Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

StoreVault, NetApp’s division that is chartered with bringing its storage technology to the small to medium business (SMB) market, has just announced a new array: the S300.

Altho small in size, the StoreVault S300 is a very important box for several reasons: for SMBs, it brings NetApp’s enterprise-class DataONTAP storage OS to folks that normally couldn’t afford a support contract on a NetApp array, much less the array itself…and it allows NetApp a clear path down market for its products and services. The S300 and its larger sibling, the S500, are gateway products that will bring in new customers to the NetApp fold that may some day grow into a larger NetApp-branded solution.

The S300 is a cube form factor, meaning it is just as comfortable sitting on a desk w/ an office printer as it is sitting on a rack shelf. It has 8 drive bays that accomodate either 250GB or 500GB SATA drives so a mac raw capacity of 4TB. It has 4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports for iSCSI connectivity and an integrated Ultra 160 SCSI port to hang a tape device off of. On the functionality side, it is the Swiss Army Knife of arrays: it can do NAS and SAN, Snapshots, RAID-DP (allowing for dual drive failures), and can either remotely replicate to another StoreVault or even NetApp FAS array.

That last feature allows the S300 to fill 2 roles: as a great central data storage platform for small businesses as well as a remote office array for larger organizations that have a NetApp environment at corporate for the S300 to replicate to.

Either way, these boxes are already generating a lot of customer buzz and will surely be a home run for StoreVault.

For pricing:  StoreVault Quote Generator.

EqualLogic has just announced a new member to its SAS-based iSCSI array family: the PeerStorage 3700X (PS-3700X). This new array boasts 16 x 400GB 10k rpm SAS drives, giving it a raw capacity of 6.4TB.

This nudges out its smaller brother, the PS3600X (16 x 300GB) which will be terminated at the close of this year. The 3700X offers 1.6TB more capacity than the outgoing 3600X and carries a List Price on $1000 higher. 1.6TB for $1000 is a GREAT deal no matter how you slice it…and an even better deal given that it comes w/ EqualLogic’s full compliment of features, like Snapshots, Remote Replication, MultiPath I/O, Thin Provisioning, Phone Home etc…

The 3700X is available for order today with first shipments hitting the UPS trucks by October 31th.

If you’d like pricing on this new array, simply drop us a line.

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

Everyone is looking at virtualization these days. And those that aren’t aren’t because they already have it. VMware…The undisputed king of server virtualization (and new Scale Datacom Partner!) is doing it part across this great land to help IT organizations save time and money by greatly increasing the efficiency and flexibility of their server hardware assets. So, you’re considering VM’ing your server environment…or you’ve just VM’ed it. Now what? One word: storage.

Going with a virtualized disk storage platform affords you the same budget savings and operational agility that VMware does on the server side. Another partner of ours, EqualLogic, offers full virtualization on all their iSCSI SAN arrays and is a perfect compliment to a VMware environment.

EqualLogic’s ability to scale capacity (from 1-168TB), mix, match and reallocate RAID sets, disks types, speeds, and sizes on the fly all in a completely redundant, enterprise-class environment insures that your organization will be ready as its data storage requirements change.

Here’s an overview PDF

Let us know if you’d like to discuss how virtualized storage (or servers) can help you.

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.

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.

Lets face it: no one ever got fired for buying EMC. Their products work reasonably well and do what they say they will. However, in the mid-range (1-100TB) space there are better ways to get a SAN done; both budgetarily and technically.

EqualLogic is one.

• All-inclusive price includes all software features in cost of the array
• Scales performance linearly w/ capacity
• True pay-as-you-grow architecture
• No host licensing fees
• The easiest SAN to administer on the planet…period

Invitation: let us do a 1/2hr WebEx for you with our EqualLogic array and you can see for yourself how truly powerful and easy to administer this product is.

If you’re not blown away then..well…I don’t know what…but if you have EMC you probably will be.

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