Saturday, April 3, 2010

Data Protection - "Email Archiving Plus "

Red Condor Archive provides an affordable, ($40/user/year) reliable and secure hosted Email Archiving Service to customers of all sizes to help you meet your compliance, litigation support, storage management or best practice requirements. Red Condor Archive leverages a global cloud computer and storage infrastructure to provide your organization with an extremely scalable, 100% software-free service, at a cost effective price. Red Condor Archive’s data collection technology supports all messaging systems (Microsoft, Novell, IBM, Zimbra, Scalix, IMail Server, Mailtrust, Keiro and many more) making the solution truly future-proof.

NavigateStorage with 10 years of experience in Email, File and SharePoint Archiving.

RELDATA - Unified storage solutions that deliver iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication

RELDATA - Unified storage solutions that deliver iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication: "NavigateStorage and RELDATA deliver a new breed of virtual enterprise-wide data storage and replication infrastructure based on a single pool of shared storage. RELDATA data storage and replication solutions are simplifying unstructured data management in distributed IT infrastructures and dramatically reduce total cost of ownership."

RELDATA Unified Storage Systems

RELDATA’s 9240i Unified Storage System delivers integrated iSCSI SAN, NAS and WAN replication functions on a single virtualized platform that delivers best-in-class performance. The system is easy to implement, operate, and manage, yet delivers enterprise-class functionality. Customers can independently scale disk storage capacity, SAN/NAS/WAN replication storage services, and network performance without application disruption. This "pay-as-you-grow" design eliminates the need for forklift box upgrades — and the downtime it causes — and liberates customers from vendor lock-in and the associated predatory pricing for additional disk capacity.

Contact NavigateStorage 978-318-9000

Why Storage from NavigateStorage

Why Storage from NavigateStorage: "iStor’s Virtual Storage technology makes the full power of IP SANs available to the SMB market. The virtual pool of storage frees the storage user from the complexities of traditional RAID configuration, eases management and increases the efficiency of disk utilization; all while optimizing the performance of all applications.

Powerful enough to satisfy high bandwidth applications, as well as transaction-intensive applications, the iS512 features 8x1GbE host ports, providing the industry’s highest throughput for a single controller, and supports over 80,000 IOPS."

Let us tell you more. Call 978-318-9000. Visit us at www.navigatestorage.com

Marathon High Availability

Marathon High Availability: "Data Protection

'Why Data Protection?'

'Because bad things happen to good people.... and... users don't want to hear excuses'

Marathon everRun High Availability delivers extremely high levels of application availability, protecting your applications, data, networks and operating systems from faults, failures, and dropped network connections. Running on standard Windows servers, everRun HA provides a significantly greater level of protection than clusters and rudimentary failover solutions, but at a lower cost and with far greater simplicity.

everRun HA software synchronizes two standard Windows servers to create a virtual application environment that is inherently protected from downtime due to faults and failures. Data integrity is guaranteed by keeping an exact copy on the the secondary server to ensure zero data loss in the event of a failure."

NavigateStorage is a ten year old company specializing in Storage, Disaster Prevention, Archiving and Anti-Virus. Call 978-318-9000

Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering « Demand-Driven Storage Blog

Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering « Demand-Driven Storage Blog: "Tiering is Dead, Long Live Tiering"

NavigateStorage, a ten year old company specializing in Storage, Backup, Data Replication and Malware. We pass this article on as a precursor to talk nor about Avere Systems. We think this company has great promise, having decoded "Dynamic Tiering" and is worth a close look. Why not stay up to date and let us set up a webex and answer you questions.

The term Dynamic Tiering has really been abused in the network storage industry lately. Everyone talks about tiering in one form or another. Vendors that do not have currently shipping products talk about futures and those vendors that have shipping products do not actually disclose how their tiering works, which applications benefit, nor by how much. Unfortunately, one of the giants in the industry has even further muddied the waters. According to a TechTarget article last week regarding NetApp’s earnings call, NetApp’s CEO said that “the whole concept of tiered storage is going to go away.” Presumably, this refers to EMC’s Fast technology, since one industry Goliath always needs to beat up on another Goliath. The unfortunate thing for NetApp, is that on the same call, they completely reversed their position on tiering when they touted the success of their form of tiering, which includes their SSD-based performance accelerator. Tiering is dead, long live tiering!

The simple truth is that no single technology has ever proven to be the panacea of data storage. SATA drives have the lowest cost per bit and are great for archival storage. FC or SAS drives offer a compromise of performance and capacity, excelling at large block accesses like those found in large sequentially read files. Solid State Devices, based on Flash, offer unsurpassed performance for random reads and small block sizes.
More importantly, the differences from one technology to another are measured by orders of magnitude, not by mere percentage improvements. Because of this, a solution that can leverage the strengths of all the technologies is guaranteed to out-perform and cost less than a solution that only uses one or two.
Rather than predicting which storage tiers will win and the capacity of those tiers in a solution, the important information needed to judge a tiering solution is how the tiers are used. Most vendors are completely silent on this. Here are three examples of the more egregious mis-steps in dynamic tiering.

The first mis-step is tiering at too large a level of granularity. Consider a solution that tiers at the volume level. If a few files in a volume become active, the entire volume will need to be promoted to a more expensive tier to get the performance needed for the few files. This results in cost inefficiency as extra data is promoted to the expensive storage and performance inefficiency as the entire volume consumes read/write bandwidth of both tiers that are involved in the promotion of the volume.

The second mis-step is not tiering frequently enough. Several vendors have proposed tiering schedules that are measured in terms of days. This is crazy. Consider the file that I am editing for this blog. I might work on this file for a few days and then rarely, if ever, look at the source file again once the blog is posted. If activity is measure across days, by the time this source file is promoted, it should be archived.
The third mis-step is not using the correct media. Most vendors actually completely avoid this question and require the administrator to set policies. In those instances where the vendor does decide, frequently wrong media is chosen.

An example of this third mis-step is to examine the two stage architecture promoted on NTAP’s earnings call – SSD & SATA. In their architecture the SSD-based performance accelerator is apparently only used for read data. All write data is sent to SATA storage. This is terribly inefficient and is even proven in their SPECsfs®08 posting. To achieve the same performance in a NTAP 3160 with the accelerator module, they required almost twice the number of SATA disks than when they run the same benchmark using FC disks (96 SATA disks versus 56 FC disks). Since the SATA disks have over 3x the capacity of the FC disks, they deployed over 6x as much capacity to store the same amount of data. This over-provisioning is a result of not tiering the media properly and is extremely inefficient in terms of space, power and equipment costs.
What is clear from all of the press on “Dynamic Tiering”, is that the term is both extremely overused and misunderstood. Because of the orders of magnitude differences in storage media costs and performance, data storage solutions can clearly benefit from tiering if executed properly.

This entry was written by Ron Bianchini, posted on February 22, 2010 at 11:08 am, filed under Tiered NAS and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Monday, March 29, 2010

iQstor Networks

iQstor Networks, Inc. , a leading developer of intelligent and integrated Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, announced today that it has qualified the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 series of 4GFC disk drives for use with its iQ2880 4GFC to FC Storage Platform and J2880 4GFC Switched JBOD (SBOD) disk expansion enclosure.

"We're pleased to qualify Hitachi's line of 36GB, 73GB and 147GB 4GFC disk drives for use with our new iQ2880 and J2880 for the enterprise data center and high performance video applications," said Jason Lo, president and CEO of iQstor Networks. "Hitachi's high-performing Ultrastar drive technology is the perfect complement for our iQ2880 and J2880 for mission-critical enterprise computing environments like online transaction processing and data analysis, while addressing the evolving high resolution content creation and post production workflows requiring storage systems that can sustain throughputs for real-time HD network collaboration and 2K digital intermediate applications.

Contact NavigateStorage for more info

Red Condor Archive – Affordable, Reliable and Secure Hosted Email Archiving Service

NavigateStorage offers an Affordable, Reliable and Secure Hosted Email Archiving Service

Red Condor Archive provides an affordable, reliable and secure hosted Email Archiving Service to customers of all sizes to help you meet your compliance, litigation support, storage management or best practice requirements. Red Condor Archive leverages a global cloud computer and storage infrastructure to provide your organization with an extremely scalable, 100% software-free service, at a cost effective price. Red Condor Archive’s data collection technology supports all messaging systems (Microsoft, Novell, IBM, Zimbra, Scalix, IMail Server, Mailtrust, Keiro and many more) making the solution truly future-proof.

Automatic Back-Up of Messages & Attachments: With Red Condor Archive, you’ll capture all inbound and outbound messages and maintain a secure and tamper-proof copy of all business correspondence. Plus, you can completely set-up and configure your archive in just minutes with a few simple clicks.

Lifetime Retention with Unlimited Storage: With Red Condor Archive, there are never any hidden fees and all our subscription plans include unlimited storage.

Remove the strain on your email servers without expensive hardware. Allow users to delete email with the knowledge that any items can be retrieved from the archive if needed later.

Powerful Search & Retrieval At All Times: Red Condor Archive keeps all data online and immediately accessible for searches. Other hosted archive vendors migrate your older data to offline or near-line storage systems, dramatically increasing the amount of time required to search. You’ll be able to search, retrieve and export messages.

These are just a few of the features. Write or call 1-978-318-9000 or visit our website and request "More Info"