Dedupe, Solid State and 6Gb SAS Headline at SNW

The theme of this week’s Storage Networking World show seems to match the economic backdrop: doing more with less, or in this case, getting more capacity or performance out of data storage systems.

Data deduplication, 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), virtualization, automation, optimization and energy cost savings seem to be the buzzwords most bandied about in product announcements this week.

But perhaps the most interesting news involved a pair of venture funding announcements that suggest interest in the data storage sector remains high. Solid-state storage startup Fusion-io — best known for landing Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak — announced a whopping $47.5 million second funding round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures, and Virtual Tape Library company Sepaton netted $15.5 million in seventh-round funding from Focus Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Valhalla Partners and HarbourVest Partners.

Dedupe catches on

Deduplication remains a strong market because of its ability to generate a quick return on investment (ROI) by getting rid of duplicate data, and plenty of vendors were pushing the technology this week.

Storwize unveiled its STN-6000i capacity optimization appliances for primary and backup storage, with pricing starting at $35,000.

Hifn, acquired last week by Exar (NASDAQ: EXAR), announced its BitWackr data reduction solutions for Windows servers starting at $995.

FalconStor Software (NASDAQ: FALC) unveiled a backup acceleration option for its virtual tape libraries (VTLs).

Nirvanix and Ocarina partnered to bring Ocarina’s data reduction technology to the cloud.

Virtualization and automation also continue to gain favor as tools for reducing IT resource and staffing needs.

Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) unveiled Veritas CommandCentral Disaster Recovery Advisor, a software management tool that automatically identifies high availability and disaster recovery risks, a product OEMed from Continuity Software.

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced new storage and data management features for VMware (NYSE: VMW) View for virtual desktop environments.

HP (NYSE: HPQ) refreshed its HP Storage Essentials software so users can discover and map VMware hosts to storage to remove storage from virtual machines that are not being fully utilized and making it available to areas that need it. The upgrade also automatically provisions storage to a VMware hypervisor or guest operating system, and is integrated with HP Operations Orchestration workflow software and the HP BSA software suite.

SAS gains favor for performance

SAS is catching on as a lower-cost, high-performance alternative to Fibre Channel , and ATTO Technology and LSI (NYSE: LSI) led the parade of offerings at SNW.

ATTO announced the FastStream SC 8200 controller, with 6-Gig SAS host connectivity and 3-Gig SAS and SATA drive connectivity, high-performance RAID protection, and advanced management features.

LSI acquired Applied Micro Circuits’ (NASDAQ: AMCC) 3ware storage adapter solutions business for $20 million and also claimed to be the first company to achieve more than 1 million IOPS in a 6Gb SAS performance demonstration on a single server.

3PAR (NYSE: PAR) unveiled its InServ F-Class Storage Servers, which it claims can save users time and money over other midrange storage offerings.

Data Robotics announced DroboPro for small businesses based on its BeyondRAID storage platform.

Xiotech showcased power and cooling conservation features for its Emprise 5000 storage system, with a new low-power stand-by mode for idle periods.

Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) announced a Workload Optimization suite for data and workload portability, backup and availability.

This story originally appeared on Enterprise Storage Forum.