Our polls for the Biz-News.com “Product of the Year Award 2009” closed on the 15th of February. The winner is a result of the amount of votes they were awarded by readers, all readers where invited to vote for their favourite products or service in the Smartphone, HDTV, Storage and VoIP categories.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter (2Q09).

IDC report shows EMC led the overall market with 23.4% revenue share in the third quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.8% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.

Symantec announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, the heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for UNIX, Linux and Windows environments.

Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2 –allowing for “fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.”

The storage industry has been a hot bed for innovation and debate with discussion on local storage versus cloud storage, and the pros and cons of each. "I believe most company will end up using a combination of both, physical on premise and cloud," said Robert Peglar, VP of Technology for Xiotech, in an interview with Biz-news.com.

Many companies find it hard to understand storage and for some the learning curve is too high. Xiotech says they provide simplicity in accessing and integrating into their own company's growth.

“Datacenter transformation is a stark reality facing most customers in the Asia/Pacific region,” says IDC. Based on its recent datacenter research, the ageing and somewhat inefficient datacenters that were built seven-ten years ago are struggling to keep up with the current technology – leading to high operational costs, poor utilization levels and increasing complexity.

“However – the report says - the current economic environment has led many CxOs to mandate CAPEX restrictions, which has forced CIOs to look for ways they can do more with the same.”

ParaScale introduced ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 - version 2 of its PCS clustered NAS system. The new release targets enterprise storage administrators who must economically scale capacity and performance, and service providers who want to offer a variety of storage cloud services.

This latest release of ParaScale Cloud Storage software reflects the growing realization by global customers that existing approaches to managing their stored data assets prevent them from rapidly delivering a pool of storage that easily scales capacity and performance independently and economically.

Panasas intoroduced the ActiveStor Series 9 parallel storage system, which is believed to be the highest-performance file storage system in the world, as the company claims.

Unlike single-dimensional storage solutions, which offer either high-bandwidth performance or optimized IOPS, the ActiveStor Series 9 uses multiple storage technologies in a synchronized architecture to produce both.

In a frame of the company’s initiative to “Stop Storage Waste” and as a part of its Axiom system, Pillar Data Systems, the provider of Application-Aware storage systems, makes 2 terabyte SATA drives available to the enterprise market.

The new drives push the Axiom’s overall usable capacity to over 1.6 petabytes per system, while driving down overall power consumption by 50 percent and space consumption by 2X.

Spectra Logic has launched what it claims is the industry’s first integrated system for deduplication, remote site replication and automated migration to tape.

nTier Deduplication achieves increased deduplication efficiency by sharing deduplication catalogs among remote sites. Users no longer need to establish multiple policies across numerous sites or purchase separate software to move replicated deduplication data to a tape archive.

LSI has launched a new generation of MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller cards based on 6Gb/s SAS technology.
The storage and networking solution provider has also announced its new channel strategy for worldwide customers.

Seagate reported a loss of USD $81 million on revenue of $2.35 billion for the second quarter of this year.
Despite the poor results, the company said it is seeing signs that the storage market is improving and it is making progress toward returning to sustained GAAP profitability as soon as possible.

EMC has reported a slight increase in revenue last quarter and provided an optimistic forecast for the second half of the year.
The announcement came as it completed the USD $2.1 billion acquisition of data deduplication specialist Data Domain.

STEC has signed an agreement with one of its largest enterprise storage customers for sales of USD $120 million of ZeusIOPS SSDs in the second half of 2009.
With this agreement signed, the company is now forecasting revenue from the sale of its ZeusIOPS drives will exceed USD $220 million in 2009.

BlueArc has launched its Mercury series network storage platform in a bid to address the storage challenges faced by many midsize companies.
Michael Gustafson, president and CEO of BlueArc, said that as the volume of unstructured, file-based data continues to explode, and retention and archiving demands increase, companies of all sizes are struggling to keep pace.

Varisys has added to its range of storage products with two new high performance boards intended for use in harsh environments.
The VTS2 also provides high-density storage in standard form factors. It is now available in a conduction-cooled assembly that provides VME users the ability to add mass storage into a rugged system.

WD has unveiled its newly redesigned My Book World Edition II dual- drive network storage system in capacities of up to 4 TB.
The company said the double protection of two Mirrored (RAID 1) drives and continuous backup software, makes the storage system extra-safe for users to back up and store the data and digital media.

SanDisk is offering a new Extreme SDHC card which it claims is the world's fastest 32GB card - with both the capacity and I/O speed to handle HD video clips.
With a sustained write speed - up to 30 megabits-per-second - the company said it is fast enough to capture a storehouse of up to 160 minutes of full HD (1920x1080) video at a 24Mb/s data transfer rate.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, has introduced unique capabilities across software and services to enable customers to reclaim underutilised storage capacity and increase the return on their assets.
This announcement highlights the company’s strategic Global Services capabilities to further extend the economic and optimisation benefits customers can achieve leveraging Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning technology.

DataSlide, the massively parallel green storage company, has announced their embedded architecture and Partnership Network agreement with Oracle.
Oracle's Berkeley Database embedded onto the DataSlide storage drive enables 3rd party developers the ability to implement next generation Business Intelligence right onto the storage system. This is a significant step for DataSlide as they move towards productizing Hard Rectangular Drives(TM) HRD(TM).

Vijay Karamcheti, CTO, Virident Systems to give Luncheon Address on the "Real World Challenges and Opportunities of Storage Class Memory in the Data Center" at 2009 NVM Conference.
Karamcheti,  who is also Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU has been invited to give a special luncheon keynote speech on the real world challenges of implementing Storage Class Memories now and for the future.

IT infrastructures tend to become ever more complex as administrators support growth with incremental hardware expansion, which in turn calls for increased real estate, power, cooling, and maintenance. Faced with shrinking budgets, many organizations end up dedicating a majority of their IT spending to simply maintaining data center resources—placing serious constraints on their ability to advance new initiatives.The computing pod is an exciting model for IT infrastructure that helps significantly advance enterprise efficiency. It is defined as a self-contained building block encompassing an optimized power and cooling footprint to facilitate scalability; integrated compute, storage, and network nodes of significant size and processing power; and simplified data center deployment and management to help reduce operational costs. Dell recommends that each pod include the Dell™ PowerEdge™ modular blade enclosure with PowerEdge blade servers; virtualized storage such as Dell EqualLogic™ PS6000 series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays; virtualization software such as the VMware® vSphere™, Microsoft® Hyper-V™, or Citrix® XenServer™ platforms; a management module with software such as the Dell Management Console; and switches with stacking capability such as Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3100 series switches. This pod architecture then becomes the basic unit of data center deployment.By elevating data center intelligence through advanced virtualization and software tools in combination with latest-generation server, storage, and network infrastructure, organizations can create highly scalable, self-managing data centers designed to reduce IT infrastructure complexity, simplify management, and increase cost-efficiency. And because this approach can be customized to specific needs, it can provide a flexible computing infrastructure that can quickly and easily adapt to evolving requirements.Also covered: How Dell Business-Ready Configurations can provide a simplified, scalable, resilient architecture for computing pod deployments.

As online transaction processing (OLTP) and other key enterprise applications take on increasing workloads, administrators are pressed to find ways of handling the performance demands on their storage systems. Traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) have built-in performance characteristics such as seek time and rotational latency that can make it difficult to keep up with escalating needs from transaction-intensive applications.A new option now available for Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series storage is solid-state drive (SSD) technology. SSDs offer exceptional performance—enabling significantly faster random read/write response time compared with traditional mechanical HDDs—along with enhanced reliability, energy efficiency, and space efficiency. To help organizations take advantage of SSD technology, the Dell EqualLogic PS6000S storage array provides outstanding performance in a cost-effective SSD-based array that can easily integrate into multitiered EqualLogic Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area networks (SANs).Although SSDs can offer dramatic performance advantages, their cost and capacity limitations make them most effective when deployed as a targeted solution in particular use cases. For example, SSDs can be a key solution for workloads that require low latency and high IOPS combined with limited capacity (such as virtual desktop infrastructure deployments), and those in which the transfer block size is small (such as OLTP applications). In a tiered storage environment, SSDs enable IT organizations to provide a customized balance of cost-effective capacity and performance with exceptional throughput and response time.SSDs have emerged as an excellent high-performance storage option for certain enterprise workloads. As part of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series of virtualized storage arrays, the EqualLogic PS6000S SSD array can help organizations simply, scalably, and cost-effectively meet escalating application performance demands with enhanced reliability and energy efficiency.

Johann Borgers is the leading provider of acoustically efficient textile components for the automotive industry, with more than 4,700 employees worldwide. The company’s core administrative activities are centralized at its headquarters in Bocholt, Germany, where office-based employees need constant access to key financial and performance data as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, the seven end-of-life servers in the data center could no longer provide the reliability, availability, or performance the company required.This case study describes how Johann Borgers deployed virtualized Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2900 servers with quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors along with a Dell/EMC CX3-10c storage area network (SAN) to help create a reliable, scalable, and highly available server and storage solution. Using VMware® ESX 3.5 virtualization software on the PowerEdge servers enabled the IT team to create virtual machines (VMs) running the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 OS and Citrix Presentation Server™ 4.5 software—offering its base of 120 users anytime, anywhere access to the Infor ERP and Microsoft Office applications. Dell Services teams worked with Dell partner CEMA to design and deploy the solution, and the Johann Borgers IT staff also received in-depth SAN training as part of the company’s Dell ProSupport for IT agreement.Transferring management of the local client desktop to the data center offers a single hardware and software management point for IT staff, helping provide total administrative time and cost savings of around 25 percent. The solution has also reduced running costs, cooling costs, and maintenance costs while dramatically improving the availability of critical data and the performance of key IT services. Based on its experience with this project, Johann Borgers now plans to work with Dell on further simplifying its departmental servers and storage.

The Dell™ NX4 network attached storage (NAS) device is designed to provide flexible, enterprise-class file storage for Microsoft® Windows®, Linux®, and UNIX® environments while incorporating advanced EMC® features that provide functionality well beyond simple file servers, including support for both Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and Fibre Channel. The Data Access in Real Time (DART) OS supports concurrent use of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS) protocols, enabling seamless file sharing without compromising data integrity and without requiring performance-reducing emulation.The Dell NX4 is designed to provide high availability without compromise—enabling organizations to continue operating at the same performance and service levels even in the event of a failure. EMC Celerra® SnapSure™ software enables administrators to create logical point-in-time snapshots to help meet recovery point objectives (RPOs), while optional Celerra Replicator™ software provides a powerful, simplified tool for asynchronous replication and can integrate with SnapSure and VMware® Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to help simplify the testing and execution of disaster recovery processes. Support for multiple backup and restore options helps maximize flexibility.In addition, file-level deduplication and compression can help organizations effectively handle the proliferation of unstructured data, while file-level retention features help them comply with enterprise, industry, or government requirements. The optional Celerra Anti-Virus Agent (CAVA) helps identify and eliminate known viruses before they infect files on the storage system. The open Celerra FileMover application programming interface (API), meanwhile, supports tiered storage access to help reduce costs, increase storage utilization, and enhance service levels. The advanced features of the Dell NX4, combined with flexible file management and support for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel, make this system well suited to help meet enterprise-class requirements while also helping to simplify data management and reduce costs.

Redundancy is a major contributor to sustained data growth in enterprise data centers. Regular replication, backup, and archiving using traditional tools, for example, often requires organizations to deploy significantly more storage than they actually need simply to maintain unnecessary copies of the same data across many different storage systems. The systems necessary to store this redundant data represent not only an up-front investment in hardware, deployment, and configuration, but also ongoing operational costs for power, cooling, and management.Deduplication technology, which is designed to eliminate duplicate copies of data, offers an important method of combating uncontrolled data growth. Dell and CommVault have worked together to create a backup and archive deduplication solution that combines high-performance Dell™ hardware with innovative CommVault® Simpana® 8.0 software: the Dell PowerVault™ DL2000 – Powered by CommVault. In contrast to traditional backup and archive architectures, CommVault Simpana 8.0 can write compressed, deduplicated, and even encrypted blocks to disk targets, enabling organizations to maximize use of existing storage hardware and helping reduce the amount of data sent over the network.CommVault Simpana 8.0 also introduces the Virtual Infrastructure Agent for VMware® and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ virtualization platforms, helping provide seamless backups in virtualized environments. Remote office servers, meanwhile, can benefit from a global deduplication strategy that reduces backup footprints before they are sent to a centralized location, helping further simplify backup and recovery processes.As administrators struggle with increasingly restricted IT budgets, they need tools that can deliver cost-effective, simplified data management. The deduplication capabilities in the Dell PowerVault DL2000 – Powered by CommVault can help overcome these challenges, offering an efficient way to consolidate data, streamline storage requirements, and control costs.

Keeping up with space constraints and the rising costs of energy are two of the greatest challenges facing IT departments today. By controlling power consumption and related heat output at the system level, however, organizations can deploy their hardware resources for optimum power and cooling efficiency to help control ongoing costs.The modular, rack-dense Dell™ PowerVault™ MD1120 direct attach storage (DAS) array is designed for efficiency and scalability—holding up to 24 low-power, 2.5-inch hard drives in a compact 2U enclosure for up to 12 TB of total storage capacity. A single dual-port Dell PowerEdge™ Expandable RAID Controller (PERC) 6/E can connect to up to six PowerVault MD1120 enclosures, enabling use of up to 144 total drives and helping simplify management. And now, the PowerVault MD1120 can also support energy-efficient Seagate® Constellation™ Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives.These industry-first 2.5-inch, 7,200 rpm, 500 GB drives are designed from the ground up specifically for enterprise-class nearline storage, providing the capacity, performance, and reliability to support high-density tiered storage applications. In Storage Performance Council (SPC) SPC-1C benchmark tests performed by Seagate engineers in January and February 2009, a 2U PowerVault MD1120 enclosure with 2.5-inch Constellation drives provided 93 percent higher performance than a 3U PowerVault MD1000 with 3.5-inch drives, or 2.9 times the performance per unit of rack space, while also consuming 40 percent less power. By deploying the Dell PowerVault MD1120 DAS array with Seagate Constellation hard drives, organizations can combine enterprise-class reliability, nearline performance, and scalability in a rack-dense, energy-efficient storage system.

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e modular blade enclosure offers a number of advantages over typical rack-mounted servers, including increased density, rapid deployment, reduced power and cooling requirements, reduced cabling, simplified management, and an advanced integrated I/O module architecture. Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays, meanwhile, can also offer compelling benefits that make them well suited to support blade server deployments.Administrators can take any of several approaches to integrating PowerEdge M1000e enclosures with an EqualLogic SAN using the available Ethernet I/O modules—the Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch (CBS) 3130G, Cisco CBS 3030X, and Dell PowerConnect™ M6220 switch—in the PowerEdge M1000e. One possible design consists of a multitiered Ethernet switch infrastructure, in which the EqualLogic SAN and a set of external switches are on one tier and the PowerEdge M1000e enclosures are on a separate tier. A second design uses the PowerEdge M1000e pass-through I/O modules with a set of external stackable switches such as the Cisco Catalyst 3750-E or Dell PowerConnect 6248. A third design relies only on the PowerEdge M1000e Ethernet switch I/O modules for the SAN.Each of these three strategies has its own trade-offs in cost, performance, complexity, and scalability. Ultimately, successful integration of a PowerEdge M1000e with an EqualLogic SAN hinges on a few criteria: the solution should provide full redundancy; enough inter-switch bandwidth to support hosting SAN traffic, inter-array management, and load balancing; and enough I/O and minimal latency between the blades and arrays to meet the requirements of the attached host applications. The PowerEdge M1000e enclosure along with external Ethernet switches can provide the flexibility and scalability necessary to build a high-performance virtualized storage architecture that can meet almost any storage need.

Aress Software has launched an online backup solution which gives 1GB of free space and also comes with an unlimited storage option.
Called BackupandShare.com, the service is aimed at business and individual users, and has an ability to schedule backup for PCs and Macs.

DataCore Software has announced that hosted IT-as-a-service company External IT has standardized on its SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN).
With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, it allows External IT to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure.

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues fell 13.6 per cent year-on-year to USD $4.2 billion in the first quarter of 2009 (1Q09), according to IDC.
For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market declined to USD $5.6 billion in revenues, an 18.2 per cent decline from the prior year's first quarter.

The bidding war for Data Domain stepped up this week after NetApp raised the stakes with rival EMC by making a new cash and stock offer of USD $1.9 billion.
This came two days after EMC's offer of USD $30 per share in a deal worth about USD $1.8 billion - around 20 per cent over the original USD $1.5 billion offered last month by NetApp.

Infortrend has announced the addition of 2U and 4U models to its EonStor G6 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) SAN solutions.
The move by the networked storage expert to provide additional form factors is intended to help more users meet their application requirements.

Sun Microsystems is extending its Unified Storage family with an array that allows solid state disk (SSD) drives and hard disk drives to be used in the same chassis and under the same management interface.
The Sun Storage 7310 is a comprehensive, Flash-powered storage system that includes leverages Hybrid Storage Pool capabilities.

Hewlett-Packard is to introduce several new storage, virtualization, PC, printing and services offerings in an effort to capture a larger share of the Small and Midsize Business (SMB) market.
The move comes as the company begins consultations on cutting nearly six thousand European jobs, including 850 in the UK and Germany.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari believes that at USD $2/GB SSDs aren't competitive yet with hard drives.
But he is bullish about the technology's prospects and believes it offers an ideal storage solution for netbooks. In an interview with Tech Trader Daily, he said that you can buy an 80 GB HDD for USD $30-$35.

Phoenix International has unveiled its new VS1-250-SSD Serial Attache SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) based VME data storage plug-in blade.
The VS1-250-SSD delivers high capacity, high performance data storage - with burst data transfer rate to 300MB/sec and sustained data transfer to 120MB/sec.

Imeem has launched its Mobile social music application for the iPhone and iPod touch.
The main thrust of the online streaming service is the ability to search and play millions of user-posted songs through a free downloadable app.

Rackable Systems this week announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2009.
The ecological server and storage product provider reported Q1 revenue of USD $44.4 Million, up 14 percent sequentially, including delivery of two ICE Cube containerized data centers.

PowerFile has announced its new enterprise-class Hybrid Storage Appliance optimized for long-term storage of fixed content.
The storage provider said the purpose-built platform delivers "the performance of disk, the economy of tape, and superior reliability and data integrity".

Digital content in the average US household could reach 12 terabytes by 2014, according to researchers.
A joint report by Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis includes DVD libraries, which accounts for a large chunk of the 12TB total.

While economies of scale have helped reduce power and cooling costs, other costs related to external storage prove to be more expensive than the storage itself, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.
A recent IDC report estimates that the total cost to manage the world's installed base of external storage is around 60 per cent of all storage related spending.

The global utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the launch of its InServ F400 Storage Server, writes Samanatha Sai for storage.biz-news.
The company says it is the fastest single-system midrange storage array based on the results of the audit and peer review SPC-1 submitted to the Storage Performance Council (SPC) - a vendor neutral standards company.

Cloud Storage service provider Nirvanix has announced three new appointments to its management team.
Stephen Foskett joins the company as Director of Consulting, Arvind Gidwani as Director of Solutions Services and Brian Schwarzentruber as Solutions Architect.

Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.
The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing - as were prices.

Amerivault and Network Technology Group Inc data storage providers are to join forces to create Venyu Inc.
The new venture will provide commercial grade, customizable solutions for data storage with disaster recovery, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

Until recently, the idea of using solid-state disk (SSD) flash drives in an enterprise storage subsystem would have been deemed ludicrous.
Ray Lucchesi, president of Silverton Consulting, however, says that recent trends in NAND technology have made SSDs more viable in the enterprise storage market.

Most industries acknowledge that increasing IT Storage needs is a fact of life even in the face of economic downturn.
Newer and more efficient ways of optimizing existing storage facilities are being explored as budgets are tight and capital outlay has been squeezed, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced that its next-generation midrange storage platform, the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 Family, achieved overall best-in-class Storage Performance Council (SPC-1) benchmark results for a midrange storage system.
In SPC-1 benchmark testing, the Hitachi AMS 2500 achieved the fastest throughput results among all midrange storage competitors with dual controllers.

Well, it was only a matter of time. The data storage market has slowed down - and much more than anticipated, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.
IDC revealed last week that global external disk storage systems' factory revenues dropped by a half per cent in the fourth quarter.

Xyratex recently announced support for Seagate's Savvio 15K.2 and Savvio 10K.3 Small Form Factor (SFF) enterprise hard disk drives.
As a result, Seagate's Savvio 2.5 inch hard drives have been completely incorporated into Xyratex's OneStor SP1224s, 2U 24 drive storage system, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

While implementing data storage policies that mandate where company files are to be stored is a popular data-protection measure, employees are not necessarily complying.
This is leaving organizations vulnerable to data loss, according to a survey.

Cisco has launched a mainstream data center computing platform - Unified Computing System (UCS) - that promises to seamlessly integrate processor, storage and network systems in a virtualised architecture.
The move pits the networking equipment market leader against the world's largest systems vendors, including HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu and others.

LaCie has announced that it is to merge with Caleido, the Swiss creator of online storage service Wuala.
The move signals the French external storage device manufacturer's entry into the cloud storage service market.

Symantec, makers of Norton security software, has announced the availability of an online backup service.
Norton Online Backup, which automatically stores files and digital assets, is the first Web-based consumer offering delivered by Norton.

Silicon Valley continues to take a pounding on the markets.
The latest stock market news for Silicon Storage Technology was all bad news, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

Just a few months ago, Sun Microsystems revealed the availability of its new Unified Storage System - the Sun Storage 7000 family.
Described as the world's first Open Storage Appliance, Sun claims the Storage 7000 family is the "biggest thing to happen to storage in decades", writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz-news.

The race to drive up flash memory storage capacity has a new champion in the form of A-DATA Technology.
The Taiwanese company has just announced the highest capacity of SSD in the industry at CeBIT 2009 - the 512GB XPG 2.5" SSD.

The majority of corporations are faced with issues about storage. While storage is not difficult, it must be easy to archive and be available when needed.
In the past, tapes and cassettes have often been used to store data. These tapes are often stored in a secure permanent offsite location.

Hitachi GST is making a fresh attempt at entering the consumer storage market after its first abortive attempt in 2007, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.
Brenden Collins, Hitachi's vice president of product marketing, dismisses the earlier attempt as one that "didn't take off that well".

The latest versions of DataCore's SANmelody 3.0 and SANsymphony 7.0 storage virtualization software were under preview at the recent VMWorld Europe 2009.
The products are due to be shipped later this month with 64 bit software architecture and various new features for virtual servers, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, according to the company's CEO Steve Luczo.
While not going into detail, he told InfoWorld that the disk drive maker has a competitive advantage in that field.

Despite the global economic downturn it appears the US storage sector will continue to remain as busy as ever.
The need to store increasing volumes of digital files - and to provide continuous access to them - seems to be keeping the industry buzzing with activity, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

Michael E.Thomas, president of Colossal Storage Corporation once remarked: "In 1974, I was making 5 Megabyte disk packs - the biggest at that time in the world.
"At the same time, IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and other Computer professionals said no one would ever need that much storage."

Hifn has named storage pioneer John Matze as its Vice President and Chief Technical Officer.
Matze first joined the storage and networking company in 2007 as its Vice President of Business Development after the acquisition of Siafu Software, where he served as CEO.

Western Digital has redesigned its My Book World Edition to target consumers with multiple computers on a home network.
The company says the new device simplifies the tedious task of backing up an entire household's files.

Adaptec has appointed Scott Cleland as its director of marketing.
With nearly 25 years of storage experience and nearly 10 years of senior-level marketing experience, Cleland will lead Adaptec's global marketing activities for the company's Adaptec-branded products.

The new year is firmly underway and time is running out for you to submit your nominations and votes for storage.biz-news' 2008 Man and Product of the Year awards.
But with voting expected to be close in both award categories there's plenty of opportunity for latecomers to make their mark.

Cloud computing - including cloud storage - will transform the industry and become the predominant way in which IT is consumed.
That's the prediction of Sajai Krishnan, CEO of Silicon Valley start-up ParaScale.
He said there has been a rapid heightening of interest recently in all things cloud - applications, computing and storage.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has appointed Steven Campbell as Chief Technology Officer.
Campbell will have global responsibility for all aspects of the company’s product development and technical vision.

ATTO Technology has announced the release of the industry’s first 8-Gb Fibre Channel-to-SAS/SATA RAID storage controller.
FastStream SC 8500 is an independent external RAID Storage Controller that provides 8-Gb Fibre Channel host connectivity to multiple tiers of low-cost, off-the-shelf SAS/SATA disk storage enclosures.

Memory cards provide the greatest revenue of all mobile phone add-ons, according ABI Research.
This is despite cellular handset accessories such as chargers and batteries shipping far more units in what is today a USD $58 billion industry.

The rush to release the first Terabyte SSD continues with Toshiba's announcement of a 2.5-inch 512GB NAND-based model.
Market analysts expect SSDs will account for 10 per cent of the market for notebook computer storage by 2010, and 25 per cent by 2012.

Western Digital is to cut 2,500 jobs, or about 5 per cent of its global work force, and will reduce executive pay as a result of the global economic situation.
Citing weakening demand for its products, the hard drive maker the company now expects fiscal second-quarter sales of USD $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, with a "consequent reduction in operating results."

With 2008 fast drawing to a close biz-news.com is seeking YOUR help in choosing outstanding candidates for the titles of Man/Woman of the Year and Product/Service of the Year.
We would like you to nominate an individual and/or product/service that you feel has contributed greatly to the Storage sector over the past 12 months.
The winner will be selected from the nominations submitted by our readers - professionals and technology enthusiasts in the industry.

Pioneer has announced plans for a one terabyte (1TB) Blu-ray disc that could be on the market by 2013.
With a 400GB disc already ready for launch and a half-terabyte disc expected to follow shortly, there may be some questions about how such an abundance of storage can be used.

Flywheel energy storage systems manufacturer Pentadyne Power Corporation has promoted Claude Kalev to the position of Chief Technical Officer.
Kalev was a co-founder of Pentadyne when the company was incorporated in 1998.
But he only officially joined the company in 2002, as Vice President, Electrical Engineering.

It wasn't THAT long ago that anything over 1GB of storage in a Flash drive was considered impressive.
Now Kingston Technology has launched its new DataTraveler 150, a 64GB USB Flash drive.
This supercedes last month's offering - a mere 32GB - as the largest in the outfit's entire DataTraveler line.

Virtualization can offer increased scalability, reliability, and availability while helping simplify management and reduce operating costs. Now, Virtual Remote Desktop solutions based on VMware® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and virtualized Dell? EqualLogic? Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area networks (SANs) can offer similar benefits for the desktop environment?helping reduce the traditional cost and complexity of managing physical laptops, desktops, and workstations.

Protecting and restoring virtual machines (VMs) can be slow and inefficient, and can take precious server resources away from critical applications. Dell? EqualLogic? Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition enables administrators to quickly and easily create hypervisor-aware snapshots of VMs?helping simplify data management, enhance scalability of data protection and recovery, and increase application performance.

The Dell? EqualLogic? PS5500E Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) array allows organizations to simply and cost-effectively deploy high-density, highly scalable, and consolidated SANs for tiered storage, primary and secondary applications, and disaster recovery operations.

New Seagate® Barracuda® ES.2 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives, available in Dell? PowerEdge? servers and Dell PowerVault? storage, are designed to provide the exceptional performance, efficient operation, robust data integrity, and seamless integration required by near-line ecosystems in enterprise data centers.

Ongoing data growth can present major challenges for IT organizations. The combination of CommVault® Simpana® backup-to-disk software and Dell? EqualLogic? PS5500E Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays can provide a simplified, scalable, cost-effective way to gain control over enterprise data and create a platform to support future growth.

Combining high-performance Dell? hardware with market-leading Symantec® Backup Exec? software, the new Dell PowerVault? DL2000 ? Powered by Symantec can help organizations of all sizes deploy simplified, cost-effective data protection?helping accelerate backup and recovery, enhance media reliability, reduce total cost of ownership, and minimize the need for IT staff intervention and management.

Spending on storage is the only area of IT hardware that will avoid a drop-off in 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis.
A newly revised forecast from IDC suggests worldwide investment in information technology will slow significantly next year.

Data center software provider, Cassatt Corporation, has announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing".
Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp, said this was an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.

Storage-as-a-service is more than just a viable alternative, according to two new IDC multi-client studies.
An IDC survey of 812 firms reveals that demand for online storage services is very strong in small, mid-size, and large firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures.

Unified storage has yet to make an impact on IT decision makers, with few even able to define what it stands for and even less aware of the business benefits of implementation, according to a survey.
The study was conducted by Gartner and ONStor among 1600 global IT and business decision makers.

One of the world's leading life science research institutes announced today that it has chosen a COPAN Systems-based storage solution to meet its demanding data storage needs.
Located in Basel, Switzerland, the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research’s was seeking a storage solution for its life science data.

Dell and CommVault have teamed up to create a next-generation disk-based backup system that combines leading-edge Dell hardware with innovative CommVault data protection software. The new state-of-the-art Dell PowerVault DL2000 ? Powered by CommVault integrates disk-based backup and recovery with de-duplication technology to help deliver fast, reliable data protection.

Combining high-performance Dell hardware with market-leading Symantec Backup Exec software, the new Dell PowerVault DL2000 ? Powered by Symantec can help organizations of all sizes deploy simplified, cost-effective data protection?helping accelerate backup and recovery, enhance media reliability, reduce total cost of ownership, and minimize the need for IT staff intervention and management.

Virtualization is the technology with the potential for having the most “significant impact” on enterprises over the next three years, according to Gartner.
Every year the analyst firm highlights the top 10 technologies and trends it predicts will be strategic for most organizations.

Hitachi Data Systems has unveiled its next-generation line-up of midrange storage systems, the Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 Series.
The company says the ground-breaking new systems introduce a wide range of pioneering technologies previously unavailable on a midrange storage platform.

Join this webcast as Pete Brey of HP reviews how HP is helping customers build next-generation file serving environments that scale to meet ever-changing storage demands.

Boost storage security with HP Secure Storage Advantage for centralized key management, data encryption and compliance on removable storage media.

Explore the use of solid state drive (SSD) storage technology in your enterprise environment and understand the benefits and the myths from HP.

Whether you are considering a first SAN or you already have one in place, a communications standard called iSCSI can help you build a more cost-effective storage infrastructure.

Almost two-thirds of IT managers are being pressured to reduce their carbon footprints, according to a survey.
The results show that 61 per cent are being directed to cut down on their energy usage and 60 per cent plan to reduce their carbon footprint within the next 18 months.

Hewlett-Packard is to spend USD $360 million in cash to buy storage virtualization company LeftHand Networks.
The company covers two areas currently receiving a lot of attention - allocating storage for virtualized servers and the using Ethernet for storage networks.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the SecureStore framework, a new way to provide retailers with cost-effective solutions to help reduce the billions of dollars of losses caused each year by physical theft, electronic data breaches and compliance violations

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SanDisk is to launch what it claims is the world’s largest removable storage capacity for mobile phones - a 16GB microSDHC and Memory Stick Micro mobile memory card.
The fingernail-sized memory cards are aimed at consumers wanting to get the most out of the many storage-intensive features in today’s portable handsets.

WD has unveiled a high-speed network storage system intended as a cost-effective, centralised storage for small office and home networks.
Its first foray into the small-office network storage market, WD is hoping to introduce a new class of users to centralised storage systems that were once only available in large companies with big IT departments.

IBM today announced that Northwest Radiology Network has gone live with a new virtualized enterprise of IBM servers and storage to support its growing medical imaging needs, giving its four locations an enterprise-class infrastructure which enables its doctors to recover medical image reports faster for analysis and enables remote 24x7 access to its medical image report system.

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Desktop computing remains the largest market for hard drives but the young upstart – consumer electronics – is the fastest growing.
Storage.biz-news.com spoke to Daniel Mauerhofer, of storage giant Western Digital, to find out more about this evolving market.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) outperformed storage software vendors EMC and HP as well as the overall storage software segment in the second quarter of 2008 on a rolling four quarter basis, measuring revenue for the named quarter plus revenue for the prior three quarters, according to new revenue share data released by IDC[1]. IBM grew storage software revenue more than 14 percent year-over-year on a rolling four quarter basis, nearly three times the growth rate of EMC and nearly double that of HP, as reported by IDC.

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Faced with 100 per cent year-on-year data growth, the London council of Hillingdon’s IT team has decided to virtualise its servers.
It took the decision after being faced with the rapid growth of employees’ e-mail boxes, the need to retain documents such as benefits assessments records, and the increased use of digital images in planning applications and property and highway inspections.

High-Definition Storage experts, Pivot3, have announced the first public demonstration of its Serverless Computing platform at ASIS International 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.
The new platform, which runs NVR software on the storage node rather than requiring its own dedicated server, will be demonstrated in three locations at the show at the World Congress Convention Center.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that IDC, a leading IT market research and advisory firm, reported that from Q1'08 through Q2'08, IBM achieved the greatest quarter to quarter growth of any of the top four major external disk storage systems vendors (1). From Q1'08 to Q2'08, IBM disk market share grew 19.15 percent, double that of the next closest vendor, besting the major storage hardware vendors for the first half of 2008.

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The Bulgarian State Agency for Information Technology and Communications (SAITC) and IBM Bulgaria today announced the Bulgarian IBM Blue Gene/P - the first installation of the world famous Blue Gene computer in Bulgaria.

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IBM today announced its largest launch ever of new storage hardware, software and services that are the building blocks for the world?s strongest information infrastructure portfolio. The new IBM offerings are designed to enable businesses, governments and other institutions to transform static data managed in silos into more dynamic information that is accessible by individuals wherever they go in a cloud computing environment.

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Engineers and researchers at the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250(1) percent.

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ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion, the ProSiebenSat.1 Group's technical service provider, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) are setting up the media group's central tapeless archive in terms of an agreement worth four million euro. The new agreement extends the ten year, 200 million euro IT services agreement signed with IBM in April 2008.

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Storage is critical in any next generation strategy. The HP Storage Story shows how you can bridge the gap between data explosion and infrastructure through flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Some advocates say disk-to-disk backup systems will soon replace tape media. HP and industry analysts disagree. These six facts tell us that tape storage is here to stay.

Learn about real-world storage products and solutions through detailed stories from businesses just like yours.

This roadshow is coming to your neighborhood. Come and see HP infrastructure solutions including ProLiant, Integrity, NonStop and StorageWorks tailored to meet your unique needs.

To get the best and the most storage for your dollar, consider these three factors: provisioning capabilities, energy efficiency and data reduction features.

When your IT infrastrucuture flexes,be sure that storage isn't a breaking point.

Creating application-consistent point-in-time data snapshots at the storage area network level can work well in traditional environments, but can also be a complex, manual process. Dell EqualLogic? Auto-Snapshot Manager allows IT administrators to quickly and easily create and restore snapshots, clones, and replicas at the application level?helping simplify data management, reduce business disruption, and improve data integrity.

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) often contend with the same storage growth challenges as large enterprises, but with limited IT staff and resources. The Dell? AX4-5 storage array is designed to help SMBs consolidate their data to a streamlined, scalable, high-performance storage environment in a cost-effective, easy-to-manage way.

Brocade® storage area network (SAN) switches are designed to meet the needs of rapidly growing enterprise IT environments. As the first Brocade switch to support both the Brocade Fabric OS® and McDATA Enterprise OS platforms, the Brocade 5000 offers flexible interoperability in a scalable, high-performance switch, while the port-dense Brocade 4900 facilitates cost-effective consolidation.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Saint-Gobain, one of the largest industrial groups in Latin America, has signed an agreement with IBM in Brazil to outsource its entire IT infrastructure. Through the agreement, with an initial duration of five years, Saint-Gobain expects to ensure predictability of IT costs, with focus on cost reduction and strict control, as well as support the fast growth of its business in Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

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Now, you can transform your data protection strategy with data deduplication. Learn about the differences in deduplication technologies from Gartner and HP and check out the exciting new game-changing VLS, D2D, and RDX products.

HP StorageWorks and Microsoft platforms and applications combine to help companies transform Microsoft environments for better business outcomes.

HP Customer Focused Testing Solutions incorporate HP storage, server and software products to help companies mazimize most of their investments.

Hear what some vendors have been saying and tell us what you think about SSD's enterprise server and storage applications.

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cognos, an IBM (NYSE: IBM) company and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software is now available, for the first time, for Linux on System z.

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For institutions of higher education, a scalable IT infrastructure can be critical. To demonstrate the scalability and performance of SunGard Higher Education?s Banner software on Dell hardware, Dell collaborated with the State University of New York to build and test a proof-of-concept architecture designed to handle up to 175,000 students with sub-second response times.

Nicholas & Company is building a model data center that delivers significantly more computing power per watt. The Salt Lake City based, 500 employee, food distributor has increased its computing capabilities while holding energy costs level by virtualizing applications, and consolidating its servers and storage on IBM systems.

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Utility-ready storage can help money- and resource-strapped IT managers do more with less. Never buy more storage than you need and track storage usage to charge back to lines of business.

HP Unified Data Center Automation is named front-runner in this report. HP Data Center Automation Center offers the best integration to automate the manual practices used today in a data center.

The SAP and HP partnership has released a new database solution stack that the mid-market can afford. With HP EVA4400 and SAP MaxDB, customers get enterprise functionality at a reasonable price.

The HP StorageWorks EVA4400 and Microsoft applications have been tested together for real performance and reliability gains, and Dynamic Capacity Manager takes advantage of more Windows features.

"One of the reasons the HP storage works so well for us is we have to be up 100 percent of the time," Baggelaar said. "We don't have downtime..."

We?ve talked in this blog before about how much power spinning disks use as being the biggest driver of storage power consumption. And we?ve discussed ways to minimize the number of spinning disks. Now, let?s talk about how much power.

The new MD1120 storage enclosure is designed to provide high-performance direct attach storage for ninth-generation and later Dell servers. Taking advantage of energy-efficient, rack-dense 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive technology, this enclosure is well suited for applications requiring high I/O or throughput rates.

As part of IBM's Project Big Green offerings, IBM today announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.

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Thin provisioning is designed to address the storage management and capacity planning challenges posed by fast-growing enterprise applications. This article explores how a thin provisioning strategy using Dell EqualLogic? PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage arrays can help increase storage utilization rates, improve staff productivity, and reduce costs.

In 24/7 production environments, advanced backup and recovery features can be critical to minimizing downtime. Combining Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and Dell EqualLogic? PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage arrays can provide an efficient and cost-effective way for enterprises of all sizes to implement comprehensive, enterprise-wide data protection.

Booting servers from an Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network further enhances the enterprise advantages of iSCSI, helping significantly reduce the time needed to deploy new or replacement servers. This article provides hands-on guidance for configuring iSCSI remote boot on Dell? PowerEdge? servers with Intel® Ethernet adapters.

The Dell? PowerEdge? Expandable RAID Controller (PERC) 6 family of enterprise-class Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) RAID controllers is designed for enhanced performance, increased reliability and fault tolerance, and simplified management?providing a powerful, easy-to-manage way to create a robust infrastructure and help maximize server uptime.

Extreme scale storage meets the explosive demand for digital content, Web 2.0 applications and new storage-intensive business models.The petabytes are coming!

Virtualization may seem like a complex technology, but it can actually be the antidote to complexity - especially when it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery. Together, HP and VMware have figured out a way to ease business continuity planning so you can focus on the work that needs to be done.

Data in the data center is protected by user authentication and access controls. But what about removable media? Get the HP Secure Advantage for centralized key management, data encryption and compliance on storage media that leave the datacenter.

How a consolidated SQL Server infrastructure can optimize a Windows application environment.

How SQL Server consolidation can deliver a more adaptable, dependable and easier to manage infrastructure for ERP systems

A look at the problem of server sprawl and how to get it under control

Balance the risks and capital costs associated with buying storage

Data deduplication is a hot, new storage technology for managing explosive data growth and providing data protection. Explore the different ways it can be achieved, and find out how to determine which approach may best suit your needs.

Storage tools help determine the right configuration based on your requirements and environment.

The MSA2000 family is here. This the next-generation HP Modular Smart Arrays, help companies more effectively consolidate storage to lower costs, increase administrator efficiency and reduce business downtime.

This storage security assessment tool is simple and helps you quickly understand what you need to do to manage your sensitive data in your storage and backup environment.

Have you always wanted to help design storage products? This user centered design program is designed to allow users to help us ensure that our products are easy to use. Learn more about the process and find out how you can participate.

Do you need enterprise-class virtualized storage for your midsize businesses at an affordable price? The new HP StorageWorks EVA4400 is here to address your need

Check out this new platform for sharing ideas with the storage experts at HP StorageWorks about storage technology, challenges, and opportunities.

Looking for dedicated, low-cost block storage? HP now has a family of products to meet your needs?with a choice of host connect interfaces ideally suited for application environments in small and midsized businesses, remote offices and as tier 2 or 3 storage for enterprise customers.

Find best practice and how to storage white papers on a variety of topics including data protection, remote replication, Oracle, Exchange and SAP.

Qualified high-performance computing (HPC) cluster configurations based on the IBRIX Fusion file system and Dell? PowerVault? MD3000 storage can provide a robust, cost-effective, high-performance architecture for parallel application deployments.

HP StorageWorks participates in the IBM ServerProven® program, a multi-vendor effort to provide accurate compatibly and support information to customers.

With newer technologies such as disk-to-disk backup, virtual tape libraries and low-cost disk drives, you can now add layers of data protection that go beyond traditional tape backup at affordable prices.

You want to work with a leader and HP StorageWorks is just that--a storage leader. According to IDC?s Q2CY07, HP StorageWorks is a leader in disk systems, tape, NAS, SAN, and software. Check out this Real Story to get all the facts.

Get the HP Secure Advantage for centralized key management and data encryption where it matters most?on removable media and devices that leave the data center.

Midsize businesses face the daunting challenge of managing rapid data growth with constrained budgets and limited staff. Advances in IP-based networked storage technology such as network attached storage and Internet SCSI (iSCSI) can help organizations of all sizes take advantage of existing resources to easily and cost-effectively build, maintain, and manage sophisticated storage networks.

The Dell? PowerVault? MD3000i Internet SCSI (iSCSI) array enables enterprises to easily consolidate storage for multiple servers. To illustrate its performance in a consolidated environment, Dell engineers performed tests demonstrating that the PowerVault MD3000i provides sufficient throughput to handle five server workloads as well as two incremental backups over an eight-hour period.

Small and medium businesses, remote offices, and departments and workgroups must cope with the same IT pressures as large enterprises, but with smaller budgets and fewer dedicated staff members. Internet SCSI (iSCSI)?based storage arrays such as the Dell? PowerVault? MD3000i offer a cost-effective way for these organizations to consolidate storage while providing powerful, easy-to-use management tools.

Digital data is outstripping storage capacity and complex systems are failing to adapt under the strain as storage demands grow faster than IT budgets. The good news is that easy-to-use IP-based networked storage with built-in data protection and management capabilities promises to bridge the budget gap?and effectively complement traditional Fibre Channel?based storage area networks.

A flood tide of digital data and increasingly complex regulatory requirements have made data backup, recovery, and archiving critical aspects of enterprise operations. Dell Services experts can assess how effectively an information infrastructure is getting the job done and deploy integrated, best-of-breed storage solutions to help ensure the safety and recoverability of critical data.

Storage area networks (SANs) have traditionally been reserved for large enterprises with the budgets and IT staff resources to handle them. Now, Dell and Cisco have collaborated to create SAN solutions designed specifically for small and medium businesses, allowing them to deploy high-performance, enterprise-class storage in a cost-effective, easy-to-manage way.

The ability to boot server operating systems over an Internet SCSI (iSCSI)?based storage area network can offer multiple advantages, including increased system reliability, simplified management, and accelerated restore processes. To help enterprises utilize this functionality, Broadcom and Dell have teamed up to offer enhanced iSCSI boot on Broadcom® Ethernet controllers in Dell? PowerEdge? servers.

The Dell? PowerVault? NX1950 integrated network attached storage system offers cost-effective, versatile storage for small and medium businesses and remote offices. To demonstrate its performance in a high-availability configuration, Dell engineers simulated a mixed environment running key Microsoft® Exchange and SQL Server? workloads alongside Microsoft Windows® and Linux® file shares.

This Server/Array matrix shows you recommend ed and supported Arrays for each Server.

The HP StorageWorks 4/32B SAN Switch demo is available.

The Real Story about Storage Market Share Facts demonstrates HP StorageWorks market leadership in disk storage systems, branded tape and storage software based on IDC?s latest storage market share trackers.

Integrating virtualized servers with shared storage is necessary for flexible virtual machine (VM) mobility, but can be more complicated than many enterprises expect. The second article in this ongoing series details the advantages Internet SCSI (iSCSI) offers in virtualized environments, including simplified deployment, comprehensive storage management and data protection functionality, and seamless VM mobility.

Combining VMware® Infrastructure 3 and EMC® layered applications provides powerful high-availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery capabilities that can help organizations create highly resilient IT infrastructures and meet stringent service-level agreements, recovery point objectives, and recovery time objectives for critical systems.

Dell? Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage arrays are designed to provide cost-effective, easy-to-deploy shared storage for software like the VMware® Infrastructure 3 server virtualization suite. This article discusses the key features of these arrays, outlines how administrators can configure them for use with VMware software, and provides test results comparing their performance in a virtualized environment.

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Dean: What are the practical limitations on the number of disks in a RAID-5 set? I understand that a larger number of disks worsens the probabilities of bad things like a failure or paying the worst possible seek/delay cost in random accesses. Do you have any mathematical models for evaluating these penalties?

Dean, there are several ways to look at this issue. Some of the areas I point out below are pretty obvious, but for the sake of completeness I?ll cover it all:

Storage efficiency: As the disk count increases so does the storage efficiency. This is because there is one disk?s worth of redundancy (parity) per array. For example a 3-disk RAID-5 has one disk?s worth of parity and two disk?s worth of usable space, therefore the efficiency is 67%, i.e., 67% of the total disk space is available for user data. Likewise, a 10-disk RAID-5 has an efficiency of 90%. As a formula, it looks like this:

Efficiency = (DiskCount-1) / DiskCount

Degraded performance: A degraded RAID-5 is an array with a failed disk. If the user tries to read a block on the failed disk the RAID software will have to access all the other disks in the array to reconstruct that missing data. However if the user tries to read a block on one of the remaining good disks then nothing special happens. The data is simply read from the disk.

So let?s go back to the 3-disk example and assume a single failed disk. And let?s assume that the user is reading just one block, and let?s see how that read transforms to one or more disk accesses. If the user reads the two good disks then each read will be converted to just one disk read. However if the user reads the bad disk then that read will turn into two disk reads (from the good disks). So on average, three random disk reads (one per disk) will result in four disk IOs, or an increase in IOs of 33% from the optimal array case. Now let?s look at the 10-disk array. A read from nine of the disks will result in just one IO, however a read to the bad disk will result in nine IOs, i.e., one read from each of the remaining good disks. So ten random reads will result in 18 disk IOs, an increase of 80%. As a formula, it looks like this:

IOIncrease = ((Disk Count-1) + (DiskCount-1) ? DiskCount ) / DiskCount

which reduces to:

IOIncrease = (DiskCount-2) / DiskCount

Now let?s look at writes - they?re a little more complicated. Each host write will typically result in four disk IOs ? two reads and two writes. One read and write will be on a data disk while the other read and write will be on a parity disk. We?ll need to see what happens if any of those IOs go to a bad disk. If a read touches a bad data disk then all the other disks will have to be read, just as in the previous example. However the data disk won?t be written, obviously, because the disk is bad. Therefore the read becomes (DiskCount - 1) reads, and the write just goes away. The parity disk still has both the read and write. So the total number of IOs is (DiskCount - 1) + 2.

If a read touches a bad parity disk, then nothing special happens. There is no parity to update and therefore the write to the data disk is just a plain ol? write. The total number of IOs will go from four to just one.

OK, to summarize, normally a write causes 4 IOs. However if the data disk is bad the total IOs will increase to (DiskCount + 1). Likewise, if the parity disk is bad the total IOs will decrease to 1.

If we go back to our example of ten IOs spread evenly (one per disk) across ten disks, you?d see that 8 host writes will result in 4 IOs, one host write will result in 11 IOs and one will result in 1 IO, for a total of 44 IOs. In an optimal array all 10 host writes would result in 4 IOs each, of a total of 40 IOs. That?s only an increase of 10%. The formula looks like this:

Increase = ((DiskCount-2)*4 + (DiskCount+1) + 1 ? (DiskCount*4)) / (DiskCount*4)

which reduces to:

Increase = (DiskCount-6) / (DiskCount*4)

It?s interesting to note that if the disk count is exactly 6 then the increase is zero and the total IOs don?t change. If the disk count is less than 6 then the total IOs actually drop!

Also, you may have noticed that I conveniently left out the XOR time. In general, assuming that the controller doesn?t have a memory bottleneck or the XOR isn?t done in software, then the XOR time is relatively small compared to the disk time, so it can be just left out of the equation.

Rebuild time: [Note that this section was reworded on July 18, 2007. An observant reader had noticed that I was in the weeds. ] When a bad disk is replaced it is re-created by reading from all the other disks in the array. Luckily these reads can be issued in parallel and therefore the rebuild time does NOT increase linearly as the disk count increase. In other words, to rebuild a 3-disk array will require reading two entire disks and writing a third disk. Likewise rebuilding a 10-disk array will require reading nine entire disks and writing a tenth disk. The time to read two disks should be roughly the same time to read nine disks. There are some additional complications regarding XOR and potential limitations in the hardware, but they don’t have too much effect on the rebuild time and probably aren’t interesting enough to repeat here.

Second disk failure: There is a small chance that another disk will fail before the first one is replaced. The chance of an array failing is simply the chance of a disk failing multiplied by the number of disks in the array. Therefore the more disks in the array, the higher the likelihood of at least one disk in the array failing. BTW, the chance of a disk failing is inversely proportional to the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of the disk. MTBF is a common way of indicating disk reliability. Here?s the simple formula:

ChanceOfArrayFailure = ChanceOfDiskFailure * DiskCount

Some folks like to correlate multiple failures, meaning that if one disk fails then there is a higher chance (such as 10X) that a second disk will fail ? possibly due to power supply problems, overheating, or shared cable issues (as with parallel SCSI). But really these chances are extremely small and it?s really not worth going into the detail again. A more thorough review can be found here.

Bit error during rebuild: This is probably the biggest negative with extremely large RAID-5 arrays. Every sector on the disk has a very small chance of being unreadable, even using error correction codes (ECC). This is referred to as the Bit Errors Rate (BER). A typical low-end SATA disk will have an uncorrectable bit error for every 10^14 bits read and a typical high-end SAS disk will have an uncorrectable bit error every 10^15 bits. These seem like big numbers, but keep in mind that there are almost 10^13 bits in a 1TB disk. That means that you?re almost guaranteed to get a bit error if you read from ten SATA disks.

So what does it mean if you get a bit error? Basically it means that one entire 512 byte sector will be unreadable, further meaning that the corresponding failed sector can?t be rebuilt. The bottom line is that you?ve just lost data. A good RAID controller will mark that sector ?offline?, allowing the OS to get an error which will cause the user to restore the corresponding file from backup. A bad RAID controller will ignore the error (causing hidden data corruption) or will abort the rebuild, leaving the user one disk failure away from total loss of all data.

Going back to our 10-disk example, let?s assume that we?re using 1TB SATA disks with a total of 8.8×10^12 bits and an error rate of 10^14. We?ll have to read nine disks to rebuild the bad disk, resulting in 7.9×10^13 total read bits. Divide that by the 10^14 error rate and you have a 79% chance of getting a bit error. In other words, you probably won?t be able to rebuild the array!

(Note that the situation is often not that horrific. A good RAID controller will perform a continuous background media check looking for bit errors before the disk fails. If one is found then it is repaired while the array is still optimal. It?s difficult to say how much that improves your chances of rebuilding, but it?s generally accepted that background media checks are a ?good thing?.)

Here?s the resultant formula:

ChanceOfDataLoss = (DiskCount?1) * DiskCapacityInBits / BER

In addition to minimizing the chance of a BER by performing the background scan, it?s common to divide the RAID-5 into multiple RAID-5 arrays combined with striping ? more commonly referred to as RAID-50. All of the equations above can be easily adapted to a RAID-50 configuration.

Dean, I hope that helps answer your question. I realize it was WAY more information than you were looking for, but I was on a roll.

TT

I wanted to let you fine folks know that I?ve recorded a few webinars on many of the topics that I routinely discuss here in this blog. Each one is about 15 minutes long and comes with smorgasbord of tasty slides. The biggest downside is that my delivery is only slightly better than Ben Stein discussing the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act. (Anyone? Anyone?)

Here?s a list of the topics that can be found at the webinar website.

How to Map Applications to RAID Configurations - Learn how to match the read and write access patterns in your daily applications to the best RAID configuration for your business.

Maximize Data Protection for Cost-Effective SATA Drives - You don’t have to compromise reliability when using SATA. We’ll show you how to deploy RAID 6 to provide maximum fault tolerance.

RAID Error Handling - Learn how comprehensive error handling capabilities built into Adaptec RAID increase the effectiveness of data protection.

Success with Snapshot Backups - Gain a thorough understanding of how you can enhance data protection with the fast backup and instant data access of virtual point-in-time snapshots.

Growing Data Protection as Your Server Grows - Get tips on how to manage RAID and remove the complexity of capacity management as your storage grows.

Software vs. Hardware RAID - Learn the advantages and disadvantages of software RAID and hardware RAID.

If anyone has any questions just drop me a line and I’ll start a blog post.

Enjoy,
TT

Question to the Storage Advisors, from anonymous: Which is better: (a) backup battery for cache as found on OEM RAID controllers or (b) writing cache content to one or more disk drives?

Good question. For those not verse in the dark arts of cache write-back strategies, we?re talking about methods for protecting user data that has been written by the OS but hasn?t actually made it to the media yet. It?s common for a disk controller to improve write performance by accepting the data from the OS and saying that it?s been written to disk, when in reality it?s still in memory (or disk, as suggested by the poster?s question). This technique is referred to as ?write-back? because the data is written in the background. The opposite of write-back is ?write-through? where the controller really does write the data to disk before telling the OS that it?s finished.

[Note that controllers aren?t the only things that have a write-back cache - the OS and drives also have one. But to avoid complicating a somewhat simple question, let?s just ignore those other caches for now. The OS has ways of protecting itself, and drive caches should be disabled if a write-back controller is being used.]

It?s very important that this un-written controller data is protected because it?s the only copy of that data. The OS thinks that the data is written to disk and therefore purges it from memory or wherever it came from. If a power failure occurs before this write-back data is written to disk, then it?s permanently lost. With large caches we?re talking about 100?s of MBs of data. And it can even be worse than that because the missing writes could be to a file structure or database, resulting in massive corruption and loss of files that aren?t even being accessed. It can be a real mess. And the user won?t know about it until they read back corrupted data ? which isn?t always obvious.

So, on to the question: What?s the best way to protect this unwritten data? The most common approach is to simply put a battery on the disk controller. If power is lost to the system, including to the drives, the controller memory will transition to battery-backed mode and preserve any write-back data that hadn?t made it to disk yet. The battery is typically selected to provide at least 72 hours of backup time ? protecting data across a weekend.

An alternative method, as suggested by the poster, is to save this write-back data to disk. There are different ways to implement this, but the most common is to ?simply? store the data in a transaction log on the disk. Now, note that the data is typically stored on the disk (in either method ? battery or log) using some form of RAID, protecting against data loss due to a drive failure. RAID-5 is a pretty commonly selected RAID level, but has very poor random write performance ? a problem which just happens to be greatly alleviated by some form of write-back cache. So for this example, let?s assume that RAID is being used. This means that the write-back data being logged to disk should also be protected from disk failure. The easiest way to do this is to simply write the log file to two disks. (Some users prefer RAID-6 which protects against two drive failures, in which case the transaction log should be written to three disks!)

OK, now let?s look at the pros and cons of the controller-based battery and disk-based log approaches.

Backup Protection Time: A battery has a limited storage time ? around 72 hours as previously pointed out. However a transaction log on disk can last almost indefinitely, i.e., the lifetime of the drive. So here the advantage clearly goes to disk-based logs. (BTW, some folks are looking at ways to automatically move the controller cache data to a more permanent storage device, like CompactFlash, allowing controller backup times similar to transaction log backup times. So this will eventually become moot.)

Life Expectancy: Another issue with batteries is that they don?t last forever. They eventually degrade and fail, lasting maybe a few years before they need to be replaced. Drives obviously don?t have this issue.

Capacity: This one is really a nit, but I figured I?d list it to be complete. If a controller has 256MB of memory, for example, then the transaction log will require 2×256MB of disk space, or 512MB. With 1TB drives, this one is a big fat ?don?t care?.

Cost: Batteries and the associated circuitry probably add about $100 to the user-cost of a controller, while 512MB of disk space for the log is practically free. $100 might be a big deal for a home user (who probably doesn?t need RAID or write-back cache anyway), but it?s just another nit for serious IT folks. Once you add up the price of the motherboard, OS, drives, etc., $100 is in the noise.

Performance: So far the advantage has clearly gone to the disk log, but performance is probably the most important factor when choosing a cache backup protection method. With a battery-backed controller there are no additional steps to protect the data in cache. ?It just works.? Of course there is a lot of magic in the hardware design to make it ?just work?, but that has no effect on the performance. On the other hand, with disk-based logs the data has to be written to two different disks. This will probably entail two seeks, assuming that the drives had been servicing requests in some other section of the media. And eventually, that logged data will have to be read back from disk and moved to the permanent location ? causing two more seeks and reads. So now a single OS write will cause four additional IOs to the disks.

So how the heck do we figure out the performance hit due to these four IOs? Let?s try this crude method:

Assume that RAID-5 is being used. Therefore each random OS write will cause four disk IOs - two reads and two writes. With disk-based logging there are four additional IOs to log and ?un-log? the data for a total of eight IOs. Using this approach we can see that disk logging has twice as many IOs as controller battery-protected cache, therefore you get about a 2X difference in performance. Of course real performance modeling will be more complex than this, so just squint at the numbers and figure that the difference is anywhere from 50% to 150%. That?s a big dang difference.

The bottom line is that most users that are concerned with performance aren?t concerned with saving $100, therefore battery-backed cache is clearly the winner.

Enjoy,
TT

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Question to the Storage Advisors, from John: I have several large SCSI arrays ranging in size from 600 GB to almost 2 TB. They add up to about 4.5 TB in total. They are currently seen as separate drives in Windows 2003 server R2. I’d like to find an adapter card that will let me span them so they appear as one large array. I’d rather not span them using disk manager in Windows 2003.

John, first, are you willing to temporarily dump your data to tape in order to reconfigure the storage? This is probably a requirement because I’m not aware of any RAID controller that can combine multiple logical drives without losing data.

Next, are these SCSI arrays created by an external SCSI-to-SCSI controller that you plan to keep? If so, you need to make sure the logical drives are presented in a way that makes the drives look enough like a physical drive to be striped by your new PCI RAID card. You?re probably ok on this point. Also, are these logical drives presented by the SCSI-to-SCSI controller all the same size? If not, you?re going to have trouble striping them and using all of your capacity since each component of the RAID-0 has to be the same size. (In other words, the minor stripe size has to be the same on all drives.) You might end up creating one RAID-0 across all the logical drives, and then another across the ?extra? sections of the logical drives, and so on. And of course you?ll have to have a RAID card that supports this; most of them don?t. (Hopefully I?m clear about this ? if not, let me know and I can draw a picture.)

The easiest way to fix this is simply attach all your drives to a single PCI RAID card and create a single new array. Don?t bother trying to stripe the arrays that you currently have. Just start from scratch.

Feel free to drop more details about drive count and sizes and I can make a more concrete recommendation on how it can be configured. Also, have you already figured out what RAID type you need to use?

TT

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) technology is changing the face of networked storage, providing a cost-effective and easy-to-manage alternative to Fibre Channel networks. The first article in this ongoing series explores the basics of iSCSI architecture; clarifies several common misperceptions about its performance, manageability, and security; and discusses how enterprises can implement iSCSI using Dell? PowerVault? and Dell/EMC storage.

Question to the Storage Advisors, from John: The age old question…RAID 5 vs. RAID 0+1 with a twist on spindles. Here’s the deal: Multiple Progress databases. Much more read intensive that write intensive. Which is faster: (2) RAID0 sets of 4 disks that are then mirrored (8 disks total) OR all 8 disks in a RAID5 config? I’m trying to figure out if more disk spindles outperforms less spindles without the RAID5 overhead.

John, good question. First, let’s talk about the RAID-0 and RAID-1 combination. You mention mirroring two 4-drive RAID-0’s. But the more typical approach is to stripe four 2-drive RAID-1’s. The end result as far as performance and capacity is the same, but the reliability and rebuild time is better with the latter - striped RAID-1’s. The reason is that if a single drive fails in the former mirrored RAID-0’s case then the entire set of 4 drives in the RAID-0 is typically taken off-line. This means that the array can tolerate at most one drive failure, but all four drives will have to be rebuilt. However with the latter striped RAID-1’s case, a single failed drive causes just one mirror pair to be rebuilt. In fact, you could actually have one drive in each RAID-1 fail and still have the array on-line.

So as far as your original question, it doesn’t actually matter which version of RAID-10 is being used. Both versions will provide the same performance assuming that no drives are failed, and also assuming that the queue depth from the host is large enough and random enough to cause all the drives to be accessed.

In your example the access pattern is mostly reads and mostly random (because it’s a database). Just for the sake of comparison, let’s say that it is 100% reads and 100% random. The end result is that all eight of the drives will see a command, or an IO. That means that if each drive can do 100 IOs per second, then the RAID-10 can do 800 IOPS total.

On a RAID-5 with 100% reads there are no RAID-5 calculations other than the block redirection due to the striping, which is almost identical to the redirection in RAID-10. So the end result is that all eight drives are used (since parity is distributed across all drives), and therefore RAID-5 will do the same 800 IOPS as RAID-10.

So, if you’re doing 100% reads, the RAID levels are identical in performance.

But your data base isn’t 100% reads, so let’s look at what happens with 100% writes. With RAID-10, each host access will be written to two drives, so the array performance will drop to one-half, or 400 IOPS. However with RAID-5 each host access is converted to four IOs (two reads and two writes), so the array performance will drop to one-quarter, or about 200 IOPS. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but this is a pretty good estimate.)

Now you’ll have to determine the real read/write ratio and calculate the harmonic mean to estimate the performance impact of these write commands. For example, if the ration was 50:50, then the RAID-10 would get around 533 IOPS and the RAID-5 would get around 320 IOPS.

The bottom-line is that the more writes you have the more RAID-5 will hurt performance. But if writes are rare, then the improved capacity of RAID-5 may warrant the slight performance hit.

Good luck!

TT

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Chris: Need some quick insight if you have a moment. This is for an Oracle db server btw. We’re buying 2 cages that use a PCIe interface and 24 146G 15K drives. We’re going to use RAID 10. Each cage only holds 12 drives. We’ll be using 2 spares in each cage (since we have to have 1 spare and can’t use RAID 10 on 11 drives). So that’s a stripe of 5 disk groups. At 175 IOPs that’s approx 875 IOPs across the stripe (if I’m using the correct terminology). If we go higher than 875 IOPs we begin seeing higher queue lengths correct? Both cages are hooked to the same server thru the PCIe controller that supports up to 8Gb/s. This is for an Oracle db, and will host 4 dbs. 2 dbs are IO intensive, 2 are not. Right now we plan on separating the 2 IO intensive dbs to 1 cage each. So here is my question: Would it be better to use both cages per db? I don’t think you can stripe disks across cages(?), so would it be better to create two stripes and put datafiles from both dbs on both cages so that we effectively use 2 stripes of 5 disk groups? Does that make sense? (Love your blogs by the way!)

Chris, first, thanks for the love. We’re feeling you, man.

You had a lot of good questions, so let’s try to handle them one at a time.

RAID-10 drive count: It’s true that a typical RAID-10 has to use an even number of drive since the array is basically a bunch of two-drive RAID-10s striped together. Obviously you realize this, but here?s a picture for the noobs (I say affectionately):

However there is a different form of RAID-10 that does support an odd drive count, and the Adaptec name for that RAID level is RAID-1E. (I guess ?E? means ?extended? or ?extra?, not ?even?. RAID-1o for ?odd? probably would have been a better name, but it?s hard to tell the difference in a zero and an ?o?.) Here?s a picture of a RAID-1E disk layout.

So you should probably consider RAID-1E with one hot spare instead of RAID-10 with two hot spares. RAID-1E would give you one more drive?s worth of performance, with no real drop in reliability.

RAID-10 IOPS calculation: I assume you?re talking about each drive getting 175 IOPS, right? That?s about 2X high for a purely random workload, but if the access pattern has a mix of short seeks and sequential IO, then I suppose I could squint enough to see 175 IOPS. So with reads to a RAID-10, every drive in the array should be able to process a command ? assuming that the queue depth from the host is large enough. For a 10 drive array you?d probably need around 20 concurrent host commands to be assured that each drive had a command to process. This means that a read-only access pattern to a 10-drive RAID-10 should be able to give you 1750 IOPS. But on writes, since each command has to go to two drives, that number is cut in half to 875 IOPS. If you?ve got a mixture of reads and writes, then the real IOPS is somewhere in between.

Database distribution: If I understand you correctly, you plan to create two separate RAID-10 arrays, one per cage. And you plan to let each RAID-10 array support one intensive and one not-intensive database. In general, that sounds like a good idea. That should keep the workload evenly distributed across the drives. However, that gets me to the next question:

RAID-10 spanning cages: The RAID controller should definitely support spanning arrays across cages. Some people like to keep an array within a cage simply for the sake of portability. For example, they might want to move one entire cage (along with the databases) to a new server. You obviously can?t do that if the array spans both cages. However, having one array has a lot of advantages. For one, you have only one drive letter to deal with. If you have two logical drives, then you?re guaranteed to someday have one drive almost full while the other has plenty of space. And at that point you?re basically screwed. So having just one large logical drive is always more flexible.

Another benefit of a larger RAID-10 is that the performance of a single database can be twice as great (assuming that there are enough host commands to keep it busy). That may not be clear, so look at it this way. Imagine having two databases. One is on one RAID-10 while the other is on the other RAID-10. If both databases are busy, then all the drives are busy, and performance is maxed out. But now imagine just one of those databases being busy. The other is completely idle. Now you have half of your disks just sitting idle contributing nothing to the performance of the system. At this point you?ll be wishing that the active database spanned all the drive, allowing performance to basically double. So when you said that you have four separate databases, think about when they?re actually be used. For example, are the intensive databases always intensive at the same time?

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.

TT

P.S. With all of these drives, you should also consider RAID-6. There are PLENTY of posts in this blog about RAID-6. Also, you didn?t mention whether you?re using SATA, SAS, or SCSI. From the drive sizes, I assume you?re using SCSI or SAS. You should take a serious look at SATA with RAID-6. You?ll get a LOT more capacity for a fraction of the cost, and even higher reliability than SCSI. The downside is that short random writes will suffer. I can?t tell from your post what your read/write ratio looks like, but if it?s mostly reads then RAID-6 is your friend.

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Neal G.: How many disk IOs does it take to write one file? I have a RAID10 array writing a 120KB file. Is this one IO for the entire file, or is it one IO per sector on the disk/write cache (which would then be approx 240 IOs)?

Neal, it really depends on the operating system and how the application is writing the file. Plus, besides the file write, there are plenty of other disk accesses such as directory, FAT or inode reads and writes.

But your question made me curious, so I did a quick experiment with SysInternals’ Disk Monitor utility which traps IO type (read vs write), transfer length, and disk number. Then I simply copied a 120KB file from one drive to another, and captured the IOs to the destination drive.

Using Windows XP Pro it was nice to see that the OS issued large writes - 64KB when possible. So the 120KB file was written using just two IOs. But I also saw about a dozen other short (16KB or less) reads and writes to other sections of the disk, which I assume are directory and FAT updates.

Do a search for SysInternals and you will find Disk Monitor. Microsoft bought them last year, but I believe their tools are still free.

Enjoy,
TT

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Darwin: I just wonder, what kind of storage solution that can saturate 10Gb Ethernet backbone. If I assume I have a file server (of course equipped with 10GbE NIC on PCI-E 8x), can an external SAS/SATA-II JBOD box (using 4xwide SAS link) produce enough throughput (taking into account the hard disk speed and the link bandwidth) to saturate the network? If not, where will be the bottleneck? Thanks.

Darwin, let’s break down the bottlenecks in this picture.

First, each drive is capable of about 100MB/s from the media. Some drives are faster and some are slower, but this is a good average number.

Next, each SAS 3Gb link is capable of 300MB/s bit rate. But once you apply overhead and encoding conversion, you’re down around 270MB/s - let’s say 250MB/s just to be safe. So with a 4x link, you can get close to 1000MB/s.

Now let’s look at your PCIe 8x bus. Each 2.5GHz PCIe link can do 250MB/s. I’ve seen efficiency estimates as low as 70%, so let’s say that each link can do 175MB/s. Therefore an 8x bus can do 1400MB/s. In fact PCIe is full duplex so each bus can actually be transferring in both directions for a total of 2800MB/s. But this is all moot. The SAS 4x bus is limited to 1000MB/s, so the PCIe 8x bus is overkill.

Lastly, let’s look at your 10GbE link. That link can probably burst at around 1GB/s, or 1000MB/s. Coincidently, that almost exactly matches the SAS 4x throughput that we calculated earlier.

So it would seem that your system is nicely balanced with 10 drives feeding a 10GbE link. But of course it’s never that easy.

First, can your disk controller hit the 1000MB/s mark? That answer will depend a lot on whether you’re using RAID for protection against drive failure, and furthermore what type of RAID and what access pattern you’re using. For example, if you’re doing random IO to the disks, then each drive is spending the majority of its time waiting for the head to seek or the media to rotate. Using the 71 IOPS from the previous post on SATA IOPS measurement, and assuming a 4KB transfer size, each drive is supplying less than 300KB/s. Therefore it would take over 3000 drives to hit the magic 1000MB/s mark! That’s not going to happen.

Next, what is the overhead of the drivers and firmware sitting between the OS and the drives? This number is probably around 10%, so it’s not too interesting. We can move on.

The next biggest problem, after drive access pattern, is “what is driving the GbE link”? Is it iSCSI with a TOE to offload the TCP/IP processing? You mention that this is a file server, so I assume that you’re just running NAS. If so, you’ve got a ton of overhead in processing filesystem metadata. You’re probably lucky to get 100-200MB/s.

So you can probably see that you asked a very complex question with lots of unknown variables. But hopefully all the simple factoids that I presented will help you find the bottlenecks in your system and tune the performance accordingly.

Good luck.

TT

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Michael K.: I’ve heard great things about SATA based DASD and JBOD devicess. I’ve found tons of information about the data transfer rate, but haven’t been able to find any hard data on how many sustained and bursted IOPS such systems can handle.

Michael, IOPS are very dependent on the access pattern. For this reason it’s normal to measure the “worse case” IOPS which are acheived on short random IOs. The IOPS can be calculated by simply adding the time to do an average seek to the time for a half rotation. Note that the transfer rate doesn’t come into play because it’s so insignificant compared to the seek and rotation time.

For example, the 500GB Western Digital SE16 SATA drive (WD5000KS) has a rotational rate of 7200 RPM. By inverting that number you get one rotation per 8.4ms. Therefore a half rotation is 4.2ms. This is also noted on the spreadsheet as “Average Latency”.

Next, the average seek times for reads are listed as 8.9ms, while writes are 10.9ms. That difference may seem odd at first, but drives eek out a little extra performance on reads by attempting to read the data before the head has settled on the track (and that settling for writes takes ~2ms). So, let’s say that you have an even mix of reads and writes, and therefore we’ll assume the average seek time is 9.9ms.

Adding 4.2ms and 9.9ms gives has an average random IO latency of 14.1ms. Since the drive can process, i.e., access the media, with just one command at a time, you can invert 14.1ms to get 71 IOPS.

You can start playing games to increase the IOPS - such as shorting the seeks by accessing a smaller section of the disk, or making the IO sequential so that requests are serviced from the drive cache. With these tricks you can get the IOPS to exceed 100,000!

Now you can see that it’s difficult to measure and specify IOPS. The number is somewhere between 71 and 100K. For this reason it’s normal to use the worse case, random access pattern value of ~71.

TT

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