Storage Nation

ESJ.com is running another of our C-4 Project video segments, this time with CEO and Chairman of FalconStor, ReiJane Huai.  Check it out. Mr. Huai reflected on his role in bringing tape backup to the distributed world, then offered commentary on several topics of interest including the formation of mini-me mainframes (“if you are going to

The tickler I received in email this AM filled me with interest in what Mr. Foskett, lately of Nirvanix, was going to write about this question in his multi-part blog.  My fingers tingled with expectation as I keyed in the URL for his postings

Over the last week there have been a few stories catching my eye.  Here’s a brief paragraph on them. SGI Acquires COPAN Systems In fact to be more precise, SGI have acquired some of the assets of COPAN and left the liabilities behind for a mere $2 million in cash ( press release ).  The demise of COPAN raises two potential questions; is spin-down a dead technology or were COPAN in a market that wasn’t able to understand their technology

“What will it take to make you scream?” asks Milo, the bad guy in The Last Boyscout. “Play some rap music,” responds Bruce Willis in the lead role of private investigator Joseph Hallenbeck.

This week we shared with our partners that Oracle and HDS will not renew the current distribution agreement for our Enterprise Storage platform that we had with Sun Microsystems prior to the Oracle acquisition. That agreement expires on March 31. We have enjoyed a very good relationship with Sun over the past nine years and have many joint customers whom we consider as our own. Oracle has ongoing capability to service their installations beyond the end of the Sun contract and we will continue to work with them to ensure that these customers receive the same high level service and support.

I’ve just been reading Greg Knieriemen’s post over at iknerd.com on the ending of Sun/Oracle’s OEM agreement with Hitachi to resell their high end storage arrays.  On the one hand I’m surprised by the announcement; on the other I’m not. Sun have resold Hitachi for some time under the 9990V and 9985V brand names.  These are no more than rebadged devices with Hitachi code and software under the covers.  From memory, I believe the only technical change is the cabinet door.  I have installed Sun supplied Hitachi technology in the past.  Sun provided no added value to the process – in fact when we encountered a microcode bug, Sun’s lack of knowledge hindered our problem resolution process

For tomorrow’s webcast at Redmond Magazine: Hope some  of you can join us.  Link.

NetApp’s Georgens said aloud the other day that automated tiering of storage is not the hot button that everyone is making it out to be.  As reported by Tech Target, Georgens maintains automated tiering is definitely overrated, although it’s being hailed as another “must-have” offering within a year or so due to the rise of Flash

Today HP will announce two new storage arrays.  Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years. P2000 G3 MSA (Modular Smart Array) System P2000 Large Form Factor I’ve not been a particular fan of the MSA devices, as I’ve worked mainly in large organisations where scalability isn’t delivered by point solutions.  However for SMEs, the new P2000 MSA seems to offer a lot of features for a small price point.  The new device provides 8Gb Fibre Channel, 1Gb iSCSI, up to 64 snapshots plus the option to replicate to another similar P2000 array.  Both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives are supported, by Small Form Factor and Large Form Factor models respectively.  Arrays can scale up to 57.6TB with SAS drives and 192TB with SATA. Surely I could replace my existing storage arrays with this kind of scalability I hear you say!  Well yes and no; low cost may appear to mean high value, however it depends on whether this kind of array provides features you care about, for example, component redundancy, RAID, automated drive sparing, multi-pathing and so on.  If these options aren’t high on your list, then the P2000 could be for you

Phew – after 5 days in Vegas, you get pretty cooked.   At home now finally and love seeing my family.     Well – a quick little summary of the week, and what we announced, showed, and discussed. Was a GREAT VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) – thank you VMware! So – what did we see and do? VMware’s continued growth is one of the largest drivers for partner growth.   PEX attendence was up 77% over last year.    VMware is super-focused on the partner community.  This came through loud and clear in Carl Eschenbach’s keynote. We saw this too in the EMC bootcamp.   We held a bootcamp on the Monday of the event for the EMC partners present.   There were almost 200 people there all day long.   Thank you EMC partners!  Would love your feedback on the event.