February 26th, 2013 by Josh Linden
Micron P410m SAS Enterprise SSDs Released
The P410m is the first Micron SAS SSD to leverage the company’s 25nm MLC NAND flash technology and Micron’s Extended Performance and Enhanced Reliability Technology (XPERT) platform. The P410m is shares most of its architecture with Micron’s P400m, a 2.5-inch 7mm SATA SSD that that proved itself a competent mainstream enterprise SSD in StorageReview’s recent benchmarks.
February 26th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
EMC VMAX Cloud Edition Announced
EMC has launched VMAX Cloud Edition, an update to the previously announced VMAX SP. While SP was targeted to service providers, EMC found enterprises and others who provide IT as a service, be it for internal or external clients. The VMAX Cloud Edition is more encompassing and serves the storage needs for anyone who needs to provision application storage in a self-service model. VMAX Cloud Edition promises to bring enterprise-grade storage with a simple deployment model that includes a self-service portal, pre-configured service level catalog, metering and chargeback reporting and APIs to enable connectivity with other business application needs.
February 25th, 2013 by Josh Linden
CommVault Simpana 10 Data Management Platform Now Available
The Simpana platform is comprised of individually-licensed modules to Analyze, Replicate, Protect, Archive, and Search data across an enterprise and across devices and locations by leveraging a consolidated virtual ContentStore pool. The arrival of Simpana 10 brings more than 300 new features to reduce risk, administrative overhead, and support costs. According to CommVault, Simpana 10’s new grid-based architecture and parallel deduplication doubles the platform's potential performance and scale.
Read moreFebruary 23rd, 2013 by Josh Linden
Barracuda and Drobo Announce Drobo 5N Integration with Barracuda’s Copy
Barracuda and Drobo have announced a joint endeavor to offer a Drobo 5N client for Barracuda’s Copy cloud storage platform. The Drobo 5N is a NAS appliance for small office environments and prosumer applications such as photography, video, and other types of digital content creation. The Copy client will allow 5N users to designate shared files that will be synchronized and accessible over the internet.
February 21st, 2013 by Josh Linden
Virident Announces FlashMAX Connect Server-Side Flash Connectivity Suite
Virident has announced FlashMAX Connect, a software suite that creates a flash storage management layer to leverage the company's FlashMAX II PCIe storage in existing SAN and NAS architectures. FlashMAX Connect, now in beta, optimizes the use of flash storage for databases and virtualization applications including applications where a single PCIe card services multiple servers.
February 21st, 2013 by Lyle Smith
PMC Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs Announced
PMC has announced the industry’s first high-performance, high density, low-profile encrypted PCIe Gen3 host bus adapter (HBA) family to further expand its Adaptec storage product-line. PMC’s new HBA family is capable of executing over one million IOPS with 6.6 GB/s sustained throughput, provides 256 bit AES encryption, and offers up to 16 ports. The Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs offer users high-performance connectivity for HDDs, SSDs, removable media, and tape drives and is specifically designed for high performance data center applications.
February 20th, 2013 by Josh Linden
SMART Announces Optimus 1.8-inch SAS SSD
SMART is line to become first to market for a 1.8” SAS SSD, with a newly-announced addition to the Optimus SSD line. The Optimus 1.8" SAS SSD is designed for blade servers, caching, and other high-density computing environments, using MLC NAND flash in capacities of 200GB and 400GB with a rated lifetime of 10 drive writes per day for five years.
February 20th, 2013 by Brian Beeler
Dell DR4100 Backup and Recovery Appliance Released
Dell has announced the DR4100, an update to their backup and recovery appliance line that is based on the Fluid Data Architecture. The DR4100 is highlighted by support for deduplication and compression at rates of up to 15 to 1, to help customers tame data sprawl with more efficient storage. While the DR4100 can start as small as 2.7TB, the units are scalable up to 81TB of usable storage thanks to expansion shelves (PowerVault MD1200) and support for 3TB hard drives in the Dell PowerEdge 12th generation server platform that serves as the hardware backbone for the DR4100. The DR4100 also supports 32 to 1 replication ability for improved flexibility and support for data protection at branch/remote offices.
February 19th, 2013 by Josh Linden
NetApp EF540 Flash Array and FlashRay Preview Architecture Now Available
NetApp today announced the availability of its new all-flash EF540 array, intended for performance-driven application and data center deployments. The EF540, built on the SANtricity operating system, can provide more than 300,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. The company has also released a preview architecture for its new FlashRay product family, which NetApp has built to maximize scale-out and storage efficiency for all-flash arrays.
February 19th, 2013 by Josh Linden
NetApp Announces FAS6200 Flash-Optimized Storage Systems
NetApp today announced the new FAS6220, FAS6250, and FAS6290, additions to its high-end FAS/V6200 storage platform. The new systems are optimized for use in conjunction with NetApp’s other flash offerings to increase IOPS over 80% from previous maximums and reduce latency by up to 90%, improving SAN to over 250K IOPS and NAS performance to over 1.5M IOPS. The FAS/V7200 platform is intended for mission-critical virtualized and cloud application environments that can scale to over 65PB.
The HGST Travelstar 7K1000 is a 1TB, 7,200RPM HDD that comes in a 2.5", 9.5mm form factor and interfaces over SATA 6Gb/s. The Travelstar 7K1000 is fairly unique in the space. Many drives are migrating to slimmer z-Heights at 7mm or even 5mm to meet the needs of space-constrained applications such as upgrading HDDs in ultrabooks. However, the 7K1000's target is a larger market - consumers that require robust capacity in their notebook computer or small form factor desktop at an economical price. Matching well with notebooks, the drive also features low power consumption and the highest shock tolerance in the industry. The 7K1000 also leverages Advanced Format which increased the physical sector size from 512 to 4096 bytes (4k). This helps to improve capacity and error correction capabilities.
The Seagate NAS HDD is a 3.5" form factor, 6Gb/s SATA interface hard drive that spins at 5,900RPM, ranges up to 4TB in capacity and is specifically engineered to be installed in one to five-bay NAS devices. With the consumer and small office NAS market growing quickly and with buyers usually opting for diskless models, Seagate is responding to market demand with this specific use-case drive. Of course there are loads of drives out there that users could implement to populate a NAS, but most are overkill or otherwise sub-optimal for the need. Seagate joins the NAS HDD market by designing a drive to handle NAS workload and operational requirements with their NASWorks specialized firmware, three-year warranty and support from many leading NAS vendors.
The Intel SSD DC S3500 is designed for data center applications such as in cloud computing, web hosting and other read-intensive environments, and the drive features an in-house controller, 20nm MLC NAND, and form factors at both 2.5" and 1.8". The DC S3500 is the latest SSD in Intel's new line while its sibling, 
The WD Se HDD is the company's latest 3.5" enterprise-class hard drive that ranges in capacities up to 4TB, spins at 7,200 RPM and interfaces over SATA 6Gb/s. The WD Se is designed to provide robust storage for large-scale NAS deployments, replicated environments, bulk cloud storage, and backup and archiving. The WD Se isn't geared toward revving up to the highest IOPS offered by an HDD; the drives are more affordable than performance variations and offer features required for data security by SMBs and the growing mid-range NAS market. That said, WD designed the Se series to still support moderate-workload applications with maximum sustained transfer rates claimed at up to 171MB/s.
The Netgear VueZone is a battery-powered camera system that is wire-free and delivers extremely simple 10 minute setup so that users can check-in on their pets, kids, home deliveries and anything else they need to monitor using a smartphone, PC or Mac. The second-generation camera system offers motion-detection, and recently Netgear has also introduced night vision cameras as well. The system utilizes a base station that connects to a home network using its Ethernet port. The station supports live streaming views of up to two camera, though with upgraded monthly plans stations can support as many as 15 cameras and can also record content and store it on the cloud.
