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

The midnite oil has been burning at Dell / EqualLogic since the acquisition was announced and today we saw the first in what will surely be a big year of product rollouts from the newly married couple.

Announced today, the PS5000 Series of iSCSI arrays are a rename in some cases and an upgrade in others. Here’s the rundown:

• PS5000E Series - these 16-bay SATA arrays will be replacing EqualLogic’s 14-bay SATA boxes (aka: 100E, 300E, 400E). They also add a model populated with 1TB drives now.
• PS5000X - Just a rebadged PS3700X - 6.4TB of 10k SAS goodness
• PS5000XV - Rebadged PS3900XV - 4.8TB of 15k SAS

Dell has thankfully left EqualLogic’s all-inclusive software licensing policy in place: the price of the array includes all software features (and there are a lot of them).

If you’d like technical, competitive or pricing info on any of these arrays, or would like to schedule a WebEx to see the technology in action (its imressive), just let us know.

More info and quote request form  here.

If you’re a midrange SAN vendor in today’s market you need to offer some form of remote replication….and they all do. Given that, what makes one vendor’s implementation stand out over everyone else’s?

The goals are simple enough: offer fast, bandwidth-friendly replications that can be easily validated, don’t require a team from NASA to administer and can be quickly rolled over to in the event of a disaster.

However, most implementations are kludgy, full of gotcha’s and require massive amounts of professional services to erect and maintain. Compellent’s Remote Data Instant Replay on the other hand, is different.

Hows this for a dream-team of features:

• Data De-Deplication
• Synchronous and Asynchronous Implementations
• Pre-Circuit Bandwidth Simulator
• Comprehensive Bandwidth Shaping - down to the volume level
• Ability to store replicas on different disk tiers and RAID sets to reduce cost
• Replicate using Fibre or iSCSI
• Replication / Failover Validation - Test your DR plan w/out bringing your environment down!

There are more but you get the picture. Ask your current SAN vendor (unless its Compellent) if they can do 1/2 of these things. Having done our research I can say their answer will most likely be no.

If you’re considering remote replication and would like to hear more about Compellent’s solution, please drop us a line to discuss further.

Our Compellent Mini-Site

Hows this for irony: we sign on as reseller partner with Compellent and American Megatrends and the following week BOTH win Finalist Awards in Storage Magazine’s 2007 Storage Products of the Year. I’d like to think our glowing blog posts of both products helped…but I’m pretty sure we had nothing to do with the outcomes.

Click here for the full rundown

American Megatrends (AMI) won for their StorTrends 3200i iSCSI & NAS array and Compellent for their Storage Center SAN w/ NAS. The AMI 3200i slots in at the small-medium business market….right where the Compellent picks up and runs straight thru to the high-end enterprise.

Both solutions are notable in that they are both very good at masking their power and complexity to users, giving them a simple, strightforward and very flexible GUI from which to work.

Well, here’s to keeping good company in 2008. If you have any SAN or NAS projects in 08 please give us a shout and we can help architect a solution that may very well include one of these award winners.

American Megatrends…yes, the BIOS company. Turns out they make a line of IP SAN arrays. We sat in on an overview of their product and took a turn driving the GUI and I gotta say: WOW!

Their arrays come in 1U, 4-Bay (StorTrends 1100) and 3U, 16-Bay (StorTrends 3200) configs, support either SATA or SAS drives and can be had as NAS-only or NAS and ISCSI.

What’s truly amazing is the long list of features that’s included:

• Remote Replication (Synchronous and Acynchronous)
• Advanced Snapshots
• Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
• Network Port Teaming
• Online capacity expansion and RAID migration
• Array Failover / Load Balancing

Sweet Fancy Moses! These guys need to hire a marketing person to get the word out. Luckily, thats where Scale datacom comes in. As an American Megatrends (aka: AMI) Partner, its now our job to spread the good word to anyone that may be in need of a cost-effective and feature-rich IP SAN and NAS solution.

Please give us a shout if you’d like to discuss in further detail and see the technology in action (they have an array online).

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

We’ve always had a good iSCSI SAN solution for our customers (read:EqualLogic) but have never had a true enterprise-class EMC-killer solution on the fibre side…until now.

Scale Datacom is very proud to announce that we are now a Compellent Business Partner and able to offer our customers Compellent’s entire line of award-winning virtualized SAN products.

The nice thing about Compellent is that their solution does it all: Fibre and iSCSI SAN as well as NAS in a single, easy-admin environment. Also, in addition to enterprise features like snapshots, thin provisioning and remote replication, Compellent also offers the ability to automatically migrate data across different storage tiers while data remains online. This ensures that your data is on the most performance and cost-appropriate hardware and makes Compellent a great choice for everything from MS Exchange and SQL to VMware and Web Operations.

Their recent win as InfoWorld’s “Best SAN of the Year 2008″ is further proof that this company has got a product that offers great performance, easy of use and value.

Contact us today to discuss if Compellent is the right solution for your needs.

And check out our new Compellent Mini-Site for more info on this exciting solution.

Boy is this getting old…or is it? Like our beloved New England Patriots, EqualLogic can do wrong these days. InfoWorld has voted EqualLogic “Best iSCSI SAN of the Year” for 2008. They are going to need a larger mantle for all their trophies.

Full press release here…

Yet another feather in their cap and further validation that the architecture path they’ve charted is the best for high-performance, feature-rich iSCSI SAN’s.

Let us know if you’d like to discuss how EqualLogic’s line of virtualized iSCSI SAN’s can help your organization.

TechTarget’s doing a survey asking for your experience with your midrange arrays. The metrics include product features, and reliability as well as sales rep knowledge and everything in between.

This is exactly the same very similar poll to the one Storage Magazine did in 2006 which EqualLogic won hands down. I’ll be very interested in seeing the final results here as there are number of hard chargers (ie: Compellent) on the list that have made up a lot of ground since the first poll.

Click here to go to the survey

Quick question for the folks at TechTarget: why on earth is Apple’s Xserve RAID on this list? Its a fine box and all, but its like having a Ford Escort on a survey list with the BMW 7-Series and Mercedes S-Class.

Let me know if this sounds familiar: you have an aging fibre SAN, a bunch of direct-attach SCSI RAID arrays and tape devices in another department and a few newer iSCSI arrays in yet another corner of the company…and of course they’re all from different vendors.

Managing all these disparate storage resources can be a real pain in the ***, consuming time and resources. Add to that that they’re probably not being utilized to their fullest potential.

Enter RELDATA’s 9000 Series of unified storage gateways. They accept iSCSI, SCSI and fibre storage (disk and tape) and present “one pane of glass” to manage them all. The appliances are clsuter’able for high-availability and can remotely replicate over the WAN for DR purposes.

But wait, there’s more! They pull double-duty as both SAN and NAS heads and allow the storage behind them to be provisioned on the fly.

If you’re interested in hearing more or would like to schedule a WebEx to see the product in action, just drop us a line.