Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

Nexsan has announced today they are getting into the NAS market with the introduction of their first NAS appliance, “The Edge”. This 1U powerhouse runs Microsoft Windows Unified Data Storage Server (WUDSS) and can connect to the company’s SASboy, SATAboy and SATAbeast arrays allowing for true tiered storage up to 84TB.

They are pricing The Edge right in the middle of the SMB market. This should be important for a number of reasons: 1) they make very good RAID arrays, 2) they have AutoMAID which is their fantastic energy-saving “green” technology 3) they have historically very good support. Given that, The Edge, when paired w/ Nexsan’s arrays, will no doubt constitute an unbeatable value as most players in that market have somewhat kludgy solutions and even clunkier support….and you gotta love their product names!

Contact us if you’d like to discuss further

RELDATA’s 9240 storage gateway is a very cool piece of data storage gear for a number of reasons that we think businesses will find attractive.

Typically, when you want to look at an enterprise-class storage solution you had a list of usual suspects: NetApp, EMC, Compellent, HP, EqualLogic etc…and they all do a bang-up job (some better than others quite frankly). But they all require you to buy the actual disks from them….at seemingly ludicrous prices. $1495 for a 750GB SATA Drive???

Like the $5000 toilet bowl seats the government has been buying for years, these high drive prices are one place where these companies pay for their R&D budgets…everyone knows the drives aren’t special. Its a $250 Seagate w/ maybe some firmware and a fancy drive sled but thats it.

RELDATA takes a different approach: sure they offer disk trays to back their 9240 storage gateways, but you don’t HAVE to buy them (altho they are a lot more budget-friendly than most). They are hardware-agnostic and extremely flexible: you can attach Fibre, SCSI or iSCSI disk from virtually anyone to the backend. You can even mix new storage with systems you currently own for investment protection and centralized management.

RELDATA then takes all this storage, virtualizes it and doles it out as iSCSI and/or NAS to your users and apps. And because we’re talking options here, they allow you to do it over Gigabit or 10Gigabit links. And its all bolstered by enterprise-class snapshot, remote replication and multi-path I/O features.

The savings in backend storage options, the ability to use existing disk and the flexibility to provision it out as block and file-level data is only the first half of the movie. Its also SCREAMING FAST. Each 9240 has dual Xeon CPU’s, up to 16GB DRAM and you can active-active cluster up to 32 of them. Simply put: you will never outgrow this solution, from either a performance or capacity standpoint.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.