Storage Vendors Keep Pumping Out Gear

More news continued to spill out of a storage conference and trade show Tuesday, and companies in the storage space not at the show took advantage of the attention to roll out new partnerships and products.

At Storage Networking World Fall 2003, a twice-a-year expo targeting storage and data center administrators that opened Monday in Orlando and runs through Thursday, several firms beat the drum.

Among them:

EMC and Nortel Networks announced a joint assessment effort targeting enterprises that want to better utilize wide area networks (WANs) and optical metropolitan area network (MANs) for long-distance data mirroring. The new service, dubbed Business Continuity over Optical Networks, is designed to help customers figure out the optimal storage and connectivity requirements to meet their recovery objectives. The two companies will, of course, also offer a joint solution to prospective customers. EMC will integrate its Symmetrix and CLARiion networked storage devices and its MirrorView remote replication software with Nortel's optical MAN platform.

Another partnership that earned play at the trade show was between Network Engines and Computer Associates, which said they would ship in December a mobile backup appliance for small and mid-sized businesses. The appliance -- which will be available in two versions, the MBA-30 and MBA-100 -- will be built by hardware maker Network Engines and feature software from Computer Associates. Targeting mobile workers, the appliance will produce backups of laptop data on pre-set schedules or automatically as soon as they connect to the wired network. Powered by Windows Server 2003 and packed with Computer Associates' BrightStor Mobile Backup and eTrust Antivirus software, the appliances will feature a pre-configured RAID storage subsystem with capacity for 30 or 100 users, depending on the model. Prices will start at $5,400, said the companies.CommVault, known for its Galaxy backup and recovery software, linked with Permabit, a supplier of content storage software, to offer an integrated solution that will combine products from the two companies -- and add CommVault's QiNetix DataArchiver product -- on industry-standard servers. The new offering will target companies that need to capture, monitor, track, archive, and retrieve a wide variety of content, including documents and e-mail messages, to comply with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

A number of storage vendors that decided not to make the trip to Florida also unveiled new wares Tuesday, hoping to take advantage of the buzz about storage to get their products in front of IT administrators.

Quantum, for instance, shipped its second-generation backup system, the DX100, on Tuesday. The disk-based system can be scaled to a 64-terabyte capacity, said Quantum, backs up data at speeds of up to 2 terabytes per hour, and offers both RAID 5 support and hot-swap disk options. With configurations beginning at 8 terabytes, with prices beginning at $105,000, the DX100 can be beefed up to as many as 16 arrays, all managed by the backup software as a single disk-based tape library.

StorageTek, also missing from the Orlando show, rolled out a two-gigabit blade array module Tuesday, and said it would launch a serial ATA-based blade storage system -- designated the B200 -- in the first quarter of 2004. The BladeStore/B200 will scale up to 56 terabytes, said StorageTek, although it sees the blade fitting in best as an entry-level disk array for customers with relatively modest storage needs.

Also on Tuesday, StorageTek introduced a new data replication appliance, the MirrorStore. The appliance, which can mirror both local and remote data, takes the traditional SAN-style disk-to-disk mirroring tactic but adds volume level roll-back, which allows administrators to revert a logical or physical storage volume to a previous state. A Java-based administration console lets administrators consolidate storage into virtual pools and serves as the central management source for a device.SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, was another storage maker to announce support for serial ATA in the enterprise as it unveiled a pair of Unix-based disk storage systems under its InfiniteStorage brand that use the disk interface technology. SGI's TP9300S and TP9500S will ship in mid-December at prices starting at $40,000.