Pillar unveils SSD Bricks

Two days back, Pillar announced the availability of SSD Bricks for its Axiom Storage Array. SSD bricks will be available for purchase by the month of June. It is under beta testing with three vendors.

SSD Bricks in Axiom allows adding a fifth storage tier, Tier 0, to say appropriately. These SSD bricks are backed by the Pillar’s QoS which offers the selection of different profiles and priorities for the applications that are attached to Axiom.

SSD Bricks includes 12 SSD Drives of 64 GB SATA SSDs. Pillar’s Axiom arrays are built using a combination of “brick” capacity nodes and “slammer” compute nodes that scale performance and capacity independently. Like standard Axiom Bricks, the SSD Bricks will include Pillar’s unique Distributed RAID technology that allows for easy and rapid scalability with no performance degradation. These new Bricks are backed by Pillar’s written utilization and performance guarantees.

Pillar’s Press release is here

Storage Investments Remain Resilient

A recent survey covering planned expenditures across 26 technology catagories was conducted by Millward Brown, Research International, and Lightspeed Research collaborate with LinkedIn uncovers that only ”Data Storage” is the technology to see increased spending this year. This survey reveals that Virtualization is the next key trend that will impact the industry.

This survey was conducted among LinkedIn members who were IT Professionals. 450 of them from US and UK participated in this survey. While overall spending on Storage was only expected to increase by a marginal amount (less then 1%), this is in stark contrast to other hardware categories which showed declines between 2-3%. When asked about the key challenges facing them in the coming year, technology decision makers cited ”meeting the same or similar objectives with lower IT budgets,”

To read the complete report visit here.

http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/MillwardBrown/Content/News/PressReleaseView.aspx?id=/20090303_StorageInvestmentsRemainResilient

2009 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS 2009)

The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS 2009) is to be held on July 9-11, 2009 in Zhang Jia Jie, China.

It will serve as an international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss cutting edge research on networking (wired and wireless), high-performance computer architecture, and parallel and distributed data storage technologies. NAS 2009 will expose participants to the most recent developments in these interdisciplinary  areas.

For more information, please visit

http://www.eece.maine.edu/nas/

1st Workshop on Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP)

Call for Participation

1st Workshop on Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP)

February 23, 2009

San Francisco, California

Provenance, or meta-information about computations, computer systems, database queries, scientific workflows, and so on, is emerging as a central issue in a number of disciplines. The TaPP workshop continues an informal series of workshops on Principles of Provenance organized in 2007–2008. We hope both to attract serious cross-disciplinary, foundational, and highly speculative research and to facilitate needed interaction with the broader systems community and with industry.

Full program details are available here.

http://www.usenix.org/events/tapp09/tech/tech.html

SNIA announces Initial Green Storage Power Measurement Specification

SNIA today announced the availability of Initial Green Storage Power Measurement Specification for public review.

The initial Green Storage Power Measurement Specification includes a “Green Storage Taxonomy” for classifying storage products based on energy consumption characteristics and application environments, as well as a baseline standard for idle power metrics which can be applied as a uniform method for collecting idle power consumption measurements.

Specification for review is available at

http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview/

The First Workshop on Integrating Solid-state Memory into the Storage Hierarchy

WISH 2009 Call For Papers

There are a variety of solid state technologies, such as, Flash, Magnetoresistive RAM, Phase Change Memory(PCM). Each of them have their own characteristics on Read/Write, power, reliability and cost. The goal of this workshop is to create a forum for interaction between researchers, application developers, system software developers, etc.

Have a look at the following link to find more information

http://www.cse.psu.edu/~tak/wish2009.html

Federal Information Processing Standard 180-3

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is pleased to announce the approval of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 180-3, Secure Hash Standard (SHS), a revision of FIPS 180-2. The Federal Register Notice (FRN) of the approval is available here. The FIPS specifies five secure hash algorithms for use in computing a condensed representation, called a message digest, of electronic data. The five secure hash algorithms are used with other cryptographic algorithms, such as digital signature algorithms, keyed hash message authentication codes or in the generation of random numbers.

Publications are available here…

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsFIPS.html#FIPS-180–3

Press release goes here.

http://csrc.nist.gov/news_events/index.html

DMTF’s Popular Standards

DMTF Survey — 2008: Do customers request support of any of the following DMTF standards in their company’s products?

DMTF’s latest survey reveals what set of DMTF standards do customer asks from vendors. About 101 members have responded and following are the results.

DASH  – 52.3%

SMASH — 61.5%

CDM   — 32.3%

Visit here for the DMTF’s Oct-08 newletter.

Visit here to learn more on the DMTF standards.

EMC Replication Manager

EMC Corporation today announced a new product, EMC Replication Manager, comprises the new data protection functionality for VMWare infrastructure. This new product is application centric and based on point in time replication. It enables managing and protecting the data across environment when used along with other EMC solutions like SnapView, SANCopy, Celerra Replicator, RecoverPoint family, etc.

EMC Replication Manager relies on disk based replicas. These replicas can be mounted for backup, restoration of file systems and reporting cycles.

Features

1. EMC Replication Manager can scale up to 30 clients per Replication Manager server
2. Supports a variety of databases including Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, DB2 UDB
3. Supports VMware® ESX ServerTM on Windows and Linux guest OS.

This tool provides integrated array replicas at the VMware virtual machine level and integrates with VMware ESX Servers and Virtual Center APIs to ensure virtual machine consistency. This new functionality can be used for direct integration with VMware VMFS providing instant VMFS level backup and virtual machine level restore

EMC Replication Manager will be demonstrated in VMWorld 2008.

To learn more about EMC Replication Manager, visit
http://www.emc.com/products/detail/software/replication-manager.htm

For press release, visit
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2008/20080911-01.htm

To learn more about EMC’s virtual infrastructure data protection solutions, visit
http://www.emc.com/solutions/business-need/virtualizing-information-infrastructure/virtual-infrastructure-data-protection.htm

Dell EqualLogic Storage Array (PS5500E)

Dell announced new storage array today. Dell EqualLogic PS Storage Array, PS5500E, a virtualized iSCSI SAN Server, that can offer intelligence and automation with fault tolerance. All PS Series storage arrays include SAN configuration features and capabilities that can automatically detect network topology, create RAID sets and detect faults.

Architecture

PS Series storage arrays are designed in keeping the requirements like Automate management tasks, ease of scaling, providing a single and shared storage service, complying to the standards, highest possible availability and cost effective. PS Series servers has three essential components, PS Array, PS Group and Volumes. PS Series Groups are comprised of one or more Arrays/Disks. PS Volumes are comprised of one or more PS Groups of similar type. PS Series Groups exports the volumes to the host as LUNs.

Features

The primary and interesting feature is Auto-Snapshot manager. This snapshot manager provides the visibility of the snapshot status, schedules and backup job status. The biggest advantage is the recovery level. You can recover a single file, volume or guest machines in total. This is the clear and clever difference between Symantec Netbackup.

Can scaleup from 24TB to 48TB.
Pooled and Tiered Storage with Thin provisioning
Automatic load balancing
Multipath I/O
Smart copy for MS Exchange, SQL Server and Windows Files systems.
Volume cloning, snapshot and volume management
Automated management

Missing Features.
Though the new PS Storage server (PS5500E) has its own advantages it is deprived of key features like 10Gig Ethernet support, SSD support, Hard disk spin-downs and Dedupe.

To know more about the product visit the following link.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/dell_ps5000e