HP and I had our first time zone transition issue of the event, but we managed to squeeze in a meeting. HP is really building the unification business, focusing on moving data and applications closer together. In a way this makes sense. A storage system is really a sophisticated software application that manages storage running on a redundant set of servers, and often they are Intel based already. So just move that to the same box that is your virtualization host and in 4U of rack space you could have 30 virtual servers, storage, and the software to manage all that. Interesting strategy, but I think a lot of storage vendors will have something to say about that.
One of those vendors is 3PAR, who this week announced their F Class midrange array. This system can have two or four storage controllers and scales to almost 300 drives. What 3PAR claims is unique is their mesh controller architecture. Unlike the traditional mid-range box that maps 1 LUN to 1 Controller with the other being used for redundancy, in the 3PAR Mesh all the controllers are active against all the storage pools. Additionally 3PAR claims that there is no performance drop-off as you add more and more drives to the unit. It maintains its performance at 300 drives, unlike other architectures that face a significant performance drop-off as the drive count reaches 50 percent to 75 percent of maximum capacity.
1:25 PM -- There is no shortage of product announcements at a show like Storage Networking World in Orlando, and companies that don't have anything new still want to talk about their product lines. Storwize did have something new. They offer an inline real-time compression tool that provides 50 percent to 80 percent data compression of primary storage with little to no performance impact. At the show they introduced the STM-6000i, which improves performance and compression rates. Storwize is making the case that storage optimization on primary storage has to come with no impact to performance. All the other technologies available affect performance, the company says, which is OK for secondary storage but not for primary.
One of the more interesting meetings was with Data Robotics, which unveiled a Pro version of its Drobo, a storage array for SMBs. The new model now includes iSCSI support along with USB and Firewire. The unit has eight bays and automatically configures data protection as you add drives. You can buy the unit with drives already in it or add your own and they can be mixed capacities. Very cool. What amazes me the most is that the DroboPro resolves some the issues that have been haunting the enterprise, like mixed drive size and adjusting data protection. It is data aware with a capacity indicator on the front of the unit. I might have to actually break down and buy one.
Another vendor targeting the SMB market is backup specialist Axcient, which has an appliance that goes at the place of business and then replicates the backup data to their storage center. What makes these guys unique is how they give a reseller that sells to these smaller businesses the ability to stay involved in the process. The reseller can drop off the on-premise appliance, configure it remotely, and then monitor it through a Web page. Lastly, the on-site appliance can also be used as a virtual failover server -- most SMBs can't afford a secondary server that sits idle until their primary server fails, so if that happens they suffer. Axcient can allow the fallen server to run as a virtual machine on their appliance.
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