New alliance calls for online access to all archived data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.