Friday, September 18, 2009

Free Disk Performance Analyzer for Networks Find disk-related performance bottlenecks

Free Disk Performance Analyzer for Networks Find disk-related performance bottlenecks on your networked systems now! Remotely scan your systems with this free utility from the makers of Diskeeper. You'll be able to id systems with severe disk performance issues-so you can take care of them before they become help desk calls. Download the free utility now!

Click to continue - Please tell them you heard about this from NavigateStorage

StoneFly offers Solid State drives accross entire IP San product line

StoneFly, Inc. NavigateStorage premier partner and leading supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems, today announced support for Intel® X25E-Extreme SATA Solid-State Drives (SSD) across its virtualized IP SAN product lines to enable customers to improve performance, capacity and lower energy consumption. Based on StoneFly testing with 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), Intel SSD shattered previous 15,000RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) performance results.


The new offerings, based on the Intel X25-E SSD, improve SAN input/output (IO) by 400 percent, while lowering energy consumption and cooling requirements by 80 percent. With no spinning disks, solid-state drives are able to read/write data faster, and consume less energy than SAS and SATA drives. "With the ability to mix SSD and HDD in a single chassis, organizations can manage and utilize their storage more effectively by appropriating specific applications with the appropriate storage tier," said Bahman Jalali, director of product management for StoneFly. "With this hybrid approach, StoneFly IP SANs enable system administrators to achieve ultra-fast performance by utilizing energy-saving solid state drives for data intensive applications, while moving non-mission critical data to SATA or SAS drives.""With the trends toward virtualization and 10 gigabit and IP SAN adoption, SSD will undeniably contribute to a paradigm shift in enterprise storage," said Kyle Fukuda, enterprise product line manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group.


"A storage model which includes SSD can increase performance and reduces energy costs for lower overall total cost of ownership."Support for Intel SSD is available for StoneFly's Voyager, OptiSAN, and ISC S-Class product lines, with the highest performing StoneFly IP SAN appliance supporting up to 8TB of SSD storage capacity.


The Voyager supports up to four bonded 10GbE ports, for an aggregated bandwidth of 40Gb, allowing organizations to sustain high-speed performance and SAN IO throughput. All Stonefly products are available through StoneFly's worldwide MVP reseller network. Each authorized MVP channel partner offers SAN configuration services, engineering support and post-sales implementation resources for all datacenter environments.

NavigateStorage celebrates its 10th year in business. 978-318-9000

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Adaptec bursts out with solid state drive controller

NavigateStorage and Adaptec this week stormed into the burgeoning solid state drive (SSD) space with the introduction of an I/O controller that speeds performance by as much 5x over traditional controller implementations.

The MaxIQ SSD Performance Cache is a PCI-e based controller that uses as many as four Intel X25-E 32GB single-level cell SSDs to offer 20,000 IOPs and 1.2GBps throughput. When used in a server and in the data path between server and storage the MaxIQ will speed performance for database applications, front end Web servers and virtual environments.
As data comes from applications, it is cached on the MaxIQ so that it can be retrieved quickly.
The MaxIQ features 3Gbps Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA support and works in Windows and Linux environments.

MaxIQ consists of Intel SSDs and software that can be paired with any Adaptec 5xxx or 2xxx controller. In a configuration with a MaxIQ Intel SSD and 12 Seagate 15,000RPM Serial Attached SCSI drives, testing of random reads showed 11x the performance of a traditionally configured Series 5xxx controller. In the same configuration, testing showed 5x performance increases for Web server workloads and 4x performance for both file server and online transaction processing.

The adapters will compete with Fusion-io's ioDrive. In a comparison, Adaptec claims that its controller costs $.31/GB and $0.14/IO compared to Fusion-io's cost of $15/GB and $0.15 per IO.

The MaxIQ Intel SSD is expected to be available mid-September starting at $1,300.

Contact NavigateStorage or 978-318-9000 for more information.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

AutoMAID™ Energy Saving Technology

Nexsan's evolutionary AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology transparently places disk drives into an idle state to vastly reduce power and cooling costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-effecdtive benefits of MAID 2.0 without the limitations of slow access times and special host software.

AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and offers multiple levels of energy savings. AutoMAID is user selectable enabling users to determine the right level of response time performance to energy savings. AutoMAID is the first MAID 2.0 architecture that supports VTL, full file format D2D and standard high performance RAID implementations.

Key Points
AutoMAID reduces power and cooling costs
Nexsan’s AutoMAID delivers the benefits of MAID without the limitations
Available on Nexsan Assureon, SATABoy, SATABeast, and SATABeast

All this is available from NavigateStorage. Call NavigateStorage today and see what they can tailor for you.

How StoneFly’s StoneFusion-Powered IP SANs Leverage Windows Volume Shadow Copy Services for Easy Snapshot Management

NavigateStorage's "StoneFly’s" fully featured IP SANs powered by the StoneFusion Operating System provide centralized storage management, advanced storage services and integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to simplify storage provisioning. To enhance data availability and host integration, StoneFly utilizes the core technologies of the Microsoft Windows operating system to interact with IP SAN volumes.

StoneFly IP SANs have offered integrated snapshot technology since StoneFusion version 3, when StoneFly Snapshot was used to implement nearline data recovery and improve system backups. StoneFly Snapshot is designed for recovering critical data quickly with point-in-time images of a live volume, which can be created nearly instantaneously. Snapshot volumes appear as regular read/write volumes to the host, and modifications do not impact the live volume. Unlike full volume copies, snapshots occupy a small fraction of available space. StoneFly

Snapshot technology reinforces the focus on data recovery by offering rollbacks to previous valid data in the event of a disk failure, volume indexing, file deletion or virus.
Microsoft enhanced its operating system-wide snapshots with a new technology called Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), which offers improved support for snapshots across NAS and SAN volumes in the Windows Server 2003 operating system. StoneFusion-based IP SANs utilize VSS to ensure continuous volume access for Windows-based workstations or servers for snapshots, online backups or other applications.

Initially the only VSS-aware applications were file systems, local volumes, Exchange and SQL. The increased demand for networked storage including IP SANs required this technology to evolve so that snapshots could be supported across the network instead of being limited to the host. As a result of the rapid increase of iSCSI across Windows Server platforms, StoneFly continued to develop its IP SAN offerings to provide more host-level integration and to ensure continuous disk access for mission-critical applications including email, databases and disaster recovery, eliminating the potential for data corruption. The StoneFly VSS agent provides a single snapshot mechanism for the IP SAN and Windows Server environment.

StoneFly IP SAN Options
StoneFly offers a wide variety of IP SANs for Windows environments, ranging from entry-level IP SANs-In-a-Box to modular high-availability, high capacity IP SANs. StoneFusion-powered storage can be easily deployed in environments requiring tiered storage, high availability or scalability.

How Microsoft VSS Works
Microsoft developed the VSS technology to provide snapshot capability (back-ups executed without closing down application I/O) to support VSS-aware applications and back-up software. The VSS utility uses a framework approach, communicating with the application server, a writer, a back-up application and the storage device.

Give NavigateStorage a call 978-318-9000 to learn more. read more about Stonefly's OptiSan and Voyager IP SAN storage systems.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Easy on your budget ideas from NavigateStorage

Our customers and prospects all have one thing in common, "they don't have much budget $$$ "

But they do have needs such as Storage, Email archiving and Protection (virus, malware, data leakage.) And the less requested but often more critical - backup.

When we encounter such needs we first work hard to understand their challenges BOTH LONG AND SHORT. This often comes down to compromising. Its interesting how often the technical side is often blinded by features and bells and whistles. Oh for sure we can sell all that but work hard to meet the NEEDS and BUDGET and not let the user be blinded by the gadgets.

So if you are contemplating storage expansion, talk to us before before you decide. We sell most all vendors and can help you find the perfect solution.

Check us out at NavigateStorage