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FEATURED by Kevin OBrien
Micron P320h 2.5" PCIe Application Accelerator Review
In March of last year, Micron announced a new 2.5" form factor for their P320h application accelerator card. PCIe cards have been the de facto standard for any enterprise looking to drive maximum responsiveness from their storage. The form factor does suffer though from issues that don't bother traditional 2.5" and 3.5" form factors such as hot swapability. It's rarely practical to power down a server and remove it from a rack to service the storage inside. Thus, the 2.5" PCIe form factor enables the speed that the PCIe interface can deliver, with the serviceability that standard drives offer. Of course a new interface means little without server support, and as part of the announcement from Micron, Dell stepped up with server support for the new drives in many of their 12th Gen PowerEdge servers. The Dell servers, like our Dell PowerEdge R720 12G with Express Flash (Dell's branding of 2.5" PCIe), offers up to four 2.5" P320h drives accessible by standard access in the front of the server via a specialized backplane.
FEATURED by Josh Shaman
OCZ Vertex 450 SSD Review
The OCZ Vertex 450 is the latest mainstream client SSD from OCZ that leverages their own Barefoot 3 controller, 7mm form factor and 20nm MLC NAND. That 20nm MLC NAND represents a significant 20% decrease over the NAND die utilized in its predecessor Vertex 4 which was 25nm. The Vertex 450 replaces the Vertex 4, and the reduction in NAND package size and move to proprietary controller enables OCZ to squeeze maximum value out of the Vertex 450 for consumers delivering a blend of economics and performance. While the 7mm form factor enables it to fit in most any notebook, the included 3.5" adapter makes it a snap to install in desktops and the Vertex 450 is bundled with Acronis True Image software to simplify moving data from an existing drive to the Vertex 450.
May 22nd, 2013 by Bill Valle
Dell Announces Solutions for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp
Dell is announcing several new products for Citrix XenDesktop 7 and XenApp that lower the cost of integrated storage, increase graphics capabilities and provide dual and quad-core processing to thin client desktops. By unifying applications, desktops and hosted VDI environments with a common management platform, Citrix XenDesktop 7 supports virtualized workloads based on Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 as well as HDX 3D enabling virtualized graphics for OpenGL applications. The cost-savings and the increased hardware capabilities come from several new products including: DVS Enterprise, Wyse Xenith Pro 2, D90Q7 and Z90Q7.
May 21st, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Permabit Annouces Albireo Compress and Replica
Permabit Technology is announcing its Albireo Compress and Albireo Replica data compression and replication applications that integrate with Permabit Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO). Permabit already offers a comprehensive Linux-based software-defined-storage solution in VDO that features deduplication and thin provisioning. Compress works with VDO's deduplication to reduce data storage requirements by as much as 35x. Replica coordinates with VDO to optimize data for content. Together with existing features on Albireo VDO, Compress and Replica enable Permabit OEMs to deliver performance and scalability on top of lowered time, resource and monetary investment.
May 21st, 2013 by Josh Shaman
HGST Announces Travelstar 5K1500
HGST is announcing its new Travelstar 5K1500 which is the first 9.5mm, 1.5TB HDD to reach the market and is designed primarily for OEMs to install in their higher-end notebook computer offerings. The drive also meets applications such as inclusion in external devices and all-in-one PCs. The HGST Travelstar 5K1500 achieves its capacity expansion by using three platters instead of just one or two. This presents some challenges as operating shock becomes an issue with three platters in a 9.5mm form factor, but HGST has innovated a way of raising the cover to avoid shock problems. HGST is getting out ahead in the market with the Travelstar 5K1500 by offering 1.5TB in a 9.5mm form factor now instead of waiting for a possible engineering enhancement later that may enable greater density so that 1.5TB can fit on one or two platters in 9.5mm drives.
May 21st, 2013 by Josh Linden
Seagate Announces Purpose-Built 4TB Video HDD
Seagate has announced the Video 3.5 which at 4TB will be the industry’s largest-capacity 3.5-inch hard disk drive engineered specifically for digital video recorders (DVRs), set-top boxes and surveillance systems. The Seagate Video 3.5 offers a 0.55 percent annual failure rate and other features which will be attractive to manufacturers, integrators and installers looking for a drive that can be relied on in the field. The flagship 4TB drive is designed to support 16 simultaneous HD streams or 20 standard-definition streams. Some of the tradeoff for decreased transfer speeds are low power consumption and heat emissions as well as engineering for 24x7 operation.
May 21st, 2013 by Bill Valle
TwinStrata Announces CloudArray 4.5 and DRaaS
TwinStrata is announcing the immediate release of its next version CloudArray 4.5 which has been evolving to simplify management and now offers a solution for on-demand disaster recovery via the disaster recovery as a service enhancement (DRaaS). CloudArray 4.5 introduces a new snapshot function that eliminates the need for separate backup software and can save storage space by requiring 20X less space than traditional backup strategies. This new release also has an intuitive administrative interface which allows the users to tune schedules to better accommodate high usage time frames to avoid contention for data access with other applications. Schedules are managed in increments of 15 minutes and 1Mb/s intervals. CloudArray 4.5 also provides the next generation of dynamic caching, adding flexible volume migration and balancing across cache policies to meet performance, sizing and tech refresh requirements.
May 21st, 2013 by Bill Valle
HDS Debuts Hitachi Cloud Services
Hitachi Data Services (HDS) is announcing its new Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) which offers users the ability to manage content securely in an off-premise cloud environment. HCP Anywhere allows employees to access content from anywhere, at any time, on any device easily. End-to-end file sharing is securely maintained by corporate IT to be deployed safely and securely. By downloading an iOS app for mobile devices, users can easily access content without needing any formal training, and this ease of use extends to the administrators with simple setup, deployment and management of the application. HCP integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory Services and affords administrators with the ability audit and manage large numbers of users.
May 20th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Veeam Announces Veeam Backup and Replication v7
Veeam Software is announcing Veeam Backup and Replication v7 data protection software includes two new innovations: built-in WAN Acceleration and Backup from Storage Snapshots. Veeam is known for their backup, replication and virtualization management solution for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, and this announcement indicates up to 50% faster offsite backup using the built-in WAN Acceleration. On top of these features, Veeam Backup and Replication v7 includes over 50 new features and enhancements to the software including Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint, VMware vCloud Director Integration, Self-Service Recovery of VMs and Guest Files, and Native Tape Support.
May 16th, 2013 by Josh Linden
Pogo Storage Announces Nexenta-Certified PogoRack
Pogo Storage and Nexenta Systems have introduced PogoRack, a petabyte-scale storage platform oriented towards government IT requirements that leverages NexentaStor ZFS and other open storage technologies. In doing so, PogoRack operates on an industry-standard hardware platform to reduce overhead for cloud, virtualization, database, and other on-demand data applications. PogoRack targets government IT environments that often face strict completion and budget requirements while also being required to meet operational standards and procurement regulations. According to Pogo, using open Nexenta technologies is a viable strategy for government IT departments to keep the cost of storage infrastructures within public budget limitations.
The Buffalo DriveStation DDR is a USB 3.0 external storage device for both PCs and Macs that features 2TB and 3TB capacities and is designed to deliver greater performance than standard external drives by offering an additional 1GB cache for accelerated transfer speeds. The DriveStation DDR also includes the Buffalo Tools software suite for Windows which is designed to boost performance and enable users to backup their content and manage their device effectively. Additionally, DriveStation DDR is compatible with Time Machine and users can use Time Machine with DriveStation Axis to back up Macs.
The Samsung SSD 840 is an entry-level consumer SSD and is the first to be made with TLC (Triple Level Cell) NAND. This differs from the MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND used in every other consumer SSD. Up to this point, TLC NAND has only been used in less critical applications like USB thumb drives and memory cards, but its acceptance in the SSD space is emerging in large part because of the reduced cost of the NAND packages. Of course the tradeoff for the lowered price-point is endurance, but as consumers are coming to accept, most of them really don't write all that much data to their drives. The Samsung SSD 840 is built off of the same platform as the Samsung SSD 840 Pro with the Samsung MDX triple-core ARM 9 controller which is clocked at 300MHz and leverages Samsung's NAND and proprietary firmware.
The Unitrends Recovery-943 Backup Appliance has 97TB of raw capacity and robust connectivity options, and it incorporates standard features found on existing Unitrends Recovery appliances such as backup, archiving, instant recovery, and disaster recovery functionality. In the past, these recovery appliances have been configured and marketed to small and medium businesses. These smaller organizations face complex backup requirements and don't have the dedicated resources and expertise needed to apply multi-platform backup-administration and as such have been Unitrends target-market. The Recovery-943 is however a step-up from previous Unitrends options with three times the storage capacity of its predecessor and the ability to scale the functionality of the Unitrends RecoveryOS to the enterprise market.
The OWC Envoy Pro EX is a USB 3.0 bus-powered portable storage device that offers capacities up to 480GB and is pre-formatted and primarily designed for Apple systems, though PC users can reformat and use the drive as well. The OWC Envoy Pro is the bare unit, while the EX models add SSD storage using 
HP has been going through a transformation recently when it comes to the 
The WD My Passport Ultra, announced today, is a USB 3.0 portable storage device with capacities from 500GB up to 2TB that features local and cloud backups. The My Passport Ultra includes software for automatic backups to the host system or to the My Passport Ultra as well as the ability to use Dropbox to backup to the cloud. The Ultra, WD's latest My Passport iteration, also enables users to setup password protection and hardware encryption to keep data stored on the device secure from unauthorized access. Cosmetically-focused, the WD My Passport Ultra is available in four different colors (titanium, red, blue and black).
