Storage expo round-up

Tape is not dead, but disk is the future

Delegates at Storage Networking World Europe were united in their defence of tape, amid growing adoption of lower cost second-tier disk storage in place of traditional tape backup and archiving solutions.

Many tape vendors were also present, keen to demonstrate disk’s future role as a long-term storage medium alongside single- or even multi-tier storage. Among those championing tape was Quantum, announcing a new range of enterprise tape libraries, the PX500 series.

The PX500 comes in three configurations, ranging from 32 to 201 tape cartridge slots and 1 to 10 drives, and units can be combined to build a library offering 22 drives, 440 cartridge slots and 176TB of archive storage. This is possible by means of an innovative lift system which allows cartridges to pass through the middle of each individual tape library when stacked on top of each other, turning the stack into a single unit.

‘These new libraries, along with our new SuperLoader 3 range, squarely address the need for small and medium-sized business users, and many customers in the enterprise, to have economical automated data protection and room for expansion,‘ said Ted Oade, director of automation product marketing at Quantum’s storage systems business.

Other launches involving disk storage and data management included HP introducing several new products and services for the archiving and protection of data.

The company also announced a new Electronic Vaulting Service, which remotely backs up a client's servers over the net to an HP data centre, and a 40TB version of the 10TB virtual tape library that it released at the beginning of the year. For archiving, the company introduced its StorageWorks File Migration Agent for automating enterprise Windows file server environment management.

The Storage Networking Industry

Association, the industry body behind the show, demonstrated technology based on the latest Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMIS).

SMIS version 1.1 enables data protection and management services through a standard set of configuration and monitoring capabilities for local and remote mirroring, snapshot and clone management of data.

By standardising these functions, storage administrators will have more flexibility in choosing storage devices and greater management control over their data infrastructure as they add new hardware.

Network Appliance (NetApp) used the conference to update users of its plans for storage security specialist Decru, which it purchased in June. The company cited statistics from the FBI, which claim that 80 per cent of all data attacks occur behind the firewall, making storage security as important as defending the network from the outside world.

NetApp confirmed plans to expand storage security features in its existing product range, as well as continuing to sell the Decru products on their own to existing customers and other hardware platforms.

Finally, storage giant EMC, the most prolific consolidator in the storage industry, announced its plans for its most recent purchase, Rainfinity. It plans to integrate Rainfinity’s network attached storage virtualisation technology with its VMWare and other software tools, developing new storage virtualisation software and services over the next few years.

UK storage industry gets ready for London expo

The UK’s own Storage Expo event takes place on 12-13 October at London’s Olympia.

Storage Expo is the UK’s leading storage industry exhibition and conference. With more than 120 exhibitors already announced, this year’s show is set to be the biggest so far, in keeping with the increasing importance of storage to UK business IT users, and growing investment in storage hardware, software and content management systems.

A multitude of product launches and announcements are planned for the show.

C2C will be showing its new version of its email lifecycle management solution, Archive One Policy 4.2, with improved features for storage and capacity management of email archives.

Dell will release the results of research on storage consolidation and discuss its scalable enterprise strategy. The company will also showcase its latest server and storage line-up, the latter part of its collaboration with EMC.

Hummingbird will be demonstrating Hummingbird Enterprise, an integrated content management platform which enables businesses to extract business intelligence value from corporate data and content.

EMC will present what it calls the three steps of information lifecycle management, with demonstrations and presentations from three of its recently acquired new businesses: EMC Legato, EMC Smarts and VMware.

As well as having a large presence at the event, Microsoft is expected to promote its various existing storage technologies, and to launch or announce the UK availability of its System Center Data Protection Manager data recovery product.

Other new companies and products launching at Storage Expo include VirtualizeIT, a division of Ji Consultancy specialising in virtualistion of storage and servers.