Data Storage News

by InternetNews.com Staff [October 10, 2002]

HP Releases Second-Gen Ultrium Tape Drives
HP said it has delivered qualification units of its second-generation StorageWorks Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium tape drive to six of its key system and library partners, who in turn will build the surrounding hardware.

HP said its first-generation tape drives could hold 200 GB of native capacity. The company said the new boxes can store 400 GB of compressed data on a single cartridge in less than two hours. Customers are expected to get their first crack at the storage devices by the end of the year.

The networked devices are based on open-standards and are expected to include HP OpenView Storage Area Management software as the native operating system.

The debate over the relative merits of tape and disk storage devices rages on, with both camps certain their technology is foolproof. Redundant array of independent disk (RAID) systems are fast, but depend on writing to several disks. Tape is more long term and meets federal standards, but tends to run slower.

"Stop debating and embrace each methodology for what they do best, tape for inexpensive snapshots over long periods and disk for up to the minute protection of the data," said NSI Software director of technical marketing Jason Buffington. "And if you back up the data at the replicated facility, that is an 'off-site backup' without paying for courier services.

Either way, HP is leading the pack. LTO tape drives outsold Imation Super DLT tape drives with a 70 percent share in 2001 sales, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest.

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EMC's Midrange Product
EMC introduced a second member of its Clariion CX family in its latest bid to capture business in data storage's fastest growing segment—the middle market.

The CX400 aims to offer high-bandwidth performance while being sensitive to customer price concerns. The product starts at $62,000 for 180 gigabytes of raw capacity and is sold directly and through EMC partner Dell Computer.

The product is a 2 Gbps Fibre Channel array storage device featuring data protection features, is being touted as an "ideal platform" for multimedia and video streaming, Microsoft Exchange clustering, medium-sized Oracle and SQL databases, for storage area network (SAN) and direct attach storage (DAS) environments. The system supports data transfer rates of 680 Mbps, and up to 4.4 TB of data.

The announcement comes less than a week after the Hopkinton, Mass., company warned about lagging sales and cut 7 percent of its workforce, or about 1,350 employees, to trim expenses.

The mid-market and price push is a departure from the EMC strategy of the 1990s, where the focus was on large customers and the impact on a customers' budget wasn't part of the sales pitch.

But a languishing economy, paired with stepped-up competition from Hewlett-Packard (which significantly upgraded its mid-market line with the acquisition of Compaq), IBM, and Sun Microsystems has changed that.

The CX400 takes aim at Big Blue, which in the last year has also marshaled its resources around mid-market customers as enterprise buyers, such as banks, airlines, and retail chains have delayed orders.

Two months ago, EMC unveiled the first member of the product group, CX600. While he wouldn't say explicitly, Bartinoski, when asked if EMC is working on additional offerings said, "stay tuned."

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IBM, Brocade Team Up on Storage Management
Brocade Communications Systems teamed with IBM to deliver standards-based storage area network management software.

In the agreement, for which financial details were not made public, the newly announced IBM Tivoli Storage Area Network Manager will use the Brocade Fabric Access API 2.0 for discovery of active zone configurations in a Brocade fabric to show separate views for each discovered zone and to show all devices in a zone. Essentially, the software infrastructures will keep tabs on storage devices in a network.

San Jose, Calif.'s Brocade, a maker of fabric switches and software whose purpose is to optimize data availability and storage and server resources, said its Fabric Access API will be compliant with the Common Information Model (CIM) by the first half of 2003. CIM is a model for describing management information in a network enterprise environment.

IBM and Brocade believe the deal will set the stage for further convergence of SAN management strategies based on CIM, and WBEM, or Web-Based Enterprise Management, which is a set of management and Internet technologies developed to unify the management of enterprise computing. CIM and WEBM are both object technologies that are part of strategy called Bluefin, whose purpose is to make it possible for heterogeneous SANs to operate smoothly.

The firms argue that through CIM, storage infrastructure components will have a standard interface which software can discover and use to manage those components. This reduces the amount of specialized code within the management application and allows the company to focus on other issues. Storage infrastructure providers and software management makers are banking on such standards as CIM and WBEM to ensure that customers benefit from the rapid development of SAN management applications. Firms such as Brocade and IBM are trying to answer their customers' call for increased functionality and greater return on investment (ROI).

In an expansion of their existing partnership, IBM's Tivoli Storage Area Network Manager is optimized to manage Brocade products and Brocade is now a certified "Ready for Tivoli" partner, which helps ensure that Brocade products are designed, tested, and validated to be interoperable with Tivoli Software technology management solutions.

IBM also sells and supports the entire family of 2-Gigabit-per-second Brocade SAN infrastructure, including Brocade's signature SilkWorm line of switches. In turn, Brocade serves as the storage networking foundation for IBM open SAN products for SAN customers in Europe.

The play is one of a myriad of partnerships in which rivals turn teammates for the goal of promoting interoperability for SAN environments. HP, EMC, and a number of other major systems vendors have inked interoperability deals lately for the same purpose.

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