This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion is an audio chat on the subject of stack wars – the creation of all-in-one “stacks” of IT equipment by the major vendors. These stacks have been quite a hot topic of discussion both inside Gestalt IT and in the community as a whole.
While getting some hands-on time with Iomega’s new 12-drive storage array, I spotted an exciting but unannounced feature: The ix12-300r includes native Avamar backup client! It also includes two PCI Express slots, bringing up intriguing possibilities for future expansion.
EMC is the 800 lb gorilla of the enterprise storage industry, but the company has much bigger plans. Although CEO Joe Tucci kicked off his keynote by claiming “We are an infrastructure company and proud of it,” EMC’s ambitions must go way beyond IT infrastructure. Each acquisition and strategy announcement is an attempt by EMC adapt to a fundamentally-transformed enterprise IT world.
STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash memory for primary data storage, the ZeusRAM uses DRAM. This improves reliability and longevity and ought to raise the bar on performance as well.
Why does network-attached storage (NAS) have such a poor reputation? This isn’t what the vendors want to be talking about, but some recent product announcements and discussions led to this thought. IT folks as a whole don’t trust NAS for real work, and 20 years of effort from big names like Sun, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, and the rest hasn’t changed that.
Amid much fanfare and, EMC launched VPLEX today at EMCWorld 2010 in Boston. The company previously outlined the vision for globally-distributed federated storage, but today’s announcement adds both meat and bone to that concept. EMC promises that VPLEX will transparently move data (and thus workloads) between storage systems locally or across a metro area and the company will eventually enable this technology across global distances.
EMC’s Iomega unit today released the rack-mount storage product we have all been waiting for. The new ix12-300r packs 12 drive bays, scaling from 4 TB all the way to 24 TB, and backs it with quad gigabit iSCSI, redundant power, and everything else the small data center needs.
This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion focuses on the presentation given by HP at our Boston event. This presentation included a strategic overview from Tom Joyce, HP’s new VP of StorageWorks Marketing, Milan Shetti Sr., Director of NAS Engineering, as well as an introduction to the X9000 NAS (former IBRIX) product from Patrick Osborne, NAS Business Development Manager.
We love our Cradlepoint PHS300, so we were pleased to come across the company at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas this week. Sensing our enthusiasm for their product, CradlePoint was happy to donate a PHS300 for us to give to our readers. Watch the video to learn how to enter the contest!
Visitors to the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) booth at Storage Networking World in Orlando were greeted by a strange symbol, but what is the symbol exactly? I was amused to get some puzzled looks (and no correct answers) when I polled a number of industry insiders.
