April 17th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Mellanox Announces ConnectX-3 Pro Adapter Cards
Mellanox is announcing its ConnectX-3 Pro 10/40 gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with hardware offload engines that are the first interconnect cards to support overlay networks found in cloud environments including VXLAN and NVGRE. ConnectX-3 Pro cards enable cloud providers to build much larger-scale infrastructures without having to rely overly much on CPU overhead. This is made possible since the overlay technologies are implemented within the interconnect hardware itself. Being the first cards to support overlay networks, the Mellanox ConnextX-3 Pro offers the unique positioning of scaling applications and essentially unlimited tenants.
April 17th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Kaminario Announces K2 Version 4 with All Flash
Kaminario is announcing the release of their K2 all-Flash storage array that is now in its fourth generation and provides top-level performance to medium-sized businesses. The Kaminario K2 v4 is based on SPEAR (Scale-Out Performance Storage Architecture), which means that not only do the systems benefit from scaling-up capacities, but also enhanced compute power. This architecture enables enterprises to increase their capacity without decreasing their IOPS and bandwith and without raising their systems' latency. This level of performance makes the Kaminario K2 v4 perfect for just about any workload or application.
April 17th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Nimble Storage Announces Private Cloud Reference Architecture
Nimble Storage is announcing its new validated reference architecture called SmartStack for private cloud deployments on Microsoft’s technology which consists of a Nimble Storage CS200 Series 3U system, Cisco USC C-Series rack-mount server platform, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012. Microsoft's private cloud Fast Track is a reference architecture for building private clouds that helps to deliver the starting point for the building using validated configurations. Nimble's SmartStack has been validated in the Fast Track reference architecture for use with up to 75 virtual machines, and it leverages Nimble's CS-Series flash-optimized hybrid design and Cisco's UCS platform.
April 16th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
WD Announces SmartWare Pro Software
WD unveiled their new SmartWare Pro software that enables users to easily back up files to any USB external hard drive or the cloud using their personal Dropbox. The software also provides users with the ability to restore or retrieve backed-up data. SmartWare Pro is compatible with popular WD products such as My Passport and Elements portable hard drives, NAS devices such as My Book Live, or other external storage devices. With the software installed, the setup is quick and easy, and from there the software presents external drives and Dropbox accounts in a unified control center for management.
April 16th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
HDS Announces Hitachi Data Instance Manager
Hitachi Data Systems announced its integrated Hitachi Data Instance Manager (HDIM) software that maps and enhances copies of data throughout the data lifecycle and is designed for midmarket and larger enterprises. With HDIM, businesses can form an information protection strategy that matches their company's use cases, as opposed to trying to fit within an existing strategy. HDIM streamlines and creates efficiency in backup, versioning, replication, dedupe, archiving and continuous data protection. Hitachi also announced that later in the year it will integrate HDIM with Hitachi Content Platform to enable better archiving, search and recovery, and improved data analysis.
Read moreApril 16th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
EMC Announces Updates to Data Domain
EMC is announcing updates to its EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems and EMC SourceOne archiving software. Data Domain software helps to keep data recoverable and accessible within a budget. The new version of the EMC Data Domain software includes a load of updates including improved performance, wider support, and Oracle optimized deduplication. With these updates, EMC is also announcing its Data Domain systems are receiving updates to make them faster and increase their support. Meanwhile, EMC SourceOne 7's updates revolve around file, email, and Sharepoint archiving features.
Read moreApril 15th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
NetApp Announces OpenStack File Share Service Prototype
NetApp announced it has produced and submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service to the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community. This announcement from NetApp comes since OpenStack currently doesn't offer native management support for file-based storage. NetApp intends to add a file share service to incorporate a range of file system types as extensions to the OpenStack block-level storage Cinder project or to implement their service separately in another project. The file share service would terminate the need for users to have a separate management interface to utilize applications designed for file-based storage.
April 15th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
HP Announces Further Commitment to OpenStack
Already having been a top contributor to Openstack for a couple of years, HP announced that it will continue to expand its commitment with new and enhanced HP Converged Cloud offerings that enable enterprises to lower their costs while still enhancing their user experience. This integration of Openstack technology will enable HP to deliver OpenStack open-source products to its private, public and hybrid cloud portfolio. As part of their announcement, HP says that Cloudsystem, their private cloud solution is being updated. Of course, the updated HP CloudSystem 7.2 now features integrated OpenStack technology. While CloudSystem focuses on provisioning, managing and scaling clouds, OpenStack will increase the feature-set by supporting “bursting” capabilities and RedHat KVM resource pools. The integration makes it so that enterprise users can utilize their external resources from HP CloudSystem.
April 10th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
NetApp and Cisco Announce Updates and Validation for FlexPod
NetApp and Cisco's joint converged infrastructure system called FlexPod is one of the first validated solutions for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, and it now features a lot of technological updates. Those updates are significant and include: more advanced switching capability, an update to the platform, and 8 new reference architectures - 4 of which are designed for Oracle workloads. FlexPod's Microsoft validation and new Oracle workload-oriented architectures demonstrate NetApp's commitment to deepening their integration. Furthermore, the FlexPod enhancements build on the trend of many enterprise users shifting their datacenters toward implementing converged infrastructures.
April 9th, 2013 by Josh Shaman
Nimble Storage Announces InfoSight
Nimble Storage announced InfoSight which is a new set of services for Nimble's storage arrays which utilize the cloud and deep data to streamline activities. The InfoSight data collection engine securely gathers data every five minutes, which comes to a total of 30 million sensor values per array daily. InfoSight analyzes that data so that users can not only monitor their arrays and check reports, but also forecast their future storage needs. This new InfoSight system is being announced in conjunction with an online community forum called NimbleConnect. NimbleConnect offers a wide range of articles and posts about best practices, while also putting peers in contact with one another to bounce ideas about improving their systems' performance capabilities.
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.
