Managing and protecting the explosive growth of corporate data was a common theme at this week’s Storage Networking World, with vendors large and small showcasing their data protection and management solutions.
IBM unveiled a number of new offerings, adding to its enterprise line of disk arrays, including a new flexible warranty option, and also unveiling the first 700 GB physical capacity tape media.
Big Blue’s HyperPAV feature for the IBM System Storage DS8000 Turbo storage server automatically allocates aliases for z/OS environments to help clients reduce overall administrative workloads, and Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) boost performance over traditional I/O processing, the company said.
The DS8000 Turbo also comes with a new flexible Enterprise Choice warranty, which lets clients choose round-the-clock warranty options from one year to four years, which IBM says provides a 13 percent to 53 percent cost savings over an EMC DMX2000, depending on configuration.
Microsoft Promotes WS-Management
Microsoft, meanwhile, pushed the WS-Management Web Services protocol. The Distributed Management Task Force standard provides a common way for systems to access and exchange management information and is already built into Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Vista for better manageability, said Gabriel Broner, general manager of Microsoft’s Storage Division.
Microsoft, HP, Sun and Symantec are demonstrating how WS-Management helps Windows storage management applications access and manage storage systems where SMI-S solutions have been deployed without requiring vendors to develop unique management providers for Windows.
Looking ahead, Broner said customers can expect new storage capabilities in Windows Server “Longhorn,” too, such as improvements with the SMB 2.0 file sharing protocol and better support for branch offices. Windows Vista will also bring a range of storage features to the desktop, such as improved snapshot features and better backup and recovery, Broner said.
Switch Vendors Showcase Wares
QLogic unveiled what it claims is the first network platform for storage and server area networking with end-to-end connectivity from host adapters to switched fabrics. The QLogic Network Platform unifies Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Ethernet and InfiniBand technologies from server edge to switched fabric core.
Sensing an opening with the pending merger of Brocade and McData, QLogic also took the wraps off the SANbox 9000 Series director-class switches. Starting at $50,450, the SANbox 9000 can scale to 128 ports in a single 4u chassis, offering redundancy for high availability and supporting a family of I/O blades for intelligent networking.
McData got into the virtualization game with a little help from StoreAge, releasing the McData Virtualizer, the first in a series of Advanced Fabric Services offerings delivered on the company’s Application Services Module (ASM) platform.
DataCore Software previewed SANsymphony Enterprise Edition 6.0, advancing centralized management and administration and adding what the company claims is the “first true Enterprise iSCSI solution.” In addition to its latest virtualization platform, DataCore also released Traveller Continuous Protection and Recovery, a CDP and high-availability mirroring solution.
Backup, Security Featured
WysDM Software refreshed its data protection management software suite, WysDM for Backups and WysDM for Fileservers, to include application discovery capabilities that provide reporting and analysis to meet critical business requirements, enabling organizations to gather information associated with applications, recovery points and restore times to ensure regulatory compliance and business continuity.
Siafu Software threw its hat into the data encryption ring with what it bills as easy-to-use encrypted iSCSI solutions. Siafu Sypher Encryption Appliances are a series of SAN solutions that securely compress data and encrypt tapes destined for offsite locations. Pricing starts at $6,995.
Seagate unveiled Seagate DriveTrust Technology, which the drive maker said combines automated hardware-based security with a programming foundation that makes it easy to add security-based software applications for organization-wide encryption key management, multi-factor user authentication and other capabilities that help lock down digital information at rest. DriveTrust Technology works by encasing the security operations in the hard drive.
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