Breaking News - RAID and NEC Partner to Address High-Performance Storage Demands
RAID Inc., a customized storage solution and services provider, today announced it has entered into an OEM agreement with NEC Corp. of America, a provider of storage and network management solutions. RAID will license NEC's D-Series Enterprise Modular Storage products and sell them under the RAID Inc. brand. The new product line will be incorporated into RAID's suite of storage solutions for the high-performance computing (HPC), government, research and corporate markets.
"NEC has a 50-year history in the storage business, although it is not known as a storage vendor in the U.S. market," Jack Igoe, director of product management for NEC America Advanced Storage Products Group, told 5 Minute Briefing. "We only started making that a thrust late last year. We are looking for very key partners - and RAID Inc. is one of those partners - to bring NEC storage to a broader marketplace in the U.S."
According to RAID officials, the D-Series is well suited for HPC and government applications because it includes SATA read verification to detect silent read errors that other arrays do not. This was "a substantial reason" for the selection of NEC technology by RAID, Bob Picardi, COO of RAID, told 5 Minute Briefing.
The new RAID suite includes Triple Mirror and RAID-3 Double Parity non-disruptive capacity, scaling from 3 up to 144 disk drives with the ability to add one disk at a time to existing groups of disk arrays. The solution also incorporates automated physical resource allocation to balance workloads along with SAS/SATA intermix to map storage ability to the appropriate application tier. NEC also includes its patented Phoenix self-healing technology, which helps to reduce the number of hard disk drive rebuilds by up to 50 percent. In addition, the solution incorporates MAID (massive array of idle disks) technology for reduced power consumption.
NEC technology's ability to detect potentially bad drives, and either healing them or taking them out of service, can prevent drive failures 30 to 50 percent of the time, said Picardi. Another capability that RAID Inc. adds to the NEC technology in this space "is that we can do remote monitoring of all the boxes that we deploy in the world, on a 24x7 basis," added Picardi.
The D-Series starts at 219GB and scales to over 1.5PB. The D-Series supports a mix of SAS and SATA hard disk drives and a range of RAID configurations. D-Series arrays also offer a range of enterprise software options, including replication, snapshots, energy conservation and compliance. For information about RAID, go here.
For more on NEC, go here.
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IBM Unveils Cognos Business Intelligence Software For Mainframes
Cognos, an IBM company and provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions, is making IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software available, for the first time, for Linux on System z. "We do have a roadmap in place in terms of where we want to expand the availability," Jennifer Hanniman, senior marketing manager for Cognos 8, told 5 Minute Briefing. The z/OS platform itself will be next, she said.
With IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, customers can report and analyze transactional systems directly on the mainframe, enabling workers across an organization to quickly identify and respond to critical business trends. "We are very excited about not only having a solution now for the first time available on the mainframe, but being able to deliver ahead of schedule. We were able to deliver it in five months," said Hanniman. IBM completed the acquisition of Cognos at the end of January.
There were three main considerations that factored into the decision to make Cognos 8 BI software available on the mainframe, said Hanniman. The first was around "the resurgence of the mainframe," with customers seeing it as a potential strategic platform as they sought to consolidate data centers and initiate green IT projects within their organizations.
Second, as customers look to standardize on System z as a platform, they want to see which applications could be delivered on System z and BI is a key application, she said. BI is also emerging from a departmental application to a mission-critical application across the organization. With that shift, organizations are looking at the technical requirements and the best platform to support the BI solution - "and this is where the strength of the mainframe around security, availability, reliability becomes important," said Hanniman.
A third consideration, Hanniman stated, is data access. "We know that about 60 percent of structured data assets are on the mainframe and it is growing at about 20 percent per year." Customers want quick access to that information. Traditionally, they would move data from the mainframe onto another platform and access it for BI, but now they want to reduce that latency and actually put the BI solution right on the same platform, Hanniman said.
According to IBM, the availability of IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z extends IBM's Information on Demand business strategy, which is intended to consolidate the vendor's software, hardware, consulting and research resources. IBM also announced it has established multiple worldwide System z competency centers to help customers learn about IBM Cognos 8 BI on System z, benchmark the System z architecture and interact with other IBM products and solutions. For more information, go here. For more information on System z, go here.
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HP Unveils Deduplication Solutions
HP announced new disk-based backup systems with data deduplication technology that helps eliminate redundant data from disk storage devices.
The vendor is providing two distinct "flavors" of data deduplication to address the needs of customers of different sizes, David Rogers, manager of product marketing for disk-based products within the HP StorageWorks division, told 5 Minute Briefing. For SMB customers, HP has integrated this functionality into the HP StorageWorks D2D Backup Systems (D2D). For enterprise customers, HP offers deduplication with the HP StorageWorks Virtual Library Systems (VLS).
"Not surprisingly, one size doesn't fit all," said Rogers. For smaller IT environments that have a stronger interest in affordability, there is "dynamic deduplication"; while for companies at the high end, there is "accelerated deduplication" to support scalability in terms of capacity and performance.
Among the distinguishing characteristics of the two approaches is that D2D dynamic deduplication for SMB customers maximizes disk space by deduplicating data as it is stored to the disk, while VLS accelerated deduplication for enterprise customers improves performance by deduplicating data after the backup has completed writing to the disk, said Rogers.
HP D2D Backup Systems emulate up to 16 LTO tape autoloaders or libraries and consolidates backup of up to 16 servers onto a single network connected device. D2D dynamic deduplication reduces the amount of disk and memory required to deduplicate data by leveraging proprietary technology created by HP Labs; improves productivity by eliminating training with a GUI that does not require complex command lines for configuration; and optimizes investment of primary backup system through compatibility with new versions of software and applications.
HP VLS emulates multiple tape libraries or drives for data centers to backup large amounts of data with quick data restores in the event of a disaster. According to HP, VLS accelerated deduplication ensures scalability by easily adding nodes, while providing a single backup location for data contained on multiple servers; accelerates data restores by maintaining only the most recent copy of backup data, while eliminating duplicate data from previous backups; and simplifies management with a user interface that automatically monitors itself, configures storage, load-balances performance and conducts diagnostics.
To provide data protection for micro and small businesses, HP also introduced the HP StorageWorks RDX Removable Disk Backup Systems (RDX160 and RDX320) to enable small businesses to store data off-site as part of their disaster recovery plan.
The HP StorageWorks D2D 2500 and 4000 systems are available now. Accelerated deduplication is available for license with the HP StorageWorks VLS6600 and VLS9000 series in July. For more information on deduplication for HP D2D and VL, go here.
For more information on HP RDX Removable Disk Backup Systems, go here
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Hyper9 Introduces Search-Based Management for Virtual Environments
Hyper9, a server virtualization vendor, has announced its first product, Hyper9, a management platform for virtual environments. Hyper9 will available in for free download in September.
Hyper9 leverages what the company describes as a "Google-like" search engine to access both real-time and historical data on everything from the guest operating system to the physical infrastructure, then presents that data to users. Through this approach, the company states, Hyper9 supports faster troubleshooting, comprehensive monitoring and detailed reporting on the performance, configuration and utilization of virtual environments.
"There is a definite inflection point where I think people are starting to virtualize more of their data center into what I call mainstream applications," Chris Ostertag, president and CEO, Hyper9, told 5 Minute Briefing. This is creating a "massive opportunity" for management, he observed. When virtualization remained in the lab and test area, management was not as critical, he said, but now it is becoming imperative for organizations "because they have to be able to trust what they are deploying - and to be able to trust it, they have to be able to manage and control it."
According to Ostertag, "Ninety-nine percent of the market, new or old, is trying to apply old, physical, static solutions to a highly flexible, highly complex, highly dynamic environment. The only way we could think to get at that dynamic nature was to base our product and its solution on a search-based platform."
For data center managers, Hyper9 offers a combination of five points of inspections and data collection, including the VirtualCenter database, VirtualCenter via an API, directly to host servers, the virtual machines (VM) and the sessions within the VMs; a visual environment written in English; business intelligence tools that help analyze that data; and actionable responses to search results.
The initial Hyper9 virtual appliance is designed to work with the VMware ESX environment. Later versions will work with additional hypervisors. More information about Hyper9 is located online here.
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IBM Acquires “Mainframe Clone” Maker Platform Solutions
IBM announced it has acquired Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), a privately held technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. PSI's technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System z business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In 2006, PSI announced the availability of cloned mainframes - running IBM's z/OS operating system on Intel Itanium-based servers, or what the vendor called “open mainframe computers.” This led to a suit by IBM, followed by a counter-suit by PSI. As part of this acquisition, both IBM and PSI said they have dropped their respective lawsuit claims against each other.
IBM said that PSI's technologies and skills, along with its intellectual capital, will become part of IBM's long-term mainframe product engineering cycles and part of IBM's future product plans.
In a prepared statement, Michael Maulick, president and CEO of Platform Solutions, said "this acquisition makes the most sense for our companies - to collaborate on future technology offerings and maximize our combined knowledge and skills for the benefit of IBM clients globally." For more information on PSI, click here. For more information on IBM System z, visit here.
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