware's vCenter AppSpeed – a tool for monitoring application performance and dependencies across different tiers of virtual and physical infrastructures – as part of the EMC Ionix IT Management portfolio.

EMC reorganized its IT management software family last month by bringing all of its Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter and Configuresoft technologies together under the Ionix brand.

The Ionix software family consists of four main product sets. The first, EMC Ionix for Service Discovery and Mapping, identifies applications and their physical and virtual dependencies in support of Configuration Management Database (CMDB)/Configuration Management System (CMS) population, change management, and application troubleshooting. It also maps servers and applications prior to data center moves, consolidations, and virtualization migrations.

The second, Ionix for IT Operations Intelligence, provides automated root-cause and impact analysis and monitors services across both physical and virtual environments. The software allows users to view the relationships between virtual machines (VMs), the VMware ESX Servers they reside on, and the network.

The third is Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance. Aimed at compliance management across servers, storage, application dependencies and networks, Ionix for Data Center Automation and Compliance tracks configuration compliance against regulatory, best practices, and internal governance policies, including VMware vSphere 4 deployment guidelines and helps users remediate compliance violations across physical and virtual infrastructures.

The fourth and final product set, Ionix for Service Management, allows customers to deploy IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management. Customers can use Ionix for Service Management to build a federated CMDB that is auto-populated with physical and virtual and dependencies.

The companies also announced new physical-to-virtual migration services offerings. The services will make use of VMware Capacity Planner, EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager, and VMware vCenter AppSpeed to speed the vSphere migration process.

The specific offerings related to VMware vCenter AppSpeed include: Enhanced Candidate Selection for VMware vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter AppSpeed Jumpstart, and VMware Infrastructure Performance Health Check.

Xiotech wants to buy your old disks

2009-08-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2009 -- What do vendors have to do to put you in a new array today? How about buying back capacity? That's Xiotech's plan under its new "Cash for Disk Clunkers" program.

The company is riding the coattails of the Obama administration's Cash for Clunkers auto industry stimulus program by offering cash incentives for old storage technology in favor of storage systems based on Xiotech's Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) architecture.

As part of the new program, which was announced last week and runs through September, customers can trade in "old, inefficient disk drives" for $1,000 per terabyte cash back toward the purchase of an equal amount of capacity on a Xiotech Emprise 7000, Emprise 7000 Edge, or Emprise 5000 system, or VM Storage Solution.

There is no limit to the amount of capacity organizations can trade in, and consequently no limit to the money they can save on their new storage systems, according to Xiotech's Cash for Disk Clunkers webpage.

You can find more info on Xiotech's website and read the Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) Lab Review on our website.

Where are we with FCoE?

2009-08-04T11:24:00.001-07:00

August 4, 2009 -- The Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard is fully baked, but how soon will customers deploy the technology beyond the testing phase?

The FCoE standard was finalized at the beginning of June. The FC-BB-5 working group of the T11 Technical Committee completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard for FCoE. As a result, the T11 Technical Committee plenary session approved forwarding the FC-BB-5 standard to INCITS for further processing as an ANSI standard.

According to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), this milestone has a few implications:

1.) BB-5 Frame Format and Addressing schema are the heart and soul of FCoE
2.) Advances FCoE industry with no new spins required for FCoE silicon
3.) FCoE products in OEM qualification today are based on the completed standard
4.) Users benefit from fully baked standardized FCoE solutions from day one

Industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP) believes FCoE is still in the very early stage of development within storage organizations at large enterprises.

In a recent paper, "Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE): Storage Pro Perspective," Rob Stevenson, TIP's managing director of storage, and Anders Lofgren, chief research officer write:

"It is clear that FCoE and server virtualization are becoming more tightly linked and end users are waiting for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to be fully deployed throughout the data center before moving forward with FCoE adoption, which we expect in two to three years."

TIP also believes FCoE adoption should start to accelerate following the implementation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet among storage organizations.

They continue: "All of the storage teams we speak with indicate that FCoE will be the dominant storage transport for the future, but the roles of host connectivity, FCoE initiator certification and topology management are still being debated."

The vendors are arming themselves to the teeth with FCoE-capable networking gear, most notably IBM. Big Blue beefed up its Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet networking portfolio through a series of expanded OEM partnerships with Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper Networks just last month.

According to Cisco's latest data on FCoE, customers are "rapidly adopting" Cisco's FCoE-capable Nexus 5000 series switches and more than one-third of those customers are planning to implement FCoE.

Cisco claims that it "leads the FCoE market" based on shipments. The company now has more than 900 Nexus 5000 customers and has shipped more than 100,000 ports. The Nexus 5020, which is FCoE-capable, has been shipping since June of 2008.

Cisco says 35% of Nexus 5000 customers purchased systems with FCoE enabled, representing: government, information technology, healthcare, manufacturing, media, financial services, telcos, and service providers.

Brocade, another big player in the FCoE space, is taking a realistic view of the subject. In an interesting talk from Tech Day 2009, Brocade's CTO, Dave Stevens, said today's FCoE technologies are changing the landscape of the data center, but only in the first five feet of the network infrastructure. (See Brocade's video: FCoE Reality - Brocade CTO Dave Stevens from Tech Day 2009)

Stay up to date on all of the latest FCoE news by visiting our FCoE topic center page.

LSI to buy ONStor

2009-07-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

July 23, 2009 -- LSI bolstered its portfolio of storage systems today with the news that it has inked a deal to buy NAS-maker ONStor for $25 million in cash.

ONStor, a privately held, Campbell, Calif.-based company, builds clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems designed to store and manage unstructured data. ONStor's products include NAS gateways and systems and unified storage systems sold through the channel and OEM partners.

ONStor recently broke its own product mold when it announced the Pantera LS 2100, a unified storage system based on open-source software and the Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

The LS 2100 series is a family of unified IP storage systems that provide both iSCSI and NAS support in a single box. Targeting SMBs – a first for ONStor – the Pantera LS 2100 family also includes a variety of built-in data and storage management tools based on the OpenSolaris operating system and ZFS.

ONStor also sells the Bobcat and Cougar families of clustered NAS gateways.

"The rapid growth of unstructured data is creating significant challenges for enterprises in provisioning, protecting and managing their storage in an efficient and cost-effective manner," said Abhi Talwalkar, LSI president and CEO, in a press release issued earlier today. "With the addition of ONStor products and technology, LSI will be well positioned to offer a comprehensive set of storage solutions to help enterprise customers effectively manage both their unstructured and structured data with ease."

LSI's current product lineup includes a range of storage technologies from custom silicon ASICs to HBAs and its Engenio storage systems.

The transaction is expected to close within thirty days and is subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions. LSI expects to provide further details on July 29 when it reports second quarter results.

EMC-Data Domain update

In other acquisition news, EMC announced this morning that it has successfully completed its tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of Data Domain.

EMC now controls approximately 94.2% of Data Domain shares outstanding and expects to effect a second-step merger and complete its acquisition of Data Domain today.

TIP expects spending increase in 2H '09

2009-07-21T15:10:00.001-07:00

July 21, 2009 -- On the eve of earnings for many major vendors, TheInfoPro (TIP) research firm is predicting a second half increase in technology spending.

According to TIP's customer research, which is based on interviews with thousands of Fortune 1000 and medium-sized enterprise end users, IBM, EMC and NetApp have been most affected by the tech spending slowdown of '09.

TIP claims that the best performing vendors have been those that compete on price or base their pitch on return on investment (ROI). CommVault, Data Domain and HP all fall into that category.

On the networking side, TIP predicts, "Cisco and Juniper will benefit from pent-up demand for increasing network capacity and performance, which will result in higher network equipment spending once economic conditions improve. Projects with a more immediate ROI will continue to be promoted for the remainder of 2009, benefiting WAN optimization providers such as Cisco, Riverbed and Blue Coat."

Data Domain was slated to release its Q2 earnings this Thursday, but nixed its concall after EMC announced yesterday that it has acquired majority ownership of Data Domain. EMC expects to complete its acquisition of DDUP by month's end and is slated to report its earnings Thursday morning.

Also on deck for earnings this week are Microsoft, F5, Riverbed, Juniper and VMware. Time to sit back, grab some popcorn and watch it all unfold.

Check out TIP's predictions and the firm's latest customer research at www.theinfopro.net.

Is Data Domain a good fit for EMC?

2009-07-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

July 10, 2009 -- The experts are weighing in on EMC's pending acquisition of Data Domain and questions abound. Did EMC pay too much? How will it juggle its many data deduplication offerings? Did NetApp make the right move?

The price tag was just too high. EMC forced NetApp to bow out of its acquisition agreement with Data Domain earlier this week after upping the ante to $2.1 billion.

According to some analysts, this may have been a blessing in disguise for NetApp.

"NetApp just forced EMC to spend [more than $2 billion] for an asset that really doesn't fit and that EMC didn't want until it thought NetApp would get Data Domain," says David Vellante, co-founder and contributor to The Wikibon Project. "EMC-ers believe that dedupe is best done at the source. It's a culture clash of a serious nature."

Vellante believes NetApp's interest in acquiring Data Domain was based on the potential impact it could have on the bottom line.

"NetApp wanted Data Domain because it saw Data Domain as the path of least resistance to $5 billion in revenue. Personally, I think there are better ways to get there," he says.

Vellante's opinion echoes that of Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie.

"I think the price was too high to begin with and nuts by the end," says Duplessie. "I think NetApp would have enjoyed a lot of synergies and opportunity with Data Domain, but at that price, there was simply no margin for error. I think it would have strapped them and put an unnecessary microscope on their every move that would deflect from the fact that they are a great company. I think they will be happy with their decision."

Now, he says, EMC will be under that microscope.

"EMC has more room to maneuver simply because of their size and assets, but that doesn't mean they won't be under the microscope. That's a mongo big price to pay for anyone to simply ignore it. They certainly have the muscle and brains to make it work, but it won't be easy," says Duplessie.

EMC raises bid as NetApp gets green light from regulators

2009-07-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

July 6, 2009 -- If you thought EMC was out of the race for Data Domain – think again. Just as NetApp announced this morning that it has received the go ahead from federal regulators to take its acquisition proposal to a stockholder vote, EMC once again raised its offer to acquire Data Domain. The EMC bid now stands at more than $2 billion.

The Data Domain Board of Directors currently plans to hold a meeting of stockholders and a merger vote on August 14. EMC is hoping to spoil the party by forcing Data Domain’s stockholders to take a long, hard look at its latest offer.

Under its revised proposal, EMC has increased its offer to acquire all the outstanding common stock of Data Domain to $33.50 per share in cash, for a total value of approximately $2.1 billion, net of Data Domain’s cash. NetApp’s offer is currently $1.9 billion.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci outlined the offer today in a letter to Data Domain’s Board Chairman, Aneel Bhusri. Here is the full text of Tucci’s letter:

Dear Aneel:
On behalf of EMC, I am pleased to submit to you and your Board of Directors this revised proposal to acquire all outstanding Data Domain common stock for $33.50 per share in cash. This price represents a substantial premium to the cash and stock proposal of NetApp and is a Superior Proposal as defined in your merger agreement with NetApp. The Board of Directors of EMC has unanimously approved this proposal.

As with our prior proposal, EMC’s revised proposal is not subject to any financing or due diligence contingency, and we will use existing cash balances to finance the transaction. In addition, we have received all necessary regulatory approvals. We are amending our currently outstanding tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Data Domain to reflect our higher price.

We enclose a revised definitive agreement that has been executed on behalf of EMC and which reflects our new $33.50 per share, all cash offer. This agreement is substantially identical to the NetApp proposal except as to the fact that the EMC offer:

-- Is materially higher in price;

-- Reflects our faster two-step structure, which will enable you to close almost a month faster than under the NetApp proposal; and,

-- Very importantly, eliminates all deal protection provisions that could further impede the maximization of stockholder value, including the no solicitation section and the break-up fee obligation.

This last point is very significant to you and your stockholders. Data Domain does not have any justification for continuing deal protection provisions for NetApp or any other party given our willingness to proceed without them. It was questionable agreeing to deal protections in your initial agreement with NetApp, when you knew of our interest in acquiring the company. There is no basis for continuing with them now.

We strongly believe that the Data Domain Board of Directors should pledge to eliminate all deal protection provisions that could further impede maximizing stockholder value. Such a commitment would be the proper exercise of the Board's fiduciary duties to secure a transaction in the best interests of Data Domain stockholders, particularly in light of the EMC proposal described in this letter.

With the early termination last week of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 concluding all regulatory conditions to this transaction, EMC could be in a position to close this transaction and deliver cash to your stockholders in as little as two weeks.

In comparison to your proposed transaction with NetApp, EMC’s proposal represents a far superior alternative for your stockholders.

EMC’s proposal provides higher absolute value for each Data Domain share.

As an all-cash offer, EMC’s proposal offers greater certainty of value.

EMC’s definitive agreement does not contain deal protection provisions that could further impede the maximization of stockholder value – including any termination fee – and is more favorable to the stockholders of Data Domain.

EMC’s transaction offers a faster time to close of almost a month.

We continue to believe that a business combination with EMC will deliver substantial and superior benefits to your company’s stockholders, customers, employees and partners. Since June 1st, when we submitted to you our prior proposal, we have received wholehearted support from many of your stockholders and customers validating our confidence in these benefits.

We encourage you to accept the merits of our proposal and look forward to your execution of the definitive agreement enclosed.

Very truly yours,
Joseph M. Tucci
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
EMC Corporation

Further details on EMC’s latest offer are available on EMC’s website.

EPA seeks feedback on Energy Star storage specification

2009-07-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

July 2, 2009 -- What will your refrigerator soon have in common with your storage array? It's not the crisper drawer. Well, not yet anyway. Someone could roll out a new unified SAN/NAS/Frigidaire system that stores your data and your produce. I guess anything is possible. What I'm talking about is the Energy Star program.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun work on a specification framework that will ultimately result in an energy efficiency program for enterprise storage systems. Translation: Energy Star stickers will eventually appear on your favorite storage devices.

Not to pat myself on the back, but this humble reporter predicted an Energy Star program for enterprise storage products a while back. I just didn't think it would take this long.

The specification is in draft form, but the EPA needs a little help with developing the framework. For example, David Floyer raises a key issue in his Wikibon blog. The EPA isn't considering software. He writes:

"Action Item: EPA should include software functionality in its specification for achieving Energy Star. This would allow a far more aggressive energy savings to be set as a standard for Energy Star certification. The vendor should be given the choice of how to achieve these energy savings against the base of a storage array with no software and poor power supplies. This approach will achieve higher levels of savings and enhance the EPA energy star brand."

Last call for comments on the Energy Star Enterprise Storage Draft Specification Framework is tomorrow, July 3. The Wikibon folks are currently collecting and consolidating reader feedback and plan to submit its collective opinion by the end of the week. Get in on the conversation here.

TIP: SRM tech making a comeback

2009-06-18T12:01:00.001-07:00

June 18, 2009 – According to the most recent Storage Study from independent research firm TheInfoPro (TIP), storage resource management (SRM) tools are in the midst of a comeback as enterprises attempt to boost utilization in tough economic times.

TheInfoPro's most recent study, which is based on data gathered from interviews with 250 IT pros at Fortune 1000 and medium-sized enterprise organizations, revealed that managing storage growth, capacity forecasting and storage reporting, and managing costs are the "top pain points" facing end users.

Enter: SRM.

A few tidbits from a press release on TIP's latest Storage Management Technology Heat Index – a barometer of the user needs and planned spending:

• Top technologies on the F1000 Storage Management Technology Heat Index include capacity planning and forecasting, storage performance monitoring and storage resource management – with capacity planning and forecasting jumping nine spots from number 11 six months ago to the number one technology on the index.

• Top technologies on the MSE Storage Management Technology Heat Index include capacity planning and forecasting, information lifecycle management, disk-to-disk and email archiving.

• Top Technologies on the European Storage Management Technology Heat Index include storage resource management, email archiving and thin provisioning.

Tucci appeals to Data Domain's rank and file

2009-06-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

June 9, 2009 -- The acquisition agreement between Data Domain and NetApp precludes EMC from communicating with Data Domain directly, but no one says EMC can't state its case to the public or to Data Domain's employees.

EMC chairman, president and CEO Joe Tucci issued an open letter to Data Domain's personnel this morning in which he praises their achievements, congratulates them for their successes and highlights the impact of their data deduplication technologies are having in data centers across the globe.

He even writes, "In many ways, you remind us of EMC."

Tucci also promises Data Domain's employees an "exciting future" if they should become part of the "EMC family."

All flattery and promises aside, Tucci continues to make the financial argument that EMC's $30 per share all-cash tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding stock of Data Domain is the better deal than NetApp's part-stock, part-cash offer.

It appears that NetApp will win the day and acquire Data Domain, but its sure is fun to watch the day-to-day developments.

The full text of Tucci's open letter to the employees of Data Domain can be found on EMC's website.

Update: Data Domain sides with NetApp

2009-06-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

June 4, 2009 -- Another day, another development in the EMC-Data Domain-NetApp saga. Less than 12 hours after NetApp publicly raised its offer to buy Data Domain, the two companies have officially entered into a revised acquisition agreement.

The volleying has been worthy of a match at Roland Garros. NetApp responded to EMC's surprise bid for Data Domain yesterday morning by raising its offer. The price seems to have satisfied Data Domain, for now.

Late yesterday, the pair issued a joint press release stating that they have entered into a revised acquisition agreement under which NetApp will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Data Domain common stock for $30 per share in cash and stock in a transaction valued at approximately $1.9 billion, net of Data Domain's cash.

EMC is standing pat. The company issued a statement of its own on Wednesday, in which Joe Tucci, EMC chairman, president and CEO, said, "EMC's all-cash tender offer remains superior to NetApp's proposed part-stock merger transaction. We are proceeding with our superior cash tender offer, which is not subject to any financing or due diligence contingency. We do not believe that the Data Domain stockholders will approve the merger transaction with NetApp."

Tucci added, "EMC urges the Board of Directors of Data Domain to not take any actions that would further impede a transaction that is a superior alternative for Data Domain's shareholders."

Whether EMC counters the counter offer remains to be seen.

NetApp responds to EMC's bid for Data Domain

2009-06-03T08:35:00.001-07:00

June 3, 2009 -- The bidding war for Data Domain has begun. NetApp has responded to EMC's surprise offer to buy the company by upping its offer to $1.9 billion and claiming that a combined NetApp-Data Domain has a bigger upside for both companies.

NetApp issued a revised offer this morning, raising the acquisition price to approximately $1.9 billion versus EMC's $1.8 billion offer earlier this week.

In a press release, NetApp's chairman and CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, said his company's "strategic rationale remains the same" and "the complementary nature of the Data Domain and NetApp product lines will result in higher aggregate growth compared to the redundancies that would result with the EMC product line."

Warmenhoven added, "The cultural compatibility between Data Domain and NetApp will maximize the potential for continued innovation from a creative and motivated employee base. This will not only create a meaningful choice for our customers but also lead to a complementary combination with no obstacles to an expeditious close of the acquisition. Therefore, we are as committed to this partnership now as we were when we first announced our intent to acquire Data Domain."

Mum's the word over at Data Domain as they company has yet to comment on the EMC-NetApp tug of war. The industry pundits, however, are keeping a close eye on the back and forth.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Lauren Whitehouse wonders whether EMC is just playing the spoiler, especially given its wealth of data deduplication technologies and OEM deals.

"I am having a hard time understanding why EMC wants the Data Domain technology. EMC has deduplication solutions through the Avamar product and its partnership with Quantum. I'm not sure what opportunities there are for technology integration with Avamar and EMC recently made a sizeable investment in Quantum," said Whitehouse. "The company has also promoted the benefits of the being able to replicate between Dell, EMC and Quantum solutions. What statement is EMC making about its investments in Avamar and Quantum by bidding for Data Domain?"

She continued, "Who can better leverage and integrate the Data Domain technology? EMC definitely has a better track record of doing acquisitions and leveraging technology purchases. Without really knowing the motivation for either company's bid, it's hard to judge who will leverage the technology better. It's just not obvious what the intentions are for either bidder. What a rollercoaster ride this has been."

David Vellante, co-founder and contributor to The Wikibon Project, believes EMC may have the edge.

"EMC plays for keeps. It doesn't mess around when it comes to competing. I think if EMC really wants Data Domain it will outbid NetApp for sure," he said.

So what does EMC's unsolicited bid for Data Domain say to the industry? Vellante sees it as a defensive move by EMC.

"It says to me that EMC recognizes it can't grow its core storage business organically and needs to acquire growth," Vellante said. "It says EMC is making a defensive move, albeit an aggressive one, to stop Data Domain from getting in NetApp's hands."

He also believes smaller vendors are fast becoming hot commodities.

"The market is continuing to consolidate and companies like CommVault, FalconStor, Sepaton and even 3PAR and Compellent are worth more today than they were yesterday," Vellante said.

NetApp's competitors take aim at Data Domain deal

2009-05-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

May 21, 2009 -- It didn't take long for NetApp's competition and industry experts to begin poking holes in NetApp's acquisition of Data Domain as questions abound less than 24 hours since the deal was announced.

There is no question the $1.5 billion deal to buy disk-based backup vendor and deduplication specialist Data Domain will immediately expand NetApp's market share and reach into the backup market. However, as the experts and competitors are quick to point out, NetApp's path is strewn with obstacles.

Wikibon president and co-founder Dave Vellante's blog on the topic raises some interesting questions. If NetApp can successfully integrate Data Domain's products and technologies (specifically deduplication), they will be poised to make serious inroads with customers seeking data reduction/Storage Capacity Optimization (SCO) technologies. However, he writes:

"This vision will take forever to execute. Meanwhile, IBM with Diligent and TSM; and EMC with Avamar and Quantum are further down the path. This will lower the time to value for NetApp, which I'm defining as the valuation being incremental."

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Lauren Whitehouse says deduplication – one of Data Domain's strengths – is a feature, not a market.

"Having the feature on storage systems may help NetApp win business in segments of the secondary and archive storage markets where it wasn't as strong before," she says.

Her biggest issue with the acquisition is overlap between VTL-interface products, NetApp NearStore and the Data Domain DD series.

"The answers NetApp provided regarding technology integration and conflict were tentative. They deferred to the soon-to-be-formed integration team to address those issues at a later time. The focus was squarely on positioning the acquisition as increasing the business opportunity rather than a technology leverage move." She continues, "NetApp spent $11 million on the VTL acquisition (Alacritus) several years ago and has made investments in NearStore over the years; however, the product is lacking some features that make it competitive with others in its class."

She cites VTL-to-VTL replication as an example. "It's going to be hard to justify incremental investment in NearStore when they've just spent $1.5 billion on a similar solution with a few more advanced features," she says.

NetApp's positioning the acquisition as a business play, rather than a move to gobble up valuable intellectual property. As reported in our story about the deal, NetApp's chief marketing officer, Jay Kidd, said NetApp's rationale was based on an incremental growth opportunity for both companies.

"The overlap between NetApp's customers and Data Domain's customers was fairly small. The addition of Data Domain's products to our portfolio was a clear market expansion opportunity," said Kidd. "We are doing this for the expansion of the business opportunity and not to acquire technologies that would allow us to consolidate product lines."

Roughly 77% of Data Domain's business comes from North America. NetApp, however, has a global reach. Kidd said NetApp's global reach makes the acquisition a perfect match. "We have access to enterprise accounts that they are not in yet. Our [global presence] will accelerate the business that Data Domain already has," he says.

Competing vendors, of which there are many, began offering their two cents on the acquisition minutes after the news broke. Here is a sampling of the vendor reaction in their own words…

David West, vice president of marketing and business development at CommVault:

"We believe that deduplication is a feature and not a company. We also believe that to gain operational efficiencies and dramatically reduce data management and related storage expenses, a global embedded software-based approach to deduplication is the best option for customers.

Yesterday's announcement did little to address these fundamental customer needs. While we applaud NetApp's effort to capture more market share through deduplication, ultimately a feature-based approach, tightly integrated within an overall backup/archive strategy is the optimal way to reduce redundant data in your environment. Like minded companies will continue to pursue an embedded approach to dedupe and we anticipate additional adoption with key strategic partners as we continue to address customer needs."

Permabit's CEO, Tom Cook:

"This is one more outstanding execution move by the management of [Data Domain]. They needed to make a move and did.

This is a ‘worst fear' scenario for the likes of Dell, EMC, IBM and HP. The last thing in the world they wanted in the market was another NTAP. They all had [Data Domain] in their sights to acquire or beat in the marketplace. They will all spring to aggressive action.

This will disrupt the partner ecosystem. F5's (who partners effectively with [Data Domain]) play is to consolidate NAS – not exactly a NTAP objective and this places the combined organization in direct competition with the likes of CommVault and Symantec.

Finally – this is a huge positive for Permabit. In the market it enables us to contrast our offering more directly with NearStore rather than [Data Domain] near line FUD. Of course, Dell, EMC, IBM and HP will help us with this. And it puts a huge focus and premium on technologies and products that can compete on merit with the combined [NetApp/Data Domain] offerings."

Bill Andrews, president and CEO of ExaGrid:

"This is an interesting move for Data Domain as it started out targeting mid market and small enterprise customers with 1TB to 60TB of primary data to be backed up. Since then Data Domain has altered its course by targeting the large enterprise and was moving the company in that direction. NetApp is an enterprise play and therefore completes this large enterprise transition for Data Domain.

Today, ExaGrid competes with Data Domain in the mid market to small enterprise and was pleased to see Data Domain moving up market. This latest development is exciting for ExaGrid as it accelerates Data Domain's move to the enterprise and leaves a hole in the mid market to small enterprise. When competing, ExaGrid has won against Data Domain the majority of the time thanks to a faster and more scalable product at a better price and this latest development will only make the mid market to small enterprise segment a more significant opportunity for ExaGrid.

Hype vs. reality – A Q&A with Wells Fargo's head of IT

2009-04-24T09:04:00.001-07:00

April 24, 2009 -- I recently had an opportunity to have a conversation with Scott Dillon, head of technology infrastructure services at Wells Fargo & Co. The discussion covered a range of topics including the bank's storage priorities and needs, how he plans to extend the life of his legacy gear through storage virtualization, and his take on emerging technologies like solid-state disk (SSD) drives and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Like many large enterprise organizations, Wells Fargo is dealing with massive amounts of storage and all of the management, migration and data protection tasks that come with it. Dillon says he has about 5PB of storage deployed in production. Storage infrastructures of that size require a pragmatic management approach. That's why the Wells Fargo IT philosophy is "standardize and optimize," while keeping clear of IT's bleeding edge.

To that end, Dillon's main goals are driving up utilization and enhancing availability and storage virtualization is the linchpin in the process.

"Virtualization is something that we are committed to and we are deploying it across our environment. It helps our cost models because it allows us to have heterogeneous [storage] providers behind virtualization devices. With virtualization, we don't have to throw out one infrastructure to bring in a new one," says Dillon. "We are big on leveraging what we already have."

He says virtualization has helped streamline a number of complex tasks, including capacity provisioning, data migration and storage tiering. He also credits storage virtualization with speeding service delivery to customers.

As for his take on vendors, Dillon would not name his storage suppliers, but he does hint at what Wells Fargo is looking for going forward.

"A lot of the large storage providers are starting to make their play into the end-to-end space. They are putting it all together, which is how we look at the big picture. We would like to see these organizations driving their products toward IEEE standards so that we don't get locked in [to any one vendor]," he says.

Dillon stresses the importance of the customer-provider relationship in his decision-making process. "The quality, availability and resiliency of a product in an industrial enterprise setting are incredibly important to us. I want the vendor engaged and I want the sales team to have as much incentive to deliver on their commitment as they do in selling me their next product. If the product is good and you deliver on your commitment you are going to sell me a lot more stuff," he says.

"What's amazing to me is how many people are just focused on the sale. I need to know they are going to be there for the long term. When times are tough it's about who is going to be there focused on your optimization and driving up utilization," Dillon says.

Dillon is also keeping on eye on several emerging storage technologies.

On SSDs: "There is a lot of initial hype. The value proposition is there. What's intriguing is reduced power consumption. But there are a lot of questions. How many times can you write to the drive? What about availability? I don't see [SSDs] as something we would deploy in production in the near future, but the promise is there and we see it."

On data de-duplication: "We have deployed some data de-duplication technologies in our environment. We are realizing some very good lift in [our de-dupe implementation]. There is a lot of promise, but the technology needs to mature."

On FCoE: "We continue to watch it very closely. We are, in general, very interested in any technology that fits with our pragmatic and customer-centric philosophy. Directionally, I think the concept of unified networking is great."

Once the aforementioned technologies mature, Dillon will weave them into his infrastructure when and if they make business sense.

"It all starts and ends with the customer experience. You can't do technology for the sake of doing technology. It has to improve the customer's experience," he says.

VMware's vSphere of influence

2009-04-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

April 21, 2009 -- Today's release of VMware's vSphere 4 operating system – a new OS for building internal clouds – has brought with it a tsunami of support from dozens of storage vendors.

The vSphere 4 OS aggregates and manages large pools of infrastructure resources – processors, storage and networking – as a dynamic operating environment. VMware claims vSphere 4 will "bring the power of cloud computin g to the datacenter, slashing IT costs while dramatically increasing IT responsiveness." VMware also touts vSphere as a path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers' internal cloud infrastructures. VMware plans to build in support for dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling "private" cloud environments that span multiple datacenters and/or cloud providers.

Big, bad virtual machines

Using the vSphere OS, users can build bigger, faster virtual computing environments. According to VMware's published specs, the platform can pool together up to:

32 physical servers with up to 2048 processor cores
1,280 virtual machines
32TB of RAM
16PB of storage
8,000 network ports

It also creates bigger, faster virtual machines (VMs) with up to:

2x the number of virtual processors per virtual machine (from 4 to 8)
2.5x more virtual NICs per virtual machine (from 4 to 10)
4x more memory per virtual machine (from 64 GB to 255GB)
3x increase in network throughput (from 9 Gbps to 30Gbps)
3x increase in the maximum recorded I/O operations per second (to over 300,000)
New maximum recorded number of transactions per second - 8,900

Data protection and migration

VMware also claims vSphere offers zero downtime and zero data loss protection against hardware failures with VMware Fault Tolerance and minimized planned downtime due to storage maintenance and migrations with VMware Storage VMotion, which provides live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous networked storage types.

vSphere 4 also features integrated disk-based backup and recovery for all applications via VMware Data Recovery and VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, which keeps capacity-hungry VMs in check.

Storage vendors on board

The announcements are coming fast and furious from the storage community as, so far, 3PAR, Akorri, CA, Compellent Technologies, CommVault, Dell, Double-Take Software, EMC, Emulex, FalconStor Software, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Nexenta, StoneFly, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and Vizioncore have all pledged support for vSphere 4.

Read on for the details we have so far…

3PAR

3PAR's InServ Storage Servers are on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for VMware vSphere 4. In addition, 3PAR and VMware are investing in joint engineering projects. For example, the 3PAR already supports the VMware vStorage initiative and the recently released adaptive queuing technology that became available in VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and is included in VMware vSphere 4.

Akorri

Akorri's BalancePoint software will support VMware vSphere by the end of 2009. BalancePoint is available on a VMware certified virtual appliance and assists in cross-domain virtualized data center management, managing virtual and physical server and storage infrastructure from a single console.

Compellent Technologies

Compellent Technologies announced that its Storage Center SAN supports VMware vSphere. Compellent's Storage Center has completed the VMware Hardware Certification Program testing criteria and is now listed on the VMware HCL for use with vSphere.

EMC

EMC announced new high-availability advancements for next-generation virtual data centers with the new EMC PowerPath/VE software. The PowerPath/VE software provides path management, load balancing and fail-over capabilities for VMware vSphere 4.

Emulex

Emulex's LightPulse host bus adapters (HBAs) and converged network adapters (CNAs) are fully supported with VMware in-box drivers as part of VMware vSphere 4. The LightPulse 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs and 10Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) CNAs deliver more than double the IOPS performance in VMware vSphere 4 environments over the previous release, according to Emulex.

FalconStor Software

FalconStor Software's NSS-S12 storage array supports vSphere and on the vSphere HCL. FalconStor's Network Storage Server (NSS) technology integrates storage virtualization and provisioning across multiple disk arrays and connection protocols to create a scalable iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN.

HP

Hewlett-Packard announced the integration of vSphere 4 into its HP Adaptive Infrastructure (AI) portfolio. The interoperability of VMware vSphere 4 with HP's portfolio includes hardware compatibility for a range of HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers and StorageWorks systems and software integration of HP's Insight software with vSphere 4.

NetApp

NetApp also announced the integration and certification of its storage platforms with vSphere 4. NetApp storage platforms and software products such as SANscreen VM Insight and MultiStore are certified for vSphere 4 and available now. The NetApp Virtualization Guarantee Program for vSphere is also available immediately.

StoneFly

IP SAN maker StoneFly announced completion of VMware vSphere certification across its entire SAN product line. StoneFly IP SANs supporting VMware vSphere, including the StoneFly Voyager, Integrated Storage Concentrator and OptiSAN product lines, are now available.

Symmetrix V-Max: EMC’s big play for big data centers

2009-04-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

April 14, 2009 -- There has been a fair amount of speculation that EMC would launch a new Symmetrix DMX-5 system, but while the company's latest high-end array shares the Symmetrix moniker, it's a completely different platform with an architecture built for virtualized data centers.

InfoStor's coverage of the EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture and Symmetrix V-Max Storage System launch outlines the technology, EMC's plans and how it all relates to cloud computing.

The architecture combines scale-up and scale-out capabilities with centralized management and (forthcoming) automated tiering of SSDs, Fibre Channel and SATA drives. The Symmetrix V-Max is significantly bigger and faster than the DMX-4, but has been specifically designed to support enormous cloud computing and virtual data center infrastructures.

David Vellante, co-founder and contributor to The Wikibon Project, says customers should take this announcement very seriously, especially if they have existing Symmetrix processes in place.

"To the extent EMC delivers on its vision, the V-Max will bring incremental strategic value to many customers and will represent a longer term investment platform. Specifically, the possibility of doing automated tiered storage within a federated Symmetrix infrastructure could be very cost competitive and advantageous if EMC can ship enough volume and – very importantly – ship software that automates the placement of data on the most cost-effective tier," says Vellante. "This software is not here today and that's important."

The software – EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology – is expected to debut later this year, according to EMC. It is touted as a feature that will automatically move data to appropriate tiers of storage within the Virtual Matrix Architecture. This is especially significant as EMC tries to speed the adoption of solid-state disk (SSD) drives as "tier zero" storage for frequently accessed data in high performance applications.

"The problem folks are having is they really don't have an automated way to move data between T1 and T2. So if EMC can give them a way to do that all within a single architecture from Tier 0 down to Tier 3 with high capacity SATA that gets interesting. But again, the software to do this is not here today, the [Virtual Matrix Architecture announcement] is the first step," says Vellante.

The industry reaction is sure to come fast and furious as the details of V-Max reverberate through the storage landscape. Stay with InfoStor's coverage of the announcement as Editor-in-Chief Dave Simpson adds his two cents to the discussion.

We have also posted a V-Max Lab Review from Enterprise Strategy Group to our ESG Lab Validation section found here.

SNW: Day two recap

2009-04-07T16:59:00.000-07:00

Brocade is now shipping an FCoE switch and adapters to OEMs, Symantec has added DR testing software to its product line via a partnership and solid-state specialist Fusion-io just bagged close to $50 million funding.

Day two of Storage Networking World was uneventful from a news perspective, but we were able to track down some industry insiders and SNIA members to explain some of this week's announcements.

First up, a keynote from Symantec's new CEO, Enrique Salem, during which he said:

"Stop buying storage."

Not a surprising statement when you consider it came from a software company, but Salem says data reduction technologies and better management can defray the cost of additional hardware through better utilization.

"In many companies there are differences in storage hardware, and often islands of storage. One department might have plenty of free storage while another is adding arrays," Salem told a standing-room crowd this morning. "You need to identify and reclaim what you've bought but aren't using. Find that orphan storage, and bring it home. The hardware vendors will tell you they can show you how your existing storage is being used. Remember, their ultimate goal is to sell you more hardware."

Salem says storage resource management (SRM), thin provisioning, data de-duplication, and intelligent archiving can all bring those orphans home.

On the cloud storage front, I was able to sit down with Storage Networking Industry Association Chairman Emeritus and member of the Board of Directors Vincent Franceschini to discuss the Association's formation of a Technical Work Group (TWG) for cloud storage.

"It has become very clear that we need to clarify the definitions and terminology surrounding cloud storage," said Franceschini. "We believe we can help the market overall by delivering reference models to describe different solutions and cloud frameworks."

He also said industry collaboration is a must if cloud storage is going to be a viable option for enterprise storage in the future.

"We are going to be collaborating with other industry groups. There is no way it is going to work if [cloud platforms] are not integrated," he said.

The SNIA has also set up a Google group in an effort to maintain a "public face" on the Cloud Storage TWG's work.

SNW: Day one recap

2009-04-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

April 06, 2009 -- The Storage Networking World (SNW) conference is under way and the InfoStor team is in Orlando to keep you up-to-date on news and announcements from the show.

A few product announcements trickled out of SNW this morning, including FalconStor Software’s release of the Backup Accelerator option for its Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product, 3PAR’s launch of a quad-controller storage array for midrange customers, the debut of cloud storage services startup Zetta, and the availability of Netgear’s newest NAS/unified storage system with a cloud storage option for SMBs.

Speaking of the cloud – and that’s all we seem to be speaking about lately – the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the creation of the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) aimed at developing SNIA Architectures and best practices related to cloud storage technology. The initial TWG charter includes the focus to produce a set of specifications and to drive the consistency of interface standards across the various cloud storage related efforts.

The Cloud Storage TWG is also soliciting proposals for standard interfaces and is looking to engage vendors and other “Cloud industry parties” in its efforts. The group plans to release a reference model for Cloud Storage with associated terminology definitions to aid in further work on the standards. Cloud service and storage interface definitions are expected in draft form later this year and anticipated to be adopted starting in 2010.

The SNIA is also refocusing its efforts on the IP storage front. The Association announced an expansion in the charter of the SNIA IP Storage Forum, which is reflected in its new name – the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF). The EFS has been tasked with driving the broad adoption of all Ethernet–connected storage networking solutions.

The ESF will consist of two Special Interest Groups - the iSCSI SIG and the NFS SIG. The iSCSI SIG will focus on continuing the IP Storage Forum agenda to evangelize the benefits and best practices related to iSCSI. Member companies include Compellent, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, NetApp and Sun.

The new NFS SIG will be focused on NFS-based NAS solutions, particularly emerging technologies, such as pNFS. The founding members of the NFS SIG include EMC, NetApp, Panasas and Sun.

Additionally, the group also plans to form a Special Interest Group focused on the CIFS/SMB protocol and ecosystem.

Hifn made news with the launch of its BitWackr 250 and 255, which are aimed at server OEMs, Microsoft Partners and white-box server builders looking to add hardware-assisted data de-duplication and compression with thin provisioning to Windows Servers.

According to Hifn, BitWackr provides real-time, in-line de-dupe and compression, reducing the amount of data written to disk. The cards combine the company’s BitWackr block-based de-dupe software with a Hifn Express DR 250 PCI-x or 255 PCIe card that employs specialized hardware to perform data compression and de-dupe hashing operations.

The BitWackr 250 and 255 products are priced at $995 with general availability slated for the third quarter of this year.

InfoStor’s Editor-in-Chief, Dave Simpson, and I will be blogging/reporting from the conference all this week. Check out the Infostor homepage for the latest industry news & analysis from SNW Orlando. There is some news from Symantec on the horizon and Brocade has called a press conference for tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned…

Cisco's UCS: The industry reacts

2009-03-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

March 24, 2009 -- The IT world has had about a week to digest, mull and question the ins-and-outs of Cisco's newly announced "game-changer," the Unified Computing System. And the industry certainly has questions for Cisco.

Several competitors are questioning whether Cisco's UCS – the platform that combines compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single system based on a new line of blade servers developed by Cisco – features a truly open architecture.

Brocade's CEO Mike Klayko made his opinion known yesterday in a video posted to the Brocade YouTube Channel.

Klayko does not believe large enterprise customers will put mission critical applications on a version one product, referring to Cisco's new blade servers.

Brocade has also issued an official statement to the media in response to Cisco's UCS launch. It reads:

"A dynamic and virtualized data center holds the promise of many compelling benefits for end-users including increased server utilization, decrease in power footprint and more efficient operations in general. However, achieving this goal is a complex challenge that can be best tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary, singular architecture of one company.

In contrast, Brocade is already helping customers address these challenges by integrating our networking solutions with a range of mature computing, management and storage technologies from some of the strongest companies in the world. These partnerships are leveraging open interfaces/standards, co-developed technology, and products that are available today, which will lower costs and maximize return on investment for customers."

BLADE Network Technologies president and CEO Vikram Mehta also took aim at Cisco in a recent blog entry where he lists 10 reasons why Cisco's Unified Computing strategy is nothing more than a way to lock customers into a proprietary world while locking out vendors like HP and IBM.

Cisco begs to differ. Rob Lloyd, executive vice president designate, Worldwide Operations for Cisco, explained that Cisco has "built an open ecosystem of industry leaders" in support of the UCS even going as far as to refer to UCS supporters as a "dream team of capable partners."

Cisco is collaborating with a wide range of hardware and software vendors to develop systems and applications that work with the platform. Specifically, Cisco is teaming up with technology partners BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat, and VMware and has expanded strategic relationships with Accenture, CSC, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro.

Noticeably absent from the partner list are the server vendors. However, Lloyd told media and analysts in last week's UCS conference call that Cisco does not view the UCS as a blade server.

"The UCS will be shipped and configured as a system. That's why we don't think we're competing on a blade platform, but on a new system form factor," he said.

Is 2009 the year of unified fabrics?

2009-03-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

Tight budgets invite tough decisions. Some storage projects will undoubtedly be shelved this year as end users look to drive cost out of the data center. As a part of those consolidation efforts, network fabrics could get a makeover.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) analyst Bob Laliberte believes all organizations are in uncharted economic territory and 2009 will clearly be a challenging year for IT budgets.

However, according to his research, the majority of organizations surveyed by ESG expect that their storage spending will increase slightly in 2009.

ESG estimates that storage capital spending will grow at a modest rate of 2.9% from 2008 to 2009, outpacing most expectations of overall IT spending growth. Spending increases will be centered among the largest, most data-intensive organizations and will be tied to specific business initiatives such as Web 2.0 projects, improved business intelligence, and globalization.

If the main players in the push for unified networking technologies are to be believed, the economic climate creates a big opportunity for unified networking technologies. Both Brocade and Cisco say they are seeing success with their newest products as users are well on their way to adopting the core platforms necessary for supporting the unified fabrics of the future.

"Our DCX Backbone is the fastest ramping and most widely successful product line we've ever had," said Brocade's senior director of product marketing, Marty Lans.

Though Brocade doesn't break out specific numbers for public consumption, the company cites internal metrics and general market acceptance as the measure of success for the DCX. The company bases its claims on the number of units shipped and port density.

Cisco is also enjoying success as it positions the capabilities of its Nexus platform as necessary for virtual data centers.

"The implementation of a unified fabric infrastructure allows for combining storage and data traffic on a single, unified Ethernet network. As virtualization becomes a stronger design influence in the data center, these features become a requirement to support virtual environments," said Cisco's Dante Malagrino, director of product marketing for data center emerging technology.

Cisco touts more than 250 customers for its new flagship product, the Nexus 7000, which began shipping in January of 2008.

According to Laliberte, server virtualization is also driving the need for faster, more advanced storage networking technologies.

"Our research indicates that all networked storage is increasing, Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN and NAS. With multiple virtual machines there is a need for additional throughput," he said.

Laliberte thinks the concept of consolidated fabrics will continue to gain acceptance this year.

"As long as organizations continue to consolidate data centers and infrastructure – the ability to consolidate FC directors onto a backbone should resonate – saves on power, cooling and space and the new virtual fabric technology ensures secure segmentation of the SAN," he said.

Survey says…

2008-12-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of year again. Major product announcements are scarce as we head into the holiday season, but the storage vendors are attempting to fill the December news void with a series of surveys that gauge the challenges facing end users in 2009.

How do you stack up against your peers when it comes to storage planning for next year?

Enterprise users

Virtual tape library (VTL) and de-duplication vendor SEPATON recently conducted a survey of IT pros in U.S.-based corporations to get a feel for what challenges they will face around data protection, business objectives and technology requirements for enterprise data centers in 2009.

Of the 145 respondents – all from enterprise companies with at least 1,000 employees and a minimum of 50TB of primary data to protect – 52% say their data protection is insufficient, citing a “lack of budget to keep pace with technology” as the cause.

The research also reveals that backup is still the scourge of many enterprise organizations. Fifty-three percent of respondents need more than 20 hours to complete a full backup, while 37% say they need more than 24 hours to complete a full backup.

According to the SEPATON survey, users are planning to turn to new technologies such as data de-duplication in order to maintain service levels and regulatory compliance.

More than 90% of respondents are either using de-dupe now or want to use it. Of those who do not have de-dupe, 55% are allocating dollars for the technology in 2009.

In addition, a majority of the respondents are using physical tape, but fewer than 50% expect to be using tape one year from now as they increase their use of disk-based technologies like disk-to-disk, VTL appliances, or VTL gateways.

SMBs

Backup pains aren’t just a problem for big IT shops. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) also rate backup as a top priority and an all-around pain in the neck, according to a recent study commissioned by Symantec and conducted by Rubicon Consulting.

Backup ranks as the second-highest computing priority for SMBs, after defense against viruses and other malware, according to responses IT decision-makers at several hundred small businesses (with fewer than 250 employees).

Ninety-two percent of companies poled have deployed some form of data backup technology, yet 50% of those respondents have lost data. Of the companies that lost data, roughly a third have lost sales, 20% have lost customers and 25% say the data loss caused severe disruptions to the company.

Some of the results were disconcerting, given how destructive data loss can be to SMBs. Approximately 25% of SMBs don’t backup their PCs at all and 13% do only informal backups where employees decide the frequency and which files are protected, according to Rubicon. Additionally, about 20% of SMBs conduct no server backups.

CIOs

Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently revealed the results of its own commissioned survey of chief information officers (CIOs) conducted by Hansa |GCR.

The Web survey of 600 technology decision-makers from medium-sized organizations to enterprises across the globe shows that 84% of tech organizations plan to “transform” their data centers in the next 12 months as they look to lower operating costs and reduce business risks through technology.

So-called "data center transformation" projects typically include consolidation, virtualization and business continuity initiatives.

According to the study, 31% of respondents say reducing cost is a top priority for ’09, while 29% plan to enhance data security. The decision-makers also say that technology needs – not business needs – are prompting these investments.

The survey also shows that 95% of organizations are implementing or planning for data center consolidation next year, while 93% and 91% are embarking on business continuity and virtualization projects, respectively.

The research may be sponsored by vendors, but, for the most part, it is in line with a lot of the third party research covered on InfoStor.com. Stay tuned as we track these predictions over the next several months.

The clouds are forming

2008-11-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

There’s a perfect storm of cheap hardware, massively scalable architectures and automated data management developing. Cloud-based storage is here.

Actually, cloud platforms have been around for a while (see Amazon’s S3 service and products from companies such as Bycast, Nirvanix and ParaScale as examples), but now EMC has stepped into the fray with its Atmos platform. A move that has, in the minds of many, simultaneously given credibility to the technology and officially established the market.

Even some of the unflappable experts in the industry have been taken aback by the amount of buzz drummed up by the Atmos launch earlier this month. Personally, I have been inundated with media pitches and interview requests from every vendor that can in some way tie the term cloud computing to their technology. They’re coming out of the woodwork.

It begs the question: Are cloud infrastructures and resulting cloud-based storage services all hype or are we truly entering a new era?

Jeff Boles, a senior analyst and director of validation services at the Taneja Group research and consulting firm and an InfoStor contributor, is convinced that cloud storage will change IT strategies in many ways.

In a recent series of articles on the topic, he makes three pretty bold predictions about the impact cloud-based storage will have on the industry. He writes:

1.) Users will expect cheaper storage, as user self-service makes storage in the cloud less expensive to deliver.

2.) Users will expect more responsive and scalable storage, because hosted providers can respond and scale on demand.

3.) Users will expect to access and manage their data in ways that were not possible before.

It’s looking like 2009 is set up to be the year that the technology will begin to change user expectations and it’s a safe bet that we’ll be tracking this segment of the storage market. It will be interesting to find out how many end users actually have their heads in the clouds.

Whatever happened to SMI-S?

2008-11-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

Rooting through the press packets and marketing materials left over from the Storage Networking World conference can sometimes help in developing story ideas, as vendors tend to include press releases from the show, technology white papers and company backgrounders. As I was flipping through the materials from the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), I came across a press release that I hadn’t noticed before and it made me wonder whatever happened to the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).

Apparently, there have been some developments in the spec. The SNIA has made version 1.3 of the SMI-S available with support for some new features and functions. For those who don’t know, SMI-S was introduced years ago under the SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative (SMI) as an interoperable management interface for multi-vendor storage networking products.

The SMI-S describes available information from storage hardware and software to a WBEM Client from an SMI-S compliant CIM Server and an object-oriented, XML-based interface. That information provides a foundation for identifying the attributes and properties of storage devices and facilitates discovery, security, virtualization, performance, and fault reporting.

The newly available version 1.3 features new support for more advanced storage architectures and functions like storage virtualization, VTLs, SAN security and RAID controller cards. The spec also now accommodates support for Fibre Channel switches to improve SMI-S solutions by speeding up discovery and monitoring larger device configurations.

That’s fine, but how much does it really matter? The SNIA and its participating vendors have made many claims since the inception of the SMI-S project. It was supposed to be a stepping-stone to interoperability. Some even claimed that users would make SMI-S a checklist item and would eventually require it as feature of any storage device or product going forward.

I have to agree with the opinions of Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International. In a two-part column earlier this year for InfoStor, Toigo stated that SMI-S has not caught on in the mainstream. In fact, I think that’s an understatement.

Slowly but surely vendor noise around the spec has died down and now it seems to have completely disappeared. Mentions of SMI-S conformance have vanished from vendor PowerPoint presentations and I can’t remember the last time a storage exec highlighted SMI-S conformance as a product feature.

The SNIA has recently turned its attention to other projects like the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI), but SMI-S development continues to roll on. In conjunction with release of version 1.3, SNIA has also launched supporting conformance tests and the first of the SMI-S committed vendors to pass the SNIA Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) provider suite for SMI-S version 1.3 storage management include EMC, HDS and HP.

According to Paul von Behren, chair of the Storage Management Initiative Governing Board, SMI-S now “contains sufficient breadth and depth of functionality such that the Storage industry can use the technology as the reference interface for managing enterprise storage solutions.”

That may be true, but after six years of development and investment how has SMI-S changed multi-vendor storage management? Given that proprietary management software still rules the day, I’d say the SMI-S has fallen short on delivering on the promise of being a panacea for open storage management.

Users get "excited" over storage vendors, technologies

2008-10-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Which vendors or technologies come to mind when you think about “exciting” storage products and services? According to IT industry research firm TheInfoPro (TIP), storage professionals in Fortune 1000 and midsize enterprises definitely have an answer to that question.

The firm’s latest research on storage adoption plans, management strategies, and vendor performance has been released and more than 250 Fortune 1000 and midsize end users say they are turning their attention to vendors that provide de-duplication, thin provisioning, virtualized provisioning, and capacity optimization technologies, according to TIP’s managing director of storage research, Robert Stevenson.

As a result, NetApp and Data Domain have seen the largest increase in mentions. Both vendors offer data de-duplication technologies and coincidentally each has pushed further into the de-dupe market over the past couple of days.

NetApp, which already offers de-duplication for primary storage via its Data ONTAP operating system announced this week that de-dupe is now available for its family of NetApp Virtual Tape Library (VTL) systems. Also, Data Domain this week entered a partnership with F5 Networks to co-market a joint solution that automates the movement of static and archive data from primary storage to a secondary storage tier. The joint offering will combine the de-dupe capabilities of Data Domain’s disk-based storage systems with the F5 ARX series of file virtualization devices.

Stevenson says his “Wave 11 Time Series Storage Study” shows that end users are looking for SAN architectures that are more active in managing storage utilization. It makes sense since the top technology in end users plans is once again data de-duplication, which has been dominating TIP’s list for more than a year.

Overall, Fortune 1000 users gave EMC the nod as the most exciting storage vendor followed by NetApp, Data Domain, IBM and 3PAR, while midsize users surveyed listed Data Domain, 3PAR, Compellent, EMC and HDS as their top five most exciting vendors.

Dell mulls FCoE support

2008-10-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

After shelling out $1.4 billion to buy SAN maker EqualLogic last year, it is safe to say that Dell has a hefty stake in the success and growth of the iSCSI storage market. Given all of the recent noise in the industry around Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) being the preferred storage protocol of the future, Dell held a conference call with media and analysts this morning to offer its two cents on the topic.

What it boils down to is that Dell’s storage folks believe converged networks based on lossless Ethernet technology will float all storage boats. According to Eric Endebrock, senior manager for Dell’s storage product group, iSCSI is here to stay and Fibre Channel storage will bolster FCoE as a way to connect legacy FC systems over 10GbE networks (and eventually 100GbE networks).

"Dell is a big believer in unifying the fabric, but that is long-term," said Endebrock. "We are not looking to take our customers and forklift them away from the environments they have today, but they will soon have to start making some choices."

Dell’s official stance is that unified fabrics make the most sense financially for customers in the long-term.

"We are going to support 10GbE and Data Center Ethernet (also known as Converged Enhanced Ethernet) in our EqualLogic PS arrays. Today our PS arrays support iSCSI and will continue to support iSCSI in the future," said Endebrock. "We are not changing now, but protocol flexibility is going to be a key to our success. EqualLogic equals iSCSI is not the best way to think about our investment in that area."

In other words, the company is not ruling out support for FCoE in its Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series iSCSI SAN arrays.

At last week’s Storage Networking World conference, I asked Dell’s director of enterprise storage, Praveen Asthana, for his take on FCoE and how it might fit into Dell’s product plans going forward.

Asthana said FCoE has already been successful in one respect. It has prompted customers to start thinking about the future. However, he maintained that FCoE requires a networking overhaul and iSCSI is still less expensive overall. He also referred to FCoE as "a stop on the way to iSCSI."

It is no surprise that Dell, like its competitors, is keeping its options open. In the end, customers will ultimately dictate which protocol will dominate or whether FCoE and iSCSI will truly coexist in converged networks.

Time to optimize?

2008-10-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

Recessions are often the mother of innovation. Times are tight and it is in these circumstances that technology upstarts have an opportunity to make some hay. Look no further than NetApp’s growth post-2001.

My colleague Dave Simpson recently listed his top 5 “hot” technologies from the floor of the Storage Networking World conference, giving the nod to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and server virtualization as the top-two tech topics. Both are consolidation plays with FCoE solving network and cabling complexity and virtual machines reducing server hardware requirements. However, I find his third pick – storage efficiency technologies – to be the most intriguing segment of the storage market.

Also referred to overall as storage optimization technologies, data de-duplication, compression and thin provisioning are moving up the stack from secondary storage applications to primary systems.

It is in this area that new companies like Ocarina Networks and Storwize may now get a seat at the table as customers look for ways to squeeze more out of their existing hardware investments, especially given the near term purchasing plans of IT buyers.

The latest wave of research from TheInfoPro (TIP) shows that technology refresh purchases during the middle of 2008 are offsetting typical year-end purchases and will lead to a significant drop in storage spending for the fourth quarter of 2008.

Ocarina’s products identify patterns and use a blend compression and de-duplication to apply file-specific algorithms to optimize data and how it is stored. Storwize offers a high-performance compression appliance that drops into existing networks to shrink primary storage requirements. NetApp is also offering de-dupe for primary storage as a free option in its Data ONTAP operating system and Riverbed is ramping up for next year’s debut of an appliance that also eliminates redundant data on primary storage systems.

These approaches seem to be worthy of a look. Data is not going to stop growing, but the amount users spend on storage capacity can be controlled using these types of technologies.

For a complete overview of the optimization market and the vendors involved, check out InfoStor contributor and Taneja Group analyst Eric Burgener’s article “It’s time for primary storage optimization.”

SNW and unanswered questions

2008-10-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

After eight years of making the semi-annual pilgrimage to Storage Networking World (SNW), the trip tends to become about routine. Make sure you register and reserve a hotel room in time. Book as many vendor and analyst meetings as possible and try to be at the right place at the right time so as not to throw your schedule into a tailspin. Oh yeah, try to cover all of the news.

Sometimes I need to tie a string around my finger to remember to eat.

There are a lot of trade-offs at trade shows. Face-time with storage vendors and analysts often usurps time that could be spent talking to end users.

I did manage to have a few interesting conversations with some of the SNW attendees in-between running to the press room and vendor briefings. When asked about new technologies like solid-state disks (SSDs) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), 100% of those kind enough to indulge my curiosity responded in the same way: “I can see their benefits, but talk to me when they can help me with the problems I have now.”

So what are those problems? Backup windows, playing catch-up with unexpected capacity growth, grappling with ILM strategies and, the big one, figuring out how to support virtual servers as they multiply like rabbits.

The breakout sessions and tutorials at SNW are informative and covered all of the above issues to a degree, but they tend to be general their scope. The users seemed to need much more information and advice specific to their challenges.

I drop a business card on users once I’m done picking their brains and invite them to e-mail or call me any time they can’t get straight answers to their questions in the hopes that I can help. Given the frequency with which the InfoStor team talks to storage vendors, it only makes sense to ask these companies real-world questions from real-world users.

Consider this a virtual business card and an invitation to do the same. If a vendor tap dances around your questions, feel free to shoot them off to me at kevink@pennwell.com. I’ll ask them for you and post the questions and responses in this blog.

The better the questions, the better the coverage. This way there are no trade-offs and I might even remember to eat breakfast.