Category Archives: Storage

ECS, Hard disk drive, SAN, Storage

ScaleIO Releases New Version of Its Elastic Converged Storage

ScaleIO today announced the release of ScaleIO ECS v1.1 scale-out storage software, bringing operational flexibility and cost savings to high-performance databases, virtual servers, end-user computing, and high-performance computing.

ScaleIO ECS eliminates the dependence on complex, expensive external SAN storage and fabric by presenting business application servers’ local disks as a robust, high-performance, shared virtual SAN. ECS provides hyper-scalability and enterprise-grade resilience while also reducing storage costs by more than 80%, delivering a direct savings of over 28% on an organization’s total IT budget.

“As enterprises consolidate into mega-data centers and SMEs move to cloud and hosting infrastructures, data centers are rapidly expanding to many thousands of servers. As a result, data center operators face constantly increasing levels of complexity and costs,” explained Boaz Palgi, CEO of ScaleIO. “ECS helps organizations manage these challenges by providing a scale-out storage solution that was designed for hyper-scalability, high performance, unprecedented elasticity, and low total cost of ownership. ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only.”

With ECS, any administrator can add, move, or remove servers and capacity on demand during I/O operations. The software responds automatically to any infrastructure change and rebalances data accordingly across the grid. ECS helps ensure the highest level of enterprise-grade resilience by deploying advanced clustering algorithms whose distributed rebuild capabilities achieve the quickest handling of failures while maintaining maximum storage performance.

Breaking traditional barriers of storage scalability, ECS scales out to hundreds and thousands of nodes. Performance scales linearly with the number of application servers and disks. Deploying ECS in both greenfield and existing data center environments is a simple process and takes only a few minutes.

ECS can be managed from both a command-line interface (CLI) and an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). ECS v1.1 natively supports all the leading Linux distributions and hypervisors; works agnostically with any SSD or HDD, regardless of type, model, or speed; and runs on x86, ARM, and other chipsets—giving organizations complete freedom of choice. Additional functionality includes encryption at rest and quality of service (QoS) of performance.

“Software-defined storage enables IT organizations to break out of the traditional SAN model that requires a staff of minions to perform mundane storage tasks,” commented Matthew Brisse, storage research director at Gartner. “Software-defined storage enables the promise of storage elasticity to match storage needs for traditional, virtual, and service-oriented cloud strategies in response to the ever-changing business requirements found in most IT organizations.”

“ScaleIO offers an innovative solution enabling customers to utilize capacity on hundreds of compute nodes and to aggregate that capacity into a single shared LUN,” said Julian Fielden, managing director, OCF. “OCF has deployed and tested ScaleIO ECS on a cluster with several hundred nodes in a large customer’s high-performance computing environment. The software made previously unused capacity available to the business applications and to a distributed file system while demonstrating impressive performance and resilience.”

Hardware, IceWEB, Storage

IceWEB Launches the IceWEB 6500

IceWEB, Inc. today announced the launch of the IceWEB 6500 Unified Data Storage appliances for cloud and virtual environments.

The IceWEB 6500 unified data system simplifies the management and efficiency of data center environments by providing all-inclusive storage for both block and file data across multiple protocols including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases, virtualized environments as well as unstructured data such as scanned images, files, videos, pictures, graphics, and voice – on IceWEB’s single enterprise-class platform.

Rob Howe, IceWEB CEO said, “The IceWEB 6500 is far more than just an addition to our product lineup. It’s full-tilt clustered storage at eye-popping low prices. The IceWEB 6500 offers simplicity, scalability, flexibility and advanced Integration. While that may just sound like a list of features, and it is; it’s a list of highly advanced features found only in unified storage systems that cost orders of magnitude more than the IceWEB 6500. That translates into massive savings for our customers who desperately need professional-level solutions to solve their storage requirements while they deal with frozen or fast-shrinking budgets. So this is not just another new product from IceWEB; this is an astounding amount of value for our customers at a time when they really need it that makes good business sense.”

 


Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, Reduced Redundancy Storage, Storage

Yet Another Round of AWS Storage Price Cuts

Timed for announcement at AWS re:Invent, and nicely juxtaposed against this week’s similar storage price cuts by Google, Amazon has trimmed S3 and EBS prices.

They’ve reduced the price of Amazon S3 storage by 24-28% in the US Standard Region, and made similar price reductions in all nine regions worldwide  as well as reducing the price of Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). Here are the new prices for Standard Storage in the US Standard Region:

Tier Old Price
(GB / month)		 New Price Change
First 1 TB / month $0.125 $0.095 24%
Next 49 TB $0.110 $0.080 27%
Next 450 TB $0.095 $0.070 26%
Next 500 TB $0.090 $0.065 28%
Next 4000 TB $0.080 $0.060 25%
Over 5000 TB $0.055 $0.055 No change

The new prices are listed on the Amazon S3 pricing announcement page. The new prices take effect on December 1, 2012 and will be applied automatically.

Amazon also reduced the per-gigabyte storage cost for EBS snapshots, again world-wide. Here are the new prices:

Region Old Price
(GB / month)		 New Price Change
US East (N. Virginia) $0.125 $0.095 24%
US West (Oregon) $0.125 $0.095 24%
US West (Northern California) $0.140 $0.105 25%
EU (Ireland) $0.125 $0.095 24%
Asia Pacific (Singapore) $0.125 $0.095 24%
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) $0.130 $0.100 23%
Asia Pacific (Sydney) $0.140 $0.105 25%
South America (Sao Paulo) $0.170 $0.130 24%


Archiving & Regulatory Retention, Backup, Storage

Some Benefits in Using Cloud Computing

Selecting a cloud storage provider depends mainly on your environment and your intentions. Whether you’re a small business, or an individual looking for the best (and often most inexpensive) way to store your wealth of files, cloud storage can be a great solution.

Why the Cloud?

So, why go with the cloud? Aren’t all the external hard drives out there enough to manage all your photographs, video files, music files and other important data? Maybe, but those items eventually break down and become obsolete—which isn’t too helpful when they’re your main method of backing up data. Not to mention they’re very costly to purchase when you have a good amount of data to store.

The benefit of the cloud is, not only is it inexpensive, and in some cases even free, but it allows you to store your data in a secure format that will help alleviate backup issues, while providing access to your files whenever you need them. Cloud services are generally easy to use with just the basics—an Internet connection, a computer, and a browser. This makes it super user-friendly for even the most basic computer users.

If you travel often, cloud storage is a great choice, because you can access your data from anywhere in the world. Much like your own computer, or back up hard drive, the cloud allows you to store information in an organized manner, so you don’t have to sift through endless amounts of data, in the end, saving you a good deal of time and energy.

Cloud Privacy

The cloud uses what is referred to as a software service model, which allows users to access their files by using a username and password. You can access the cloud from any computer with Internet capacity, allowing you access to your files in pretty much the same way as if you were working at home or in the office.

Yet, privacy is one of the major concerns for those considering cloud storage. And it goes without saying that whatever cloud storage company you choose, you want to make sure that your data is safe and that nobody can have access to your files.

In order to do this, you need to understand how certain servers store your data, in a way that is accessible and that you can communicate with the service should anything happen. Let’s say the server crashes for some reason, does this mean that your data is at risk? In most cases, with cloud storage companies, the answer is no, as good cloud storage companies will have backup systems in place that ensure your information will never be lost.

The best cloud storage services also employ the most advanced security options out there, in most cases better than what most small businesses or individuals can afford on their own. But even with these security measures, there’s always a slight chance that something could happen, so just be preventative, and make sure that your important files are backed up elsewhere. This will also give you some peace of mind, even if nothing should occur.

Another benefit of cloud storage is that it eliminates the need for an IT staff and expensive backup servers. If you have a small business, you can have your staff access all files via the cloud, therefore eliminating the need for an on-site server and thousands of dollars in IT staff paychecks. With cloud storage, if a problem arises, you only need to contact your company’s customer support should any problems arise.

Suffice it to say, the cloud obviously has it detractors, who feel that it’s an unsafe way of storing private information. Yet, with recent developments in safety, the cloud has basically revolutionized the way we manage our data, as well as how we do our business online. If you’re still wary of making the switch to online cloud storage, talk to some who use it. See what their feelings are. Most have found it quite beneficial, with cloud storage offering a great alternative to backup servers and hard drives.


Backup, Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, IceWEB, NovaStor, Partnerships, Storage

IceWEB Adding NovaStor Backup to Storage Appliances

IceWEB Inc., today announced they will bundle NovaSTOR’s Advanced Backup software with IceWEB’s Unified Storage Appliances.

“NovaSTOR is an excellent companion product for our IceWEB appliances because of its broad set of market applications,” said Rob Howe, IceWEB, CEO. “Their products span the same market spaces as ours—small, medium, large and cloud-based enterprises. They cover Windows, Linux, VMWare and Unix servers and clients in a myriad of configurations, mirroring our model. Because it is not always possible or cost-effective for companies to enable total unified storage protocols everywhere in their enterprise, we are providing significant additional value to our customers by enabling them to utilize NovaStor to target an IceWEB appliance in their network in order to satisfy their backup and disaster recovery needs for every location. Enabling them to have the ability to utilize a world-class product like NovaSTOR is yet another area in which IceWEB brings them excellent value when they purchase IceWEB products,” Howe concluded.


Cloud Block Storage, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, Solid-state drive, Standards, Storage

Rackspace Launches High Performance OpenStack Cloud Block Storage

Today, Rackspace Hosting announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack®. This solution provides a superior approach to attached storage in the Cloud by addressing customer demand for consistent and affordable performance for file systems, databases and other input/output (I/O) intensive applications. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage offers a standard volume option for everyday storage with performance that has been tested to be at least 30 percent less variable than that of alternatives1. The new product’s Solid State Drive (SSD) volume option has also been tested to deliver even higher performance, 5x to 6x faster than competing solutions1. Both options feature a transparent, flat pricing structure with no charge for I/O, and are now available for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack.

“The Rackspace Cloud Block Storage solution is a crucial piece of our product portfolio,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “The explosion of data over the past few years has placed greater demands on our customers, presenting them with a variety of new storage related challenges. We developed Cloud Block Storage to deliver consistent performance in the cloud, with a very simple pricing model that gives customers the flexibility they require to meet their unique business needs.”

With Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, customers get:

A Full-Featured Attachable Storage Solution

  • Attach multiple volumes of up to 1 Terabyte each of block storage to
    Cloud Servers
  • Detach and re-attach storage between compute nodes in seconds
  • Choice of Standard Performance or SSD-based High-Performance storage

Enhanced Performance

  • SSD-based solution is more than 10 times faster than Standard drive
    performance1.
  • Rackspace’s Cloud Block Storage Standard drive delivers consistent
    performance with less variability than standard drive solutions
    offered by leading competitors1.
  • High performance can be achieved without the need to RAID0 (stripe)
    volumes together, providing significant savings in cost and complexity.
  • There is no cap on I/O and users do not have to specify IOPS numbers,
    as they do with competing solutions.

A Simple Pricing Model

  • Standard – $0.15 per gigabyte per month; SSD – $0.70 per gigabyte per
    month
  • $.10 per gigabyte per month for snapshot data stored
  • Competitive pricing structure also features I/O at no additional
    charge, no additional per-instance fee, no minimum instance size, and
    consistent pricing in all U.S. regions

No Vendor Lock-In

  • Using the OpenStack Cinder APIs will allow customers to avoid
    proprietary implementation
    Rackspace Cloud Block Storage

Standard volumes are aimed at customers that typically require large amounts of everyday storage. These customers can leverage the product for a broad range of applications, including those that require standard performance or those needing to scale storage without scaling compute nodes. In addition, the product provides dependable storage for archiving solutions, companies that access large quantities of large files, and small to medium size websites.

Rackspace Cloud Block Storage SSD volumes are ideally suited for customers that require even higher levels of performance than what is normally experienced with standard drives. With a faster and more reliable SSD-based storage solution, customers can be better equipped to use applications that are crucial to their business, such as self-managed MySQL databases, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Web caching and indexing, among others.

“Based on our internal benchmarks, we’ve been impressed with the ability of Rackspace Cloud Block Storage to steadily perform at a high level,” said Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian Inc. “For our customers, the capacity to effectively archive large amounts of email data is critical to their business. As a result, we look for storage solutions that give us maximum agility, scalability and enterprise readiness. We are excited that Rackspace is now providing a new block storage alternative service for running our large scale email archiving deployments.”

Cloud Block Storage joins Cloud Databases as a key solution in Rackspace’s expanding portfolio of storage products. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage is now available in the U.S. and UK. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/blockstorage/

1 The data provided results from performance benchmarking tests that were commissioned by Rackspace. More information is available at: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-block-storage/.


Enterprise storage, IceWEB, Intellectual Property, Patent application, Storage

IceWEB Files Patent for IceSTORM Operating System

Image representing IceWEB as depicted in Crunc...

IceWEB Inc. today announced that the Company has filed an application with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (Application #: 61714375) entitled “Single Management Pane for Unified Storage” to secure one of its most valuable assets, the IceSTORM Operating System.

“Our breakthrough ‘single pane of glass’ approach provided by all of IceWEB’s Unified Storage products is built upon our IceSTORM technology. Protecting this key intellectual property is a great step forward for our company,” said Rob Howe, CEO of IceWEB. “Our growing base of customers understands that IceSTORM makes our solutions more useful, more easily trained upon, and more quickly and easily expandable. That’s real core value.” Howe said.


Canonical, Cinder, nova, Open Source, OpenStack, Partnerships, SolidFire, Storage

SolidFire, Canonical Deliver Deployable OpenStack Nova, Cinder

SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems for cloud service providers, announced today, in conjunction with Canonical, a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production- ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the OpenStack Summit, taking place October 15 through October 18 in San Diego.

John Griffith from SolidFire and David Medberry from Canonical will co-present the summit’s first workshop: “How to Deploy a Best-of-Breed OpenStack Compute and Block Storage Cloud” on Monday, October 15, at 9:50 a.m. local time. The session will include information on deployment tools, tips and tricks, targeted use cases, benchmark results and key enabling technologies.

“SolidFire has done a great job leading the Block Storage project in line with the OpenStack philosophy of delivering a pluggable architecture with integration points for multiple vendors and technologies,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s exciting to see more production implementations and configuration options available to OpenStack users.”

“Canonical has worked with SolidFire to ensure tight integration of Cinder into Ubuntu OpenStack packages to deliver a production-ready cloud infrastructure. As the reference operating system for OpenStack, Ubuntu was the natural choice to integrate with SolidFire’s solution,” commented Nick Barcet, Ubuntu cloud product manager at Canonical. “We believe SolidFire’s work in OpenStack is extremely important to the ecosystem, because it allows cloud providers to enhance their offering with high IOPS storage and unprecedented quality-of-service. They have also been leading the Cinder project in OpenStack to deliver a great abstraction layer that can be reused by other vendors to integrate their own solution.”

“Cinder has gotten off to a very successful start thanks to the hard work of more than 50 individual contributors,” said John Griffith, senior software engineer at SolidFire. “We delivered a deep feature set in our first release of Cinder, which allowed us to move quickly with Canonical in executing this powerful production-ready reference architecture for large-scale multi-tenant clouds.”

Key SolidFire-related features in the first OpenStack Cinder release include:

  • Full SolidFire driver integration
  • Ability to create, snapshot and manage SolidFire volumes using
    OpenStack clients and APIs
  • Ability to set and maintain true QoS levels on a per-volume basis
  • Ability to store instances on SolidFire volumes
  • Enhanced boot from volume options, including support for SolidFire
    volumes

SolidFire’s efforts around OpenStack are further evidence of its commitment to delivering proven, integrated storage solutions for its customers’ cloud infrastructures. This Cinder integration milestone follows SolidFire’s recently announced integration with major technology vendors across the cloud ecosystem.

Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfireinc | www.facebook.com/solidfire.


IceWEB, Storage

IceWEB Launches Unified Storage Appliance Aimed at SMB Market

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IceWEB Inc. today launched the IceWEB 1000, a Unified Storage Appliance targeted primarily at the Small to Medium Business market. The IceWEB 1000 meets the ever-escalating storage needs of small-sized businesses whose data storage requires professional level solutions with complete protection and reliability.

The IceWEB 1000 comes with IceWEB’s unique automated setup application – the FindIceWeb plug and play utility, which enables a small business person to set up their IceWEB 1000 on their network in just a few minutes. With the benefit of the IceSTORM™ operating system providing all the management and application software capabilities needed to support cloud and virtual computing needs, any business that keeps electronic records is covered.

According to the Small Business Administration there were 27 million home-based businesses as of the end of 2011 and it is expected that 50%-60% employment going forward will be derived from this sector.

“The IceWEB 1000 is the first true unified storage product for small businesses, giving them a simple and painless way to garner professional level solutions for cloud and virtual storage needs. They need this level of storage for a whole host of reasons, but they have been intimidated by high prices and great complexity. We’ve solved both of those for them. For a free live demo, they can call us at 866-239-0470!” stated Rob Howe.

“This launch concurrently addresses the Company’s mission to grow our business by targeting untapped markets while we continue to forge ahead with our marketing strategies for our other product suites in the government, education, medical and commercial markets,” Howe concluded.