Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

StoreVault’s “little array that could” S500 is all grown up and now offers support for 750GB and 1TB SATA drives. Now known as the S550, it betters the previous S500’s 250GB and 500GB drive support, giving it a max raw capacity of 12TB now.

The S550 and its little, desktop-residing brother the S300 are perfect storage solutions for small to medium businesses: they can do SAN and NAS in the same box and offer the flexibility iSCSI and fibre connectivity. And because they’re a division of NetApp, they also offer a tweaked version of their award-winning DataONTAP storage operating system with features like snapshots and remote replication.

Another feature (and a very smart moev by NetApp) that makes these StoreVault boxes cool is their ability to replicate not only to other StoreVault arrays but to larger NetApp FAS arrays. This basically making these little guys gateway arrays to bring smaller organizations into the NetApp fold at an earlier stage in their lifecycle.

Click here for technical info and quote generator

One of the standout features in Compellent’s long list of great features is their Data Progression. What it does is autonomously classify and move data at the block level between tiers of storage based on frequency of use.

This has several benefits, all of them big:

• Save money by storing inactive data on cheaper, larger capacity drives
• Improve the overall SAN performance by keeping only high-traffic data on the faster drives
• Reduce administrative overhead by doing all of this autonomously - no intervention required

Surprisingly, most midrange SAN’s out there do not do this out of the box like Compellent; usually requiring either manual transfer of data between tiers or a 3rd party software layer which adds cost and complexity.

More info can be found on our Compellent Mini-Site

Yes, we write about EqualLogic a lot on this blog. Fact is, in the sometimes mundane world of SAN storage, these guys are very interesting. Whether they’re winning their 1000th industry award, announcing new products, or winning yet another 3rd party product shootout, EqualLogic is always doing something cool.

To that end they’ve just announced a blistering new MS Exchange 2007 benchmark using Microsoft’s own ESRP framework: 60,000 users using 300MB mailboxes at extremely high I/O levels. Using their PS-3900XV arrays (300GB 15k rpm disks), with standard gigabit ethernet switches (Cisco 3750G’s) over Cat5e cabling to VMware’d Dell servers, they posted results that would shame most fibre channel vendors.

Here’s the full report

Bottom line: EqualLogic’s iSCSI rocks in large scale Exchange environments…take THAT fibre channel!

Check out our new EqualLogic Quote Generator for pricing on custom config’s that will meet your needs today!

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.

E-mail archiving and recovery software has proved itself useful in the case of the American who flew to Europe even though he had tuberculosis (TB).

The Fulton County, Georgia, Department of Health and Wellness tried to prevent Andrew Speaker, of Atlanta, from traveling to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon in May because his drug-resistant form of TB could make him contagious to other airline passengers. …more

Source: Robert Mullins - InfoWorld - 7/10/07

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Contact us if you’d like to discuss your needs in further detail.