Enterprise Storage Snapshots – 10/17/03

Enterprise Storage Snapshots offers a weekly wrap-up of what’s going on in the storage industry.

Storage news highlights for the third week of October include: StoneFly Networks debuts its new Storage Concentrator i3000 appliance, HDS and Cisco team on enterprise storage, Agere releases a new SerDes core that offers the flexibility to design chips for storage networking systems using any speed and any protocol, and BakBone and Bridgeworks collaborate on FC connectivity.


StoneFly Networks Seeks to Jumpstart IP SAN Market with Storage Concentrator i3000

StoneFly Networks claims its new Storage Concentrator i3000 lets small-to-medium enterprises and large organizations quickly and easily transform Ethernet networks into cost-effective, highly available IP SANs. With local and remote mirroring capabilities, advanced storage management features, superior throughput, and Flexible Port Configuration (providing up to six iSCSI, SCSI, or FC I/O ports), the new Storage Concentrator i3000 brings a new level of performance and unparalleled price to the IP SAN market, according to the storage start-up.

The i3000 is standards-compliant and offers high-performance features such as an Intel Xeon 3GHz processor and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports for active load balancing of I/O traffic. In addition, StoneFly Replicator mirroring, included with the i3000, supports storage-independent local or remote synchronous or asynchronous data replication over unlimited distances using iSCSI on an Ethernet network for increased data availability and disaster recovery planning.

“Most businesses today guard against a potential local disaster by storing duplicate data outside of their geographic region,” explains Bob Preston, vice president of marketing at StoneFly. “With the Storage Concentrator i3000, businesses receive not only superior performance, but also increased protection through remote data replication, which expedites disaster recovery at a remote location and strengthens business continuity.”

The Storage Concentrator i3000 will join the StoneFly family of IP-based storage products this month, with pricing starting at $13,995 for a single-unit configuration and $19,995 for a FailOver cluster-pair configuration.

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Hitachi Data Systems and Cisco Team on Enterprise Storage

The Cisco MDS 9500 series of Multilayer directors and the Cisco MDS 9216 Multilayer fabric switch are now available from Hitachi Data Systems, a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. , with full service and support through a worldwide reseller agreement with Cisco Systems .

The companies claim customers will be able to benefit from the power and unique connectivity of Hitachi Freedom Storage systems and the networking capabilities of the Cisco MDS products to build highly-scalable networked storage solutions while simplifying their infrastructure and centralizing storage management and security. This combination of technologies will lead to lower management costs and a higher return on investment, according to the companies.

“Working closely with industry leader Hitachi Data Systems, we have gained another respected ally in the storage market, and have achieved a significant milestone in our go-to-market strategy for the Cisco MDS 9000,” says Soni Jiandani, vice president of Marketing for the Storage Technology Group at Cisco. “Cisco SAN technology, combined with Hitachi Data Systems’ technically advanced storage systems, allows our mutual customers to simplify their fabric architecture and centralize storage management while still building the highly scalable, high-performance storage networks they need to grow with them into the future.”

“As part of our TrueNorth vision of providing best-of-breed solutions to our customers, we were the first vendor to complete hardware interoperability qualification testing between the Hitachi Freedom systems and the Cisco MDS 9000 family in SAN environments,” reports Scott Genereux, vice president, Global Marketing and Business Development, Hitachi Data Systems. “With the addition of this new line from Cisco, we further solidify the common goal of simplifying storage networks with highly available and scalable fabrics.”

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Agere Systems’ SerDes Core Provides FC, SATA, SAS, and PCI Express Support on Same Core

Agere Systems reports its new advanced serializer/deserializer (SerDes) core features the ability to address all the necessary high-speed input/output protocols for storage area networking (SAN) infrastructure equipment on a single chip. The new SDM4G13 SerDes core addresses the immediate market opportunity for 1, 2, and 4 gigabits per second (Gb/s) Fibre Channel while offering customers an easy evolution to 10 Gb/s all in the same core.

The SerDes core also supports 1.5 and 3 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA), serial attached SCSI (SAS), and PCI Express standards for high-speed serial storage interconnects, multi-standard support that allows systems designers the flexibility to design chips for storage networking systems using any speed and any protocol. The SDM4G13 SerDes core is being designed into ASICs using TSMC’s 130-nanometer process technology.

“The integration of SerDes technology will continue to be a popular design trend going forward, especially as SAN disk array and infrastructure OEMs look to reduce real estate, lower power, and reduce costs,” says Sean Lavey, an analyst at IDC. “Having a SerDes core that can provide a broad variety of necessary speeds and protocols all on one device is a significant step in providing the capabilities SAN providers need to quickly and affordably roll
out their next-generation systems.”

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Collaboration Between BakBone Software and Bridgeworks for FC Connectivity

BakBone Software has successfully completed integration and testing activities between BakBone’s NetVault 7.0 data backup and recovery software and Bridgeworks’ new Tamar family of Fibre Channel bridges. The partnership builds on both companies’ commitment to open storage architectures and heightened compatibility by collaborating on the development of affordable Fibre Channel connectivity solutions.

NetVault’s successful integration with the Tamar line of FC bridges will enable administrators to define, manage, and monitor the transfer, backup, and recovery of data throughout any sized network environment, according to BackBone. With reliable storage connectivity assured, IT managers can extend the scalability and performance benefits of Fibre Channel SAN to their tape libraries.

“BakBone’s partnership with Bridgeworks ensures that our customers can get the highest data availability and reliability for their storage connectivity needs,” says Andrew Unsworth, managing director at BakBone, E.M.E.A. “By dramatically simplifying implementation and networked storage administration, our customers will also benefit from considerable cost savings and performance improvements by deploying a NetVault/Tamar solution.”

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