May 7th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
EMC Announces New and Updated Software Suites
EMC is announcing an enhanced version of their Storage Resource Management Suite and a new product called Service Assurance Suite to provide administrators with unadulterated views into storage, network, and compute infrastructures. This announcement also highlights new integration with the forthcoming EMC ViPR software-defined storage. The new EMC Service Assurance Suite and updated EMC Storage Resource Management Suite share a common presentation layer with EMC ViPR. This shared presentation layer will make the transition to software-defined storage easier, and it enables administrators to ensure that they are meeting service-level agreements and that they are seeing a proper return on their investments.
May 7th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
EMC Offers Enhanced Support For Syncplicity
EMC is announcing support for Policy-Driven Hybrid Cloud, EMC ViPR and EMC VNX on the EMC Syncplicity file sync and sharing product. The support for policy-driven hybrid cloud means that customers will be able to simultaneously access private and public clouds. Additionally, storage performance will be optimized. All of this will be done with consideration given to security and regulatory compliance based on user and content types. EMC Syncplicity will also begin native support for EMC VNX starting in the second half of 2013, and it will begin utilizing EMC ViPR software-defined storage as well.
May 7th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Inktank Announces Ceph Cuttlefish Update
Inktank is announcing the newest release Ceph called Cuttlefish which offers enhancements to the massively scalable, open source software-defined storage system. Ceph Cuttlefish updates include Red Hat support, quicker installation for easier adoption, and operational improvements for scaling applications. Ceph also delivers object, block, and file storage in a single system that runs on existing hardware. Amongst larger updates detailed below, Ceph Cuttlefish also includes a few more features in this version: users now have access to incremental snapshots of block devices, at-rest encryption of data and quotas for storage pools. Inktank is marking their continued commitment to Ceph with their commercial support for Cuttlefish and future versions of the OS.
May 7th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate Announces SSDs and X8 PCIe Accelerator
Seagate is announcing its new Seagate 600 SSD, 600 Pro Enterprise SSD and 1200 Enterprise SSDs designed for consumer, entry-enterprise, and mainstream enterprise applications (respectively) and is also releasing information regarding its new X8 PCIe application accelerator card. The new Seagate 600 SSD and 600 Pro Enterprise SSD drives both feature Toshiba MLC NAND and interface over SATA, while the Seagate 1200 SSD features eMLC NAND for even higher level enterprise-grade endurance and is the first Seagate drive interfacing over 12 Gb/s SAS. The X8 PCIe cards are designed for applications where performance is paramount and are rebranded Virident FlashMAX II Application Accelerators.
May 7th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate 600 Pro Enterprise SSD Review
The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is a 2.5-inch MLC NAND enterprise-class SSD in a 7mm form factor with a capacity up to 480GB that is designed for read-intensive applications. Due to its size, the 600 Pro easily fits almost any platform, maximizing capacity while minimizing its footprint. Seagate's primary focus during the engineering of this drive though was to build a drive to meet the growing demand within the enterprise for SSDs that offer enterprise-class endurance and adequate performance at a reasonable price-point. Organizations that need these types of drives include centers, cloud system builders, cloud service providers or virtualized enterprises. In these applications, the enterprise requires more endurance than they could get with a client SSD; it wants a drive upon which it can depend to be reliable over time, thus keeping data secure.
May 6th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
EMC Announces EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform
EMC ASD (Advanced Software Division) is announcing its software-defined storage platform EMC ViPR which operates on existing storage to help manage the robust data growth experienced in the enterprise. EMC ViPR can manage both the storage infrastructure and the data that exists within the storage using policy-based automation. Additionally, EMC ViPR enables administrators to view objects as files and provides file access performance without the latency users typically experience in object storage. Coupled with all of this functionality, EMC ViPR is all software-based meaning that it will run both on EMC and non-EMC hardware and can be setup in just a matter of minutes as opposed to lengthier setups with more traditional deployments.
May 6th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Proximal Data Announces Updates to AutoCache
Proximal Data is announcing enhancements to their AutoCache hypervisor caching product that removes I/O bottlenecks to accelerate reads and writes while also improving VM density by 2-3 times. AutoCache and its I/O Intelligence utilize PCIe flash and SSDs to store hot data to increase application performance. Newly updated features are abundant in AutoCache. It can now cache more quickly at the time of installation, pre-warm the cache upon vMotion of a particular VM, support caching for virtual disks stored on NFS or iSCSI datastores, and integrate not only with VMware ESXi 4.1 and 5.0, but also 5.1 (the newest version of the VMware vSphere hypervisor).
May 2nd, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Micron Announces P420m PCIe Application Accelerator
Micron is announcing the release of their new P420m PCIe accelerator card in both half-height half-length (HHHL) and 2.5" form factors, making it the first MLC NAND PCIe SSD in the 2.5" form factor. The Micron P420m provides high performance and reliability with low latency, with a higher capacity than previously offered with the SLC-based P320h. These features make the P420m optimal for enterprise server, appliance and storage platform deployments geared towards read-heavy applications. For an example of just how capable the P420m is, in MySQL OLTP Sysbench benchmark, it delivered over 3,200 transactions per second. The P420m also increases the performance of applications such as online transaction processing, data warehousing and virtualization.
May 1st, 2013 by Josh Shaman
LaCie 5big NAS Pro Review
The 5big NAS Pro is LaCie’s latest NAS featuring the Neil Poulton design users are long familiar with as well as an updated 2.13GHz dual-core Intel 64-bit Atom processor and an impressive 4GB of RAM. LaCie utilizes their own LaCie NAS OS3 in this model, diverging from the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials in the 5big Office + NAS. The updated OS offers a single user interface for local and cloud storage creating a hybrid cloud via Wuala (the cloud provider with which LaCie merged a few years back). Hardware features include five drive bays, a solid aluminum structure, and plenty of connectivity via USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet ports. Designed for small businesses, LaCie's target market is offices with up to 50 concurrent users.
April 30th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Seagate Enterprise Value HDD (Constellation CS) Review
The Seagate Enterprise Value HDD which is also known as the Constellation CS, is a 3.5", 7,200RPM SATA drive with a maximum capacity of 3TB that is targeted at organizations looking for the cost-effectiveness of consumer HDDs but also the enterprise features they need. The Constellation CS fit those needs by offering inexpensive bulk-storage for cases such as hosting unstructured data in the cloud with the lowest $/GB cost in the market. Adding to the Constellation CS drives' overall value is that at 2.75W/TB, it also offers the lowest power consumption of any new enterprise-class HDD, drawing up to 29% less power than competitive high-capacity enterprise drives by Seagate's numbers.
The StarTech 2636 cabinet is a 15U server rack that ships fully assembled and is ready to go right out of the box. The growing rack space requirements of the 
The SAS 616iSD 10G is part of an extensive line of block-level storage arrays offered by JetStor. The iSCSI 616iSD offers up to 48TB of storage via 16 3.5" bays in a 3U enclosure. JetStor features dual redundant active/active RAID controllers and four 10GbE ports, two per controller. Each controller is powered by an Intel IOP342 64-bit Chevelon dual-core storage processor, and includes features like parity-assist ASIC, iSCSI-assist engine and TCP Offload Engine (TOE). Should 48TB prove insufficient, the 616iSD can be expanded with four JBOD shelves (SAS716J) for a maximum capacity of 240TB per array.
The Mellanox SX1036 is a 1U managed Ethernet switch that provides up to 2.88Tb/s of non-blocking throughput via 36 40Gb/s QSFP ports that can be broken out to achieve up to 64 10Gb/s ports or offer a mixture of 40Gb/s and 10Gb/s connectivity. As a backbone to the .jpg)
The Lenovo ThinkServer RD630 represents a calculated entry into the server market: an affordable server with specifications that support database applications and virtualized infrastructure. The RD630 was announced earlier this year as part of an initiative to expand the ThinkServer brand into enterprise cloud and virtualization deployments. It is a scalable 2U rack server solution featuring hardware RAID and eight to sixteen 2.5-inch hot-swap SAS or SATA drives. Powering the ThinkServer is the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family with the Intel C602 Chipset. New products like the RD630 are positioning Lenovo to take on other OEMs like Dell and HP that already operate in the enterprise server market.
Eaton’s Advanced Monitored family of ePDUs are designed to allow administrators to remotely monitor the power usage of individual outlets or sections over the network. Out-of-the-box web monitoring is built into the ePDU, and SNMP allows integration with third-party management systems. The eAM001 Advanced Monitored ePDU brings 20 C13 outlets and 4 C19 outlets to the 
