Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

EqualLogic’s blogger extraordinaire Marc Farley has posted a great video on his Storage @ Work blog of their Director of Product Management, Eric Schott, explaining how their remote replication works.

Click here for the video

In keeping with their corporate mantra “simplifying networked storage”, EqualLogic’s remote replication implementation is truly incredible because of its simplicity and as well as performance. If you have remote site data that you’d like to centralize or are thinking of implementing a disaster recovery plan, EqualLogic’s PeerStorage iSCSI SAN arrays have the features, horsepower and reliability to be the backbone of your disk storage needs.

Contact us today if you’d like to discuss EqualLogic’s products/features in further detail. Or try our new EqualLogic Quote Generator

Being from New England I like to write about hometown happening and this is a big one. EqualLogic has just added New England Cable News to its list of >3000 happy customers.

If you live outside New England (or don’t own a TV), New England Cable News is monster of a company. They are the largest regional news network in the US and reach 3.6million homes. They had outgrown their direct-attached storage and were feeling the pain big time with respect to management, backup operations, scalability and DR possibilities. They did their due diligence and looked at both Fiber and iSCSI solutions from EMC, LeftHand Networks, EqualLogic and HP and in the end chose EqualLogic for a number of reasons: performance, flexbility, ease of remote replication and management.
Here’s the write up.

If you’re considering a SAN solution and would like to discuss which SAN fabric and vendor would be the best choice for your environment, just give us a shout.

If you’re short of things to worry about, Robin Harris over @ ZDNet has 2 great posts about things that can go wrong in the realm of data storage…

50 ways to lose your data by Robin Harris — Apologies to Paul Simon… Disk drives are marvelous devices. Especially when they go “clunk” and stop working. I’m not kidding: at least you know your data is hosed. I prefer that to the silent data corruption you don’t find out about until you can’t access a file or your OS starts freezing. Or a RAID rebuild […]

How data gets lost by Robin Harris — Our perception of risk and the reality of risk are often two different things. For example, are computer viruses or system glitches more likely to hose your data? While viruses get bad press for poor system performance, they aren’t very likely to damage your data. Your system, on the other hand . . . . This […]

CDP (Continuous Data Protection) is becoming the popular kid at the party lately and for good reason: why deal with tape backups that are potentially days or weeks old when you can have continuously backed up data at your recovery fingertips? Exchange environments are constantly changing and restoring them in the event of a failure is a tricky task…this makes them ideal candidates for CDP.

Our good friends at TimeSpring have a great white paper that illustrates the benefits of CDP in general as well as their CDP product, TimeData for Exchange. A must read if you are serious about keeping your MS Exchange environment constantly protected.

Shoot us a line if you’d like pricing and/or configuration info on TimeData for Exchange.

Nice article on ComputerWorld.com about how business continuity solutions in the mid market are affordable options now. Things we love like constant data protection (CDP), Windows VSS and our friends at EqualLogic are all named as budget-friendly ways to keep your business up in the face of disaster.

With technology constantly improving and prices continually coming down, rock-solid yet affordable business continuity solutions are now within the budgets of most small to midsized organizations.
Give us a shout today if you’d like to discuss business continuity solutions for your organization. From CDP, snapshots, and remote replication to disk-based backup and accelerated wide-area data services we can help tailor a solution that meets your needs and budget.

New PS Series Software adds Smart Copy for data protection, recovery of Microsoft SQL Server databases and NTFS file systems

Nashua, N.H. — July 16, 2007 — EqualLogic®, today announced PS Series Software enhancements that deliver rapid copies of Microsoft application and file system data. The new Smart Copy function, standard with PS Series storage arrays, allows IT administrators of Microsoft Windows to improve the speed and reliability of database and file recovery and testing operations. Smart Copy extends the PS Series’ host integration capabilities to reduce the amount of time IT administrators spend managing and protecting Windows-based business applications. …more

And as always, this new feature is available free with the latest version of firmware and if fully compatible across EqualLogic’s entire line of arrays: 50E, 100E, 300E, 400E, 3600X, 3800XV, 3900VX

Contact us today to discuss how EqualLogic can help your Windows environment’s storage needs.

StoreVault, NetApp’s little brother division that caters to the small-to-medium business (SMB) market makes what I would refer to as a Swiss Army Knife disk storage device: the S500

The S500 can handle both NAS and SAN duties…and it gives you options of iSCSI and Fiber Channel SAN connectivity. And because its part of NetApp, it runs their award-winning DataONTAP NAS operating system (snapshots, replication, thin provisioning etc..)

In keeping with its chartered target of SMB’s, the S500 does tap out at 6TB (3.5TB usable), so look elsewhere for that massive data mining project. But if your data storage requirements are within those parameters and you’d like a very flexible and powerful solution, the S500 may be the perfect box for you.

StoreVault S500 Data Sheet

Contact us today if you’d like to discuss how the S500 can help you.

Customer LifeLink Sees Benefits of Faster Data Replication, LAN-like Application Performance over the WAN and Lower Infrastructure Costs

San Francisco, CA and Nashua, NH– June 26, 2007 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), and EqualLogic, a leading provider of enterprise-class iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions, today announced that a growing number of businesses are using EqualLogic and Riverbed solutions together. The combined Riverbed® and EqualLogic offerings provide customers with lightning fast data replication between remote sites while reducing the bandwidth needed to replicate data. …more