Roundup: SGI, Silver Peak, NetApp, Cisco

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

SGI launches open storage solution. SGI announced the introduction of SGI NAS, a powerful enterprise-class open storage solution  to help IT managers address the challenges of inexorable data growth. The new NAS joins the Modular InfiniteStorage product family, and can start small and yet scale to multiple petabytes of unified storage. SGI NAS includes full VM integration, even in mixed vendor environments, and with the latest Intel Xeon E5 series processors, the system offers infinitely flexible configuration options from terabytes to petabytes of storage and can be expanded to extremely large deployments with multi-node local and remote clusters. "Customers continually ask for flexible solutions that don't tie them into one type of storage architecture as they look for ways to better manage continued data expansion across their infrastructures," said Tony Carrozza, executive vice president of field operations at SGI. "SGI NAS addresses this by ensuring that they can effectively deal with data today, and ensure it will be available anytime and anywhere as their data demands continue to scale."

Silver Peak appliances tested against EMC.  Silver Peak announced that its WAN optimization appliances have been tested and qualified with the EMC Isilon network attached storage (NAS) and SyncIQ replication products. Set for "big data" uses, the performance gains benchmarked up to 90x for SyncIQ replication throughput and 99 percent bandwidth reduction across some WAN environments. “As one of our largest global strategic partners, we are excited to partner with EMC to help customers protect and access big data using Isilon scale-out NAS,” said Marc Trimuschat, vice president of business development and alliances for Silver Peak. “Our network approach to WAN optimization scales easily for big data workloads, and allows customers to optimize bandwidth shared by other EMC storage applications and general business applications like email and unified communications.”

Cisco and NetApp expand Flexpod architecture.  Cisco (CSCO) and NetApp (NTAP) announced plans to extend the FlexPod with a series of new pre-validated design architectures priced and sized for smaller workloads. To simplify and accelerate implementation of cloud automation capabilities, Cisco and NetApp have also validated several new management solutions from leading software management vendors for all FlexPod design architectures. An entry-level FlexPod combines the NetApp entry-level FAS2240 and the Cisco UCS C-Series Cisco Nexus 5000 Switches, Cisco Nexus 2232 Fabric Extender, and Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects. ”Since the initial announcement of FlexPod more than a year ago, the innovative stack approach leveraging best-of-breed technology has achieved strong adoption and proven highly successful in enabling partners and customers to simplify their transition to the cloud," said Chris Cummings, vice president, Products and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "With today’s announcement, Cisco and NetApp have evolved the FlexPod architecture to address growing demand and deliver greater value to an expanded range of customers.”

Exinda selected by Texas A&M.  WAN Optimization company Exinda announced that Texas A&M University at Galveston is the latest top higher education institution in the US to deploy its WAN optimization solution. The campus uses Exinda to assure performance in its student dormitory network by monitoring traffic, eliminating illegal file sharing, prioritizing specific applications and application types, and optimizing bandwidth usage of its busy 100 Mbps Internet connection. “When students choose an educational environment, they want the optimum resources for learning, collaborating and also to express themselves socially. Institutions like Texas A&M are equipped with the visibility and control to enable that for all their students, not just the bandwidth hogs,” said Nolan Rosen, Chief Marketing Officer at Exinda. “In addition, the university is making use of Exinda’s Edge Cache, which accelerates Internet access to e-learning and video content which are strategic to its operations.”