HP Ramps Up Storage to Multi-Petabyte Range
HP has announced a storage system designed for businesses with multi-petabyte (more than 1,000 terabytes) data storage requirements. The new HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) is intended to allow customers with extreme storage demands - such as Web 2.0, digital media and other large enterprise customers - to reduce costs and simplify management of the large amounts of data commonly associated with online or digital media business models.
There is a phenomenon in the storage arena - as storage costs per gigabyte or per terabyte decline, people actually use more, Patrick Eitenbichler, director of marketing at HP StorageWorks, told 5 Minute Briefing. "It is not like they stop using it, or start paying less for it because they just use the same amount of storage. They actually see more and more opportunities to make data available online - and that is what this announcement is about."
Business services, such as photo sharing, streaming media and social networking generate large amounts of file-based data that needs to be stored, managed and retrieved, but current storage systems for these environments cost two to five times more than the new HP storage solutions, according to HP.
With the new storage system, also, according to HP, administrators can easily manage petabytes of storage versus terabytes through a common management interface, reducing the number of staff required and the cost to manage the environment.
"By delivering that extreme scalability, extreme affordability, and unified management of petabyte-scale storage systems, we enable customers to put more information online and actually in turn become more productive, themselves, if they use it internally - or actually create new business models, start new businesses externally," noted Eitenbichler.
As an example, Eitenbichler pointed to Snapfish, a photo sharing service. "They obviously have to be up 24/7 because when a user wants to share their pictures, look at and print their pictures, they can't afford the downtime. At the same time, they have to have the flexibility after a holiday to accept a lot more pictures and provide the performance so that everybody can quickly bring up their pictures," he noted. "That is the beauty of our Extreme Data Storage System. It has independent performance and capacity scalability so you can scale capacity by just adding more disk to it, you can scale performance by just adding more blades to it. The difference from existing systems is that actually that it uses a new architecture."
HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System will be available in the fourth quarter. For more information, go here.
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Emulex Qualifies for Use With EMC Systems
EMC Corp. has qualified the Emulex LightPulse LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for use with the EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage system families. According to the companies, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs, which are available from EMC through EMC Select, provide customers with new performance, virtualization and security features, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel products.
"For EMC and Emulex, the transition to 8Gb/s Fibre Channel data networks are being driven primarily by the increased use of server virtualization and also by high transactional processes or applications such as database applications," Al Gamarra, senior product marketing manager, Emulex, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs are EMC E-Lab tested for deployment in SAN environments with CLARiiON, Celerra and Symmetrix networked storage systems. The complete Emulex LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s HBAs is now available through the EMC Select program.
The E-Lab approval and availability through the EMC Select channels is "a stamp of approval that is recognized by all the data centers," said Gamarra. "Their combination of testing together with ours ensures that we work seamlessly within existing Fibre Channel networks which are predominantly 2-gig and 4-gig - but once again, in these areas where you are starting to see the increased performance needs, we can seamlessly drop in there and the data center managers continue to use the utilities and the management tools that they have previously been working with."
The Emulex LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s HBAs, supported by EMC includes the dual channel LPe12002, single channel LPe12000 and midrange LPe1250.
"It's our new-generation platform," said Gamarra. "It is a doubling of the bandwidth, increased resources for virtualization. It is allowing people to future-proof themselves because it is a PCI-Gen2-based adapter so as you start seeing Gen2 servers coming out that's what people will be adopting," explained Gamarra. For more information on Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs, go here.
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SOA Software Announces New Release of Mainframe SOA Solution
SOA Software, an SOA governance solution provider, announced the release of SOLA 6.0 (Service Oriented Legacy Architecture), a major update to its mainframe SOA solution. SOLA 6.0 features a more powerful Web 2.0 SOLA Development Studio, authentication, and with enhanced BPEL support for orchestration of mainframe-based services.
SOLA is designed to enable mainframe applications to function as part of an SOA in a cost-effective manner. Originally created by Merrill Lynch for its brokerage operations before being purchased by SOA Software in 2005, the solution provides a process to expose mainframe applications as secure Web services, and also enables mainframe applications to consume Web services.
Using SOLA, customers can leverage billions of dollars of existing mainframe investments when building an enterprise SOA, SOA Software said. The SOLA runtime environment runs entirely on the mainframe, eliminating the need for expensive, unreliable and unnecessary middleware.
"By running SOA on the mainframe, you have a much more reliable platform," Jim Crew, SOLA co-creator and vice president of SOA Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. "If you're running XML parsing, for example, on a middle tier platform, then you're as reliable as that middle-tier platform, which tends not to be particularly reliable. The issue that you have with those platforms, is when things break, it's almost impossible to figure out what went wrong. Doing a complete SOAP stack on the mainframe gives you a much higher manageability capability, monitoring capability."
Along with Web 2.0 and BPEL support, the latest version of SOLA includes greater workflow efficiency, and enhanced database and parser algorithms increase efficiency and boost ROI. SOA Software also announced improved security features, such as identity mapping, SAML 2.0 authentication, XACML authorization, multiple certificates and TLS provide improved security. Version 6.0 also incorporates multiple container and pipeline support boost performance and efficiency by taking advantage of architectural improvements of IBM's CICS TS. Enhanced management and administrative capability provide added flexibility, security and control.
SOLA provides mainframe end-to-end governance with WS-Security, WS-Policy, mainframe-optimized registry, integrated monitoring, logging, auditing and near limitless scalability, all implemented on the mainframe. For more information, click here.
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nSolutions Debuts Change and Configuration Appliance Based on Bell Labs Technology
nSolutions recently launched its flagship change and configuration management offering, Network Ontology and Virtualization Appliance (NOVA). NOVA is a product line of plug-and-play appliances that manages change in heterogeneous infrastructures through automation and control.
For many companies, a significant percentage of revenue is generated online, but the complexity of IT has become so great that it is not possible for enterprises to provide the business services at the level necessary using current techniques of manual operations, Harish Rao, nSolutions' CEO, told 5 Minute Briefing. The complexity is exacerbated by the increasing use of virtualization, added Rao.
"We do three things very well," said Rao. "We do the discovery of the network and create a unified view of the network. We provide an operational configuration management database that allows people to have the trackability and traceability of all changes whether they are on the network, servers, database or application level." Additionally, NOVA's Change Impact Analytics (CIA) allows a variety of reports to be generated for stakeholders responsible for operations, compliance and security.
"Change is the biggest cause of downtime, the biggest cost of security, and the biggest problem associated with compliance because people tend to make mistakes," Rao stated.
"IT spends a great deal of time trying to find out where the problems are because people are managing in solos. What you need is a deep unified view of the entire network so that you can then correlate the interdependencies of any problems associated with change and do the change impact assessment before you actually make the change effective. We provide that kind of analytics," said Rao.
NOVA is based on technology that was tested on a global basis before nSolutions spun off from Bell Labs as an independent business in 2001. "The original technology was developed for the telecom market," said Rao. "Since 2005, we have focused more on the enterprise. Now we have brought out a flagship product line of appliances," he said. "It is the same technology but we have extended it significantly as oriented towards enterprise operations. It used to be originally for planning and design of telecom networks."
The appliances are sized according to the number of devices they support. The NOVA M-100 Series is packaged as a 1u rack mountable appliance which supports up to 50 or 100 connected devices. The M-100 comes equipped with 160GB disk capacity and two 1 Gps network interfaces. The NOVA E-100 Series is packaged as a 2u rack mountable appliance which supports larger infrastructures with 2,000 or more connected devices. Each E-100 appliance comes equipped with 500GB disk capacity and two 1Gps network interfaces. For additional information, go here.
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