Share application data across multiple virtual machines

Virtual machines running Windows operating systems on VMware ESX can now share access to application data on SAN volumes and maintain access to application data, even when virtual servers are migrated between physical host servers. Now Sanbolic’s Melio clustered file system available from NavigateStorage addresses a shortcoming of virtualization across all major platforms – an inability to share application data between multiple virtual machines, which creates an inflexible storage platform for virtual data centers.

"Previously, a SAN storage volume containing application data had to be assigned uniquely to a single physical or virtual server, limiting flexibility and providing a single path to application data," said Momchil Michailov, Sanbolic’s founder. "Sanbolic’s Melio file system (Melio FS) enables multiple paths to the data and concurrent read/write access to the application data using a high performance, low latency SAN storage fabric. Shared access to application data on SAN storage infrastructures enhances application availability, and also provides flexibility to scale applications and improve performance of tiered applications."

"We are building a VMware-based virtual environment for most of our servers," said Anders Alexandersson of GVA Consultants AB, a KBR company. "All of the physical and virtual servers have common shared storage volumes formatted with Melio FS. All of our data is placed on the Melio FS formatted volumes, and we can dynamically add both physical and virtual machines to access the data. This kind on infrastructure not only significantly reduces our administrative costs, but also allows us to keep a single set of the data and increase the processing times significantly."

Sanbolic’s Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager are designed to support Windows applications which benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool simultaneously accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64 bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes. These products install easily on physical or virtual servers, and can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware. Windows directory, reporting, and clustering features are supported. Reporting on storage I/O and transaction performance facilitates optimization of storage intensive workloads.

To learn more and see a demo contact NavigateStorage

iQStor Storage Enterprise-Level Features - High Performance - Affordable Price

The iQ2880 storage system from NavigateStorage delivers the high performance and reliability required by today’s demanding applications, at an affordable price. The iQ2880 combines enterprise-level features such as storage virtualization, snapshot, mirroring, remote replication, storage provisioning and automated capacity growth with fully redundant components, to deliver storage scalability, data protection, storage automation and management simplicity. And all this at a price point that’s dramatically less than competing storage solutions on the market today.

Modular Configurations
Each iQ2880 supports up to fifteen Fibre Channel drives providing 4.5TB of storage capacity using 300GB disk drives or 15TB with 1TB SATA disk drives. This capacity can be easily and dynamically scaled to 240TB by attaching optional J2880 disk enclosure with FC or SATA disk drives to the iQ2880 storage system, creating a tiered-storage environment, with Fibre Channel drives for primary storage and SATA drives for secondary storage.

If you would like a competitive quote or more information please contact us. Or just pick up the phone and call 978-308-9000 or e mail us with your questions.

E-Mail Discovery Best Practices

NavigateStorage has been in the email archiving solutions business since 2001. Intitially with Educomm which was later bought by ZANTAZ. Today we offer solutions from ZANTAZ and Global Relay. We are experts in the field and offer a full range of services. Give us a call at 978-318-9000 or request us to contact you here.

Be proactive.
Don't wait to be on the receiving end of a subpoena or regulatory investigation before acting. Whether it is because of Enron, Elliot Spitzer, or the Wall Street Journal, regulators and the courts have become increasingly aggressive in enforcing regulations, all of which involve e-discovery. Courts view e-mails as the place to find out who knew what and when in civil, criminal, or patent litigation. Sooner or later, it will happen to you. So be proactive and invest in processes and products to minimize the impact of e-discovery on your organization.

What you don't know can hurt you.
If only the old adage ("what you don't know won't hurt you") were true. You could simply delete all e-mails and minimize the risk of someone using them against you. But in today's increasingly inter-connected world, that is no longer an option. E-mail flows freely across organizational boundaries, making it impossible to destroy all copies of any given message. Enterprises are better off storing all business-related e-mails and knowing what they contain. Ultimately, when you sit down to determine your legal strategy (e.g., "do we settle or fight?"), it's not unlike playing a game of poker. By storing e-mails, you not only know your cards but you also know the cards that your opponent may have.

Pick your partner carefully.
Given that keyword search tools from e-mail archives or other vendors aren't sufficient, you'll need to pick an e-discovery partner. There are a wide range of e-discovery products and services to choose from. Whatever you decide, make sure that your chosen solution has everything it takes to address the problem: a single interface to all of your e-mail repositories so nothing is missed; the linking of e-mails into discussion threads to establish who knew what and when; the ranking of e-mail search results by relevance; and so on.

Take e-discovery products for a test drive.
Don't take the word of an e-discovery vendor. Ask them to install their product in your environment and try it out before you buy. (With Global Relay we can have you operational in a test environment in about an hour. ZANTAZ is more difficult to install and test environments require much more.) Ask the solution vendors to provide customer references and case studies of enterprise deployments. Speak with their existing customers to learn about the solution as well as the company. It is worth spending the time to evaluate before you buy.

Document processes and best practices.
Document your end-to-end e-discovery processes, from collection to analysis to review to production. Capture all the tasks and document how each task addresses chain of custody, spoliation, and security issues. Outline all the parties involved in each task and their roles and responsibilities. Conduct post-mortem analyses after every large case or several small cases to identify opportunities for improvement. This will help ensure the highest return on your investments in automating and streamlining your e-discovery processes.

This article is an excerpt from Aaref Hilaly's article, "So You Bought An E-Mail Archive System. Now What?" originally published in the July 2006 issue of E-Discovery Advisor Magazine.

Color at Black-and-white Prices

It's time to add color to every document you produce and no longer worry about how much it costs. The Phaser 8860 color printer and Phaser 8860MFP color multifunction printer from NavigateStorage make it easy to create beautiful color documents for the same cost as your typical black-and-white prints.

Everyday Color Printing is Here

It's not a dream. Busy workgroups with high print demands can now afford to print in attention-grabbing color every day. You pay a little more for the printer or MFP, but the printing ink costs are so low that you could recoup that extra cost in a hurry depending on how much you print.

Low cost of ownership with color ink sticks that cost a fraction of laser toner cartridges
View SpencerLab Digital Color Laboratory analysis (PDF)
View IDC white paper (PDF)
Create more effective documents by using color that is more affordable than ever and savings add up fast with every color print - the more you print, the more you save. Finally you can drop the restrictions you have on color printing and be the hero.

Find out how much you could save
Your cost savings could be significant if you use the Phaser 8860 color printer or Phaser 8860MFP color multifunction printer over typical color laser devices. Give us a shout at NavigateStorage to see how much. Its easy.

NAND Flash Storage may be affordable

During a conversation with a customer of NavigateStorage, the customer asked me if I had ever heard of Fusion IO. He said that he was awaiting delivery of a trial card with 320GB of flash memory to use as his primary storage for his hungry, high performance I/O data bases. He also said that the price of the card was about $9,000.

The ioDrive uses non-volatile NAND flash as its storage medium. Their website at http://www.fusionio.com/ says that they company, founded in Salt Lake City in 2006, came out of stealth mode in late 2007. They claim that their cards are

• Capable of over 120,000 random read/write IOPS
  
• Allows for less than 50 microsecond access latency
  
• Permits user to Host and Serve 10x the content per server
  
• Enables terabytes of Virtual Memory with near DRAM speeds
  
• Eliminates service interrupts due to I/O contention
  
• Save or resume virtual machine states in seconds

If you are interested in knowing more or giving them a try, let us know. Call us at 978-318-9000 or drop us an email.

IP SAN solutions from NavigateStorage's vendors are the right choice

Ease the storage management and economic burden of data storage by implementing an IP SAN from NavigateStorage

Whether you're currently managing multiple direct-attached storage devices or you're looking for enterprise-class features in an IP SAN, we will meet your requirements for simplicity, performance and functionality. Our ipSAN arrays come from vendors from A -Z but only from vendors with the reputation for quality, performance and value.

For example:

Entry level 11+TB IP SAN under $16,000 supports up to 15 high performance, high capacity SATA drives and can be configured to take advantage of the 4 or 8 port GbE or 1 port of 10GbE. High throughput design.

High capacity low cost up to 42TB of SATA 2 storage with 2 iscsi ports and 2 fibre channel ports, single and dual controllers, green power storage management.

Scalable, high availability, SATA SAS IP SAN storage solutions with dual active/active controllers, fail over, scalable to multiple terabytes, replication, data de-duplication, encryption, ILM

Let us understand your requirements both current and future and find the right match for you. Contact us at NavigateStorage

IBM and NavigateStorage introduce FastBack CDP

Following on the heels of its FilesX acquisition, IBM is rolling out software that gives customers continuous data protection for applications, databases and file servers.

Available from NavigateStorage, IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack software features the ability to provide nearly instantaneous recovery of applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and DB2. The software complements IBM’s Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files, which backs up only file-based data and not transactional data.

The software continually captures changes at the block-level. It has policies an IT administrator can set that lets them control the Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives on a per application basis.

The software is available in four versions:1. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Microsoft Exchange allows the restoration of individual e-mail messages, attachments, calendars and tasks.2. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Bare Machine Recovery lets users restore entire systems to a server or virtual machine.3. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack Center combines FastBack, FastBack for Microsoft Exchange and FastBack Bare Machine Recovery.4. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, which lets you recover any Windows server data.

All versions of FastBack are presently Windows-only products in contrast to one of its competitors, Symantec’s Backup Exec. FastBack also competes with Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager. As you would expect from IBM, the company is looking at supporting AIX, Linux and Solaris over time.

IBM acquired FilesX three months ago in April for $90 million. FilesX’s Xpress Restore is the basis for IBM FastBack.

The software is priced at $800 to $3,000 per server. Call NavigateStorage today at 978-318-9000 and ask for Jim

Xerox color printer program from NavigateStorage

We just came back from a CompTia meeting in Orlando, Florida - August 4-8, 2008. Amongst the various vendor presentations was a real exciting product offering from Xerox. One that will enable our customers to SAVE significant money in an area they seldom even think about. A Printer!!! And what made it even more exciting the printer comes with a full service and supplies offering under a guaranteed fixed price contract for 3+ years. NavigateStorage immediately signed up as a Xerox partner and is authorized to offer this great deal to our customers. (our website will be updated in the next week). NavigateStorage has specialized for nine years in storage, backup, disaster recovery, e mail and security solutions so this is quite a departure but the program is just too compelling.

Now here is the money saving plan.

FACT: Most companies have no idea how much each color page cost - do you? As an example, a typical printed color page can cost $0.13 per page for supplies only - this does not include the cost of purchasing or maintaining the printer. If you double the ink coverage on the page, the cost per page will also double from $0.13 to $0.26 a page! NavigateStorage's program provides a fixed cost per page so page coverage is no longer an issue! Since service is included for FREE, there is no need to worry about repair charges down the road. NavigateStorage is an Authorized Channel Partner for Xerox and uses genuine Xerox ink and Xerox technicians.

NavigateStorage will provide you with a brand new Xerox Phaser 8860PP, all the ink you need FREE and service for fixed cost of $0.14 for the first 2,000 color pages then only $0.10 each color page over 2,000. No matter what your color print coverage is per page. Remarkably, the more you print, the more you save!

Looking for the convenience of a true Xerox quality "solid ink" printer or multifuntion printer with print, copy, scan and fax capabilities all in color? The Xerox Phaser 8660 color printer or the Phaser 8660 multifunction printer allows you to print, copy, scan, and fax with stunning color output. Match that with its ease-of-use, consistency, quality and reliability and you have the ideal MFP for medium-size work groups with high-volume print demands. The Phaser 8860MFP is $0.14 for the first 2,500 color pages, then $0.10 each color page over the 2,500. Check out our family of printers.

Contact us today and lets talk turkey. Start out small and give us a try. Remember, its Xerox for the best print quality, its Xerox supplies and its Xerox service. You can't go wrong.

NetApp V-Series now de-dupes other vendors

Now here is something that's really exciting for NetApp users or NetApp wanna be's and NavigateStorage wants to tell you more.

On July 31, 2008 -- NetApp this week fired a shot across the respective bows of its competitors with the announcement that its V-Series family of storage virtualization controllers can now front-end primary storage systems from any vendor with virtualization and data de-duplication capabilities.

The V-Series product line already enables customers with non-NetApp storage systems to run the NetApp Data ONTAP 7G operating system. Now, the V-Series allows customers who have EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hewlett-Packard (HP), or other storage systems to deploy NetApp de-duplication technology -- which is a free feature of ONTAP -- to reduce redundant copies of data on primary storage.

NetApp's A-SIS (Advanced-Single Instance Storage) de-duplication is capable of achieving de-duplication ratios of up to 20:1, with the possibility of even greater ratios over time.
"We believe that we are alone in the market in terms of being able to de-duplicate data on primary storage," says Chris Cummings, NetApp's senior director of data-protection solutions. "Other vendors are focused on de-duping backups and archives."

Claiming to be the sole vendor in the storage industry doing something -- the old "we don't really compete with anyone directly with this product" -- is usually standard vendor FUD. In this case, however, NetApp's claims may be on target, at least temporarily.

"It's an accurate claim today," says Stephanie Balaouras, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. "NetApp supports de-duplication across its entire family of FAS systems and is already talking about the benefits that de-duplication can provide not only in backup environments but also in virtualized server environments, virtualized desktop environments, home directories, file shares, etc. NetApp is ahead of the rest of the market today when it comes to expanding the value proposition of de-duplication beyond backup."

Nexsan's SASBoy combines SAS and MAID

Here is a creative idea that provides increased performance with SAS drives and combines a touch of "Green"

With the release of its SASBoy disk array, Nexsan Technologies Inc. is combining two technologies rarely seen together: high-performance SAS disks and spin-down for power savings.

SASBoy, Nexsan's first SAS disk array, contains 4.2 TB of 300 GB 15,000 rpm SAS drives, 4 Gbps Fibre Channel or 1 Gbps Ethernet ports, and up to 4 GB of cache. The array also has the ability to spin-down disks for power savings using Nexsan's AutoMAID feature.

With the combination of SAS disks and spin-down, Nexsan is trying to fill a gap between Tier 1 transaction processing storage and bulk SATA secondary storage. "With this product, we're focused on fast random access of fixed-content storage," said Bob Woolery, Nexsan marketing vice president. One example of how this hybrid storage tier could be used would be to store the index of an otherwise static archive for fast search.

MAID was originally developed to prolong the lives of low-cost SATA drives, which have a lower MTBF than typical enterprise drives. But some industry observers aren't sure how much of a market exists for MAID on high-performance drives and the new type of storage tier Nexsan targets. "This is an unusual implementation of SAS," said analyst Arun Taneja, Taneja Group. "Right now it's hard to tell how customers will use it -- but customers often find different creative ways to use systems."

NavigateStorage, a Nexsan Premier Partner, specializes in Storage solutions of all types from all manufacturers. Why not let us offer our expertise to you? Contact us.

Hosted Malware Protection - save hardware and personnel

Here is a great money and time saving idea. And best of all it is not much more than buying the software and managing your Anti-Malware protection yourself.

Panda Managed Office Protection is a web-based subscription service that removes the cost and management overheads of hardware, personnel and other resources dedicated to antivirus for SMBs.

As a Hosted Service, it provides an always up and easy to use web console which allows organizations to manage their protection anytime from anywhere, reducing complexity to the maximum. Since Panda Managed Office Protection can be installed and managed remotely it can also be the ideal solution for branch offices from large organizations which are not connected to the LAN, without additional infrastructure investments.

NavigateStorage, a premier Panda Security Partner offers Panda's Technologies. Why not give it a try today ---no obligation. .

NetworkWorld Clear Choice Test - Show me the money"

In the July 28, 2008 edition of NetworkWorld, a great magazine, a comprehensive comparative test was conducted on the leading iSCSI Storage Area Network vendors. These vendors included NetApp (FAS2050), Compellent Technologies (Storage Center), HP (StorageWorks 20121), Dell (Equallogic PS5000XV), Lefthand Networks (NSM2120), StoneFly (Storage Concentrator), FalconStor Software (NSS-S12), Reldata (9240 Unified Storage Gateway), Nexsan (SATABeast) and products from Kano and D-Link which both ranked at the bottom.

NavigateStorage has reviewed the NetworkWorld study and found it to be very informative from a "technical" standpoint and well worth the read but we urge folks to be aware of the technical issues but don't forget the realities of today's business environment. Fact of the matter is that some of the arrays such as the NetApp FAS2050 at $69,960 scoring 4.2, the Compellent StorageCenter at $68,800 scoring 4.1 and the Lefthand Networks NSM2120 at $96,000 scoring 3.9 should rank highest at those prices... what would you expect?


Now I can't comment on the HP StorageWorks but I can comment on the StoneFly array at $26,436 scoring 3.9 equal to the Lefthand Networks array. My experience has been that the StoneFly, dollar for dollar, provides the outstanding performance, interoperability, data protection, enterprise features, management and performance. And if HA, full features and scalability are to your liking, check out the StoneFly OptiSAN. Just contact us for the full scoop. It is well worth the look see.

Storage Virtualization

According to Wikipedia, Storage virtualization refers to the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage. The term is today used to describe this abstraction at any layer in the storage software and hardware stack.

But in more understandable language, storage virtualization means taking the chains off storage and allowing it to meet the needs of a company that has created virtualized servers and now recongnizes that the new bottle neck they created is storage.

Yesterday NavigateStorage, my company founded in 1999, organized a webex for just such a company. They had successfully installed VMware and had created a couple dozen virtual servers and suddenly found that their storage consumption was far out stripping their installed capacity. Knowing that they needed more they contacted us and asked for help. The company felt that they needed about 6TB immediately and would probably grow to about 10TB over the next year or two.

The solution we proposed was a storage array, certified by VMware and designed to allow virtualization. The cost was $17,000 including 10 - 1TB drives, 5 empty slots for growth, unlimited telephone support and 3 years of next business day service. And more importantly it was designed with a GUI that made the process easy and affordable. Our solution basically presented a "pool of storage" to the GUI and permitted them to intelligently use the storage to meet the needs - both the known needs, as well as, the unknown needs. For example in a true virtualized environment the user could:

* Truly optimize storage utilization
* Create volumes that can include drives of dissimilar sizes
* Support multiple RAID levels on a single drive
* Support RAID migration and drive roaming

The solution we presented, a family of solutions really, was specifically designed as simple to use, cost-effective storage for business environments, and to complement leading applications such as VMware:
• As storage requirements grow in future years, the array provides an extremely cost effective growth path that leverages a customer’s investment throughout the lifecycle of the product.
• A key market differentiator of the solution is the systems 10GbE high performance architecture, which enables either 8 1GbE ports or a true 10GbE interface in a single storage appliance. And you can migrate at your own pace.
• Real time volume expansion, along with virtualized storage, simplifies the allocation of storage as new virtual machines are brought on line.

"Virtualized servers create a rational consolidation point for early adoption of 10GbE iSCSI SANS since they provide good economic leverage and they can take advantage of the increased bandwidth."

If you would like to also see this informative storage virtualization webex please let us know.

Why archive email, IM and more?

Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS)

Email and file archiving that both optimizes storage and provides easy access for discovery and review

As the amount of unstructured information such as business critical email messages and office documents continues to grow, organizations face increasing challenges managing content servers and keeping data storage costs down. Compounding the challenge of growing data storage maintenance and capital costs is the need to be able to retrieve any corporate information (current and historic) on demand. Industry and government regulations such as the new FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC 17a-4, HIPPA, the Data Protection Act, and the USA Patriot Act—as well as the ability to respond to legal discovery requests—have made the capability to efficiently capture, protect, find and recover relevant emails and files a top business priority.
ZANTAZ Enterprise Archive Solution™ (EAS) is a highly scalable and flexible archiving platform that enables your organization to capture and preserve email messages, attachments, and files in a way that both optimizes storage and allows immediate access for discovery and review by courts, regulators, administrators, and end-users. Powered by IDOL, EAS automates the processing of enormous volumes of information, dynamically exposing the patterns, linkages and meaning within.

Reducing the cost and hassle of mailbox management for both IT and users

ZANTAZ EAS applies corporate policies to selectively offload email messages and files from servers into the archive. The EAS single instance storage algorithm eliminates wasteful redundancy while preserving and managing each specific instance of a file or message. When combined with highly efficient compression, the result is unparalleled storage optimization, with an overall reduction in stored content volume of 50 to 90 percent. Reduced storage requirements and more stable, responsive servers translate directly to a dramatic reduction in storage and back-up costs as well as productivity gains for both administrators and end-users, who no longer have to deal with mailbox quotas or unstable servers and can easily and transparently access all archived information.

Ensuring ongoing compliance with internal and external regulations and policies

By consolidating email messages, attachments and files into a centrally managed, scalable repository, ZANTAZ EAS gives your organization control over its valuable information assets—control that enables you to maintain ongoing compliance with internal corporate governance policies and procedures or externally mandated regulations. With EAS, administrators can set automatic retention and disposition policies for highly granular control over the information lifecycle.

To comply with corporate policies, information can be automatically classified based on specific keywords contained in messages and files or on metadata, such as address fields, date fields, and subject fields. EAS also supports mailbox journaling, capturing a copy of all email messages in the archive and ensuring preservation even if deleted or moved by users prior to archiving. And
ZANTAZ EAS Supervisor provides capabilities to closely monitor and supervise emails and attachments.

Providing cost-effective, enterprise-wide support for legal discovery

In the event of a legal discovery request, your ZANTAZ EAS enterprise-wide archive can be searched with unparalleled security, scalability and performance driven by the IDOL platform on which EAS is built. By storing corporate information in an EAS repository, you avoid the need to manually search each desktop and server, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved in searching for information as well as the possibility of missing relevant information. Furthermore, with EAS, archived information can be rapidly reviewed and tagged within the context of a specific legal matter, with legal holds enacted to ensure the preservation of the information throughout the duration of the case. Proactively managing corporate information with EAS minimizes the risk of legal fines and penalties as well as the lasting damage to corporate brand equity that can result from litigation.

ZANTAZ EAS Product Family

The products in the ZANTAZ EAS family all share a common, distributed architecture built on the IDOL platform and engineered for robust scalability, performance and flexibility. The uniquely versatile architecture supports a wide variety of document storage options, including SAN, NAS, and onsite or hosted compliant media. In addition to EAS for Exchange, EAS for Notes, EAS for SharePoint, and EAS for Files, the EAS product family includes:

NavigateStorage, one of the original Value Added Resellers since 2001, is expert in this technology and available to help you get just the right solution for your business. Drop us a note or call 978-318-9000

NAS Filers - Network Attached Storage

Network attached storage filers (NAS) products provide a wide-range of network attachment capabilities to a broad ranges of host and client systems.

Network Attached Storage Our DNF NAS products offer a variety of hard drive interface choices including SATA, SCSI, SAS and Solid State Disks.

CHOOSE CONFIGURATION then call or just call us for best pricing and NavigateStorate assistance 978-318-9000

IntegratedThese FlexStor-NAS Appliances are a complete and robust solution all in a single integrated NAS storage appliance. Featuring storage solutions in 1U to 8U form factors, the FlexStor-NAS features network-attached storage capacities of up to 16TB in a 3U form factor, or 40TB in 8U. Integrated products are exceptionally easy to install and configure. The storage, RAID controller, and NAS intelligence are all built into a single unit—no external wiring required.

ModularThe modular line of NAS servers is ideal for high-availability, expandable configurations, or where ultimate performance is required. Based on M1, M2, or M4 NAS appliance heads, they can be matched with storage subsystems using SCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity. Typical capacities exceed 100TB in standard configurations, or more if customized.
NavigateStorage can provide you network attached storage supporting NFS and CIFS simultaneously and various drive types in all price ranges, performance, scalability and levels of availability.


Also if you already have NAS filers and are looking to increase their efficiencies then check out our Storwize solution.


Storwize STN-6000™can increase storage capacity by up to 80 percent, stretching storage dollars or allowing postponement of the purchase of additional storage. This storage compression appliance requires no workflow changes, no software agents, no drivers and no configuration changes. Totally lossless, Storwize data compression and decompression occur at speeds that make them transparent to users. The Storwize STN-6000™ appliance can provide organizations significant additional storage capacity and associated savings in capital, operational, maintenance and management resources.


Our mission is to match technology to your current and future needs. Check us out.

Unified Storage - What is it?

Unified Storage is a single, integrated storage infrastructure that functions as unification engines to simultaneously support Fibre Channel, IP Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) data formats.

A unified storage system simultaneously enables storage of file data and handles the block-based I/O (input/output) of enterprise applications. In actual practice, unified storage is often implemented in a NAS platform that is modified to add block-mode support.

One advantage of unified storage is reduced hardware requirements. Instead of separate storage platforms, like NAS for file-based storage and a RAID disk array for block-based storage, unified storage combines both modes in a single device. Alternatively, a single device could be deployed for either file or block storage as required. To learn more and to request us to contact you.

IP SAN solutions from NavigateStorage's vendors are the right choice.

Ease the storage management and economic burden of data storage by implementing an IP SAN from NavigateStorage. Whether you're currently managing multiple direct-attached storage devices or you're looking for enterprise-class features in an IP SAN, we will meet your requirements for simplicity, performance and functionality.

Our ipSAN arrays come from vendors from A -Z but only from vendors with the reputation for quality, performance and value. For example:

Entry level 11+TB IP SAN under $16,000 supports up to 15 high performance, high capacity SATA drives and can be configured to take advantage of the 4 or 8 port GbE or 1 port of 10GbE. High throughput design.

High capacity low cost up to 42TB of SATA 2 storage with 2 iscsi ports and 2 fibre channel ports, single and dual controllers, green power storage management.

Highest Availability in and IPSAN this solution is designed for enterprise environments looking for a versatile SAN for primary and secondary storage applications. With support for SAS, SATA, and TED drives for online transaction processing, database, email, disk based archives, disk to disk backup, virtual servers and other core applications. It surpasses the Dell Equalogic in both price and functionality. A real winner.

Scalable, high availability, SATA SAS IP SAN storage solutions with dual active/active controllers, fail over, scalable to multiple terabytes, replication, data de-duplication, encryption, ILM

Let us understand your requirements both current and future and find the right match for you.

Expand NetApps capacity and save money

A new approach to data compression
Compression is as old as personal computing, but it is used today mainly for backup and second tier storage. Many attempts to address the challenges of primary storage compression have failed because of degraded performance and lack of transparency.

Compression - the Storwize Way
Because compression of primary storage data has been difficult to address, most efforts in recent years have been directed at compression during remote transport. This type of compression saves bandwidth but does nothing to reduce stored data volumes. Attempts to compress primary storage data interfered with user workflow and required running software on both storage and end-user devices. These solutions were based on cumbersome sequential access (decompress, update, recompress), work at file-level granularity, or both. They also wasted client resources and introduced unacceptable latencies. Storwize technology processes in real-time only the data required for a particular user or application, and fully supports every type of file access. The Storwize method offloads and centralizes compression in a powerful, dedicated appliance, eliminating performance degradation and in most cases actually improving it.

The bottom-line
If your NetApp (or comparable) is running out of storage capacity with Storewize you can increase its capacity by up to 50% for a fraction of the cost that it would take to buy more NetApp (or anyones) filer. Let us put our money where our mouth is and offer you a trial. Contact us today.

Malware Detection service with no installation

Here is a really good way to audit your systems.

Panda Malware Radar - Automated malware audit

This product can identify and clean even the malware that goes undetected by your current security solution. With this you can know exactly what malware your have, how many and where. Keep one step ahead of new security threats. Save time and effort on controlling the threats in your network.

Panda Malware Radar is an online and automated audit service that scans your network searching for malware that slips past the installed protections. What's more, it checks the state of the protections and the existence of vulnerabilities, delivering detailed reports of the detections as a result. Additionally, it can automatically clean all malware found.

More information and a free trial just ask us.

Full Feature Storage Arrays "all included"

Here is a sleeper in the world of quality storage. Well worth a good look according to the storage experts at NavigateStorage

American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) creates and manufactures key hardware and software solutions for the global computer marketplace, providing the highest quality and compatibility necessary to build today’s advanced computing systems. Established by S. Shankar in 1985, AMI’s mission is to design state-of-the-art computer solutions and develop advanced technology for the best computing solutions in the world. Today, AMI is the world’s largest BIOS firmware vendor, with AMIBIOS® deployed in more than 65% of all computers worldwide.

Today, AMI's extensive product line includes StorTrends® IP Storage Area Network (IP-SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions, Aptio™ and AMIBIOS® system software and firmware, MegaRAC® remote management software and PCI/OPMA hardware, motherboards, backplanes, diagnostic utilities, and engineering services. With these product groups, AMI is uniquely positioned to provide all of the fundamental components necessary to offer complete system performance, manageability, and availability for today's enterprise computing requirements.

AMI is the only company in the industry today offering all of these core technologies. Ind addition has a full feature set of arrays for both IPSANs and NAS.

American Megatrends Inc. (AMI)StorTrends 3200i (with StorTrends iTX 2.7 software) Intended for SMBs, this all-in-one appliance can provide block storage (iSCSI) and file storage (NAS). A rich feature set includes snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, continuous data protection (CDP), Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Wide Area Data Services (WADS) with WAN optimization. SATA and SAS drives are supported with capacities to 112 TB.

Take a peek and then let us know what you think by leaving a comment. And if you would like to arrange for a demo or a trial or have a custom quote, let us know.

Storage and the Economy - help has arrived

It is no secret that storage continues to expand in leaps and bounds and even in this "so called" economic downturn storage continues to flourish. It is no surprise that iSCSI storage is amongst the top sellers now that it has been proven over and over that the performance and reliability are outstanding. This continued expansion of storage bodes well for our business being a storage provider that provides solutions from a wide variety of vendors.

What has been surprising however is how many customers - both large and small - have opted to add the new and upcoming storage vendors rather than building out their existing big name arrays. The market has discovered that when measuring price/performance the value is not necessarily in the big names. In fact, we would go even further to say that working with midsize companies with a good product is easier particularly when it comes to service and support. The big guys have little to prove while the rising stars go out of their way to provide high quality support and do it in a prompt fashion.

IP SANs don't have to be expensive either. Our experience is that even High Availability configurations with no singe point of failure such as StoneFly solutions are a perfect example.

Another real sleeper is StoreWize This solution can increase storage capacity by up to 80 percent, stretching storage dollars or allowing postponement of the purchase of additional storage. The storage compression appliance requires no workflow changes, no software agents, no drivers and no configuration changes. Totally lossless, Storwize data compression and decompression occur at speeds that make them transparent to users.

So, whether your seeking Fibre Channel SAN, IP SAN, or NAS we are ready to help you.

Virus Scanning without impacting exchange

Today on a FalconStor webex on their NSS product (Network Storage Server) the presenter relayed an idea to us that was passed along to him by a FalconStor customer at a recent tradeshow.

The customer said that he uses a snap shot instance to run his AV scan against thereby not impacting the Exchange Server. If the scan shows a problem in a particular mailbox then they go into the production exchange and direct the AV scan to that specific mailbox.

By the way, we specialize in AV solutions from Panda Security and Kaspersky. If we can help or you might like to discuss the pro's and con's let us know.

iSCSI Storage

iSCSI Storage or IP SANs come in a wide variety of flavors and prices. Time has shown that name on the label and the quality/performance/features of the array do not always go hand in hand. Some vendors charge for each feature while others bundle them making it less expensive for the customer to acquire and less expensive for the vendor to maintain and update.

One thing for sure is that time and experience have proven that the performance and durability (mean time between failures) is a whole lot better than originally thought. Or at least versus the negative rumors by the FC crowd. Their FUD made IP SANs growth slower but in the end the market learned not to believe everything they hear.

Your experiences would be greatly appreciated, so if you have the time, tell us about them.

Enterprise Archiving - Email, IM, Files and SharePoint

Archiving today comes in all sizes and shapes to meet the needs of almost every business.

For top of the line archiving NavigateStorage offers ZANTAZ. We have been a partner with them since 2001 and installed some of the very early systems when it was still under the banner of Educomm. Today, ZANTAZ supports MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, MAC Entourage, SharePoint, NTFS File Systems, Instant Message, Discovery and Full Compliance Supervision. In addition to archiving the contents of the files and messages, Email Archiving Solution captures, indexes and archives all compliance-related metadata for rapid in house search and discovery - SEC, NASD, HIPPA supports WORM compliant hardware .

Other solutions are available from hosted offerings to small appliances which not only archives email but will also track websites visited, IMs and more.

If you are looking for a full range of offerings NavigateStorage is the place to shop.