Roundup: News from Storage Networking World

Put on by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Fall 2012 Storage Networking World event took place this week in Santa Clara, with several storage vendors having announcements:

SNIA Cloud Data Management spec earns ISO. SNIA  announced that its Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification, an open standard specifically for data storage as a service as part of cloud computing, has been designated an International Standard (IS) by the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1), a joint effort of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for the purpose of standardization in the field of Information Technology. Applicable to public, private or hybrid clouds the CDMI standard enhances the types of storage services available and allows interoperability and portability between service providers. “A high priority to further USG cloud computing technology adoption is the availability of international voluntary consensus-based standards for interoperability, performance, portability, security, etc," said Michael Hogan, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and co-chair of NIST's public Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group.  "We’re glad to see the JTC 1 PAS Transposition process working as intended to quickly gain consensus and approval of an international voluntary consensus standard.”

Sepaton 6.3 backup and recovery solution. Sepaton announced S2100-ES3 series 2922 purpose-built appliance with version 6.3 software. The next-generation data protection platform features Hitachi Data Systems HUS 100 storage arrays for 25 percent more capacity, delivering 350 percent more single system capacity than any other system on the market. Designed specifically for large backup and restore operations it reduces the cost and risk of data protection by delivering the performance, grid scalability, deduplication, flexibility and enterprise-class reliability needed to protect massive, fast growing data volumes in a single system. "Sepaton’s advanced data protection solutions safeguard massive data volumes by meeting backup windows, keeping pace with huge data growth and protecting enterprises from downtime and disasters cost-effectively,” said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Sepaton, Inc. “The ES3 product delivers 350 percent more single system capacity than our nearest competitor (EMC/Data Domain) – further widening our competitive advantage in large enterprises.”

Skyera launches full software suite.  Skyera introduced its SEOS solid-state operating system that optimizes the hardware, storage and data management capabilities of its purpose-built Skyhawk enterprise storage system. Its hardware management layer includes hardware compression and de-duplication and a proprietary RAID-SE offers better reliability than RAID-6 with three times less writes to the Flash storage to minimize wear. A simplified storage management Quality of Service administration sets up and maintains three easy-to-understand storage pools, each offering different Service Level Agreements. SEOS provides advanced data management capabilities to satisfy the exacting requirements of next-generation enterprise computing. “We meant it when we said that we were developing a mainstream enterprise solid-state storage solution from the ground up,” said Radoslav Danilak, CEO and co-founder of Skyera. “A true solid-stage storage solution must be more than simply sticking Flash media and controllers in a box. We understand the expectations that companies today have for their storage systems and we plan on exceeding those expectations with Skyhawk. With the announcement of our SEOS solid-state operating system, we have combined hardware, storage and data management into a truly revolutionary solution that provides the best performance, cost and power consumption attributes.”

Nimble Storage delivers VDI Architecture.  Nimble Storage announced a new reference architecture with Cisco Systems and VMware for 1,000 simultaneous VDI users, requiring only 3U of rack space, for $43 for storage per desktop. As a fully-integrated, preconfigured system it includes Cisco UCS B-Series blades, VMware View 5.1 and a Nimble CS220G-X2 array, with twelve 1TB hard disk drives and four 160GB flash SSDs. “The economics of VDI are extremely compelling, but customers may balk at implementation if they foresee long ramp-up times, interoperability problems, performance issues or uncertain ROI. Nimble Storage has united with Cisco and VMware to eliminate the uncertainties of VDI with a reference architecture that has been proven under loads and in an extensive range of scenarios. There’s a common denominator in every scenario for VDI: the need for speed. Users simply won’t wait for their data. Built from the ground up for virtualized environments, Nimble arrays reduce latencies, effectively enabling end users to gain the responsiveness of a physical desktop with the convenience and security of VDI.”