Best Practices in Data Center Re-Design will add $$$ to the Company's bottom-line - January 23, 2009

Orlando Florida -- Power consumption at data centers is once again in the spotlight, after Automation and Consolidation firm Sencilo Solutions of Daytona Beach Florida came up with a list of best practices in the data center that are designed to save electricity and improve cooling.

Sencilo claims that if companies follow all of it's best practices, they could typically expect to save 1 million kilowatt-hours. It says that in a conventional data center, between 35% and 50% of the electricity consumed is for cooling compared to only 15% in best-practice or 'green' data centers.

"Virtually all data centers waste enormous amounts of electricity using inefficient cooling designs and systems along with older storage arrays," said Rob Peterson, CTO and co-founder of Sencilo, in a statement. "Even in a small data center, this wasted electricity amounts to more than 1 million kilowatt-hours annually that could be saved with the implementation of some best practices."

The main reason for the waste in conventional data center cooling is the "unconstrained mixing of cold supply air with hot exhaust air on out dated servers and storage," he said.

"This mixing increases the load on the cooling system and energy used to provide that cooling, and reduces the efficiency of the cooling system by reducing the delta-T (the difference between the hot return temperatures and the cold supply temperature). A high delta-T is a principle in cooling," McGuckin said.

The following are Sencilo's 10 top tips for reducing power consumption:

Plug holes in the raised floor. Holes in the floor allow cold air to escape and mix with hot air. This single low-tech retrofit can save as much as 10% of energy used for data center cooling, says Peterson.

Installing blanking panels. Data centers are full of racks, and unused rack space needs to be covered with a blanking panel so that air flow can be properly managed -- for example, by preventing hot air leaving equipment in one section of the rack and then entering the cold air intake for other equipment elsewhere in the rack. Sencilo says that when these panels are used effectively, supply air temperatures can be lowered by as much as 22 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 5 degrees Celsius).

Look into new primary storage compression appliances and de-dupe devices for backup and reduce the number of disk drives 15x.

Improve under-floor airflow. This typically affects older data centers, where the space under the raised flooring is a lot more constrained than in newer builds. Many old data centers also use the underfloor spacing for running data and power cables, thereby restricting airflow. Clearing out of these spaces is advised.

Implement hot and cold aisles. This is one of the most obvious best practices. Sencilo says traditional data centers use a "classroom style" to position their racks, whereby all the intakes face in one direction. The problem with this setup is that hot air exhausted from one row mixes with cold air being drawn into the adjacent row, thereby increasing cold-air supply temperature in uneven ways. Newer rack-layout practices over the past 10 years instead organize rows into hot and cold aisles, which offer much better control of airflow.

Install sensors. Seems obvious, but how do you tell if you have a temperature problem in a certain area of your data center? Sencilo says a minimal investment in this technology could reap big insights into data center operations and can also provide a method for analyzing the results of improvements made to the cooling systems.

Implement cold or hot aisle containment. When a data center uses hot and cold aisles, dramatically improved separation of cold supply air and hot exhaust air through containment becomes a viable option. Sencilo reckons effective containment of the hot or cold aisles will provide, for most users, the single largest payback of any of these best practices.

Replace those older filer servers with a new NAS arrary, in one case we retired 72 Compaq file-servers with aging 32 GB SCSI drives, which a single NAS device sporting the newer S-ATA II disk.  Between reduced floor space, electricity, cooling and noise our client paid for the new NAS in 3 months.  

Exploit free cooling. It depends a lot on local climate, but in winter in Northern Florida, cold air is readily available outside the data center.

Designing new data centers using modular cooling. Traditional data centers have been cooled by the raised-floor perimeter air distribution. Mounting evidence strongly points to the use of modular cooling (in-row or in-rack) as a more energy-efficient cooling strategy.

Today Sencilo Solutions has put it's "Green Certified stamp" on over 35 companies throughout Central Florida including two Power Companies and four government agencies. 

For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/consolidation-assess.php

About Us

Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.

Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts

IT Cost Cutting Solutions - Part Two - Using Primary Storage Compression - January 23, 2009

Clearwater Florida -- With the amount of data growing by leaps and bounds every year, technologies that can make the most of storage capacity and reduce the amount of physical space, power and maintenance that storing terabytes or petabytes of data requires are becoming increasingly attractive to large and even mid-sized organizations.

Not surprisingly, analysts predict continued strong growth and adoption of secondary storage optimization and data de-duplication solutions over the next 12 months. In times like these, it's technology that sells itself.

Now, building on the success of secondary storage optimization (SSO), a number of vendors have introduced optimization solutions aimed directly at primary storage. Although it's early days for primary storage optimization (PSO), with only a few hundred confirmed customers, analyst Eric Burgener, who covers storage optimization for the Taneja Group, sees PSO and technologies like wide area data services (WADS) gaining momentum and making inroads with storage customers over the next year.

"Over the last four years, we've seen the growth rate for secondary storage optimization [take off]," said Burgener.

But when SSO first came on the scene, "people were very hesitant about the technology, because it was new and there hadn't been anything like this around before," he recalled. "Primary storage optimization is very similar to secondary storage optimization in terms of the concept. But this time around the concept's proven. People know that the technology works pretty much — and there are thousands of referenceable customers that are using secondary storage optimization technology," whom end users can talk to.

"So we think the growth of the market is going to happen much more rapidly in the PSO space, just because people are already generally familiar with that technology," he said. PSO and SSO use different algorithms, "but the concept is very similar."

Inline vs. Post-Processing

In defining the PSO market, Burgener identifies two distinct camps: the inline approaches (exemplified by Storwize) and the post-processing approaches (exemplified by NetApp and Ocarina Networks).

Which approach is right for optimally storing your primary data depends on the problem you are trying to solve, said Burgener. "There's no one [PSO] technology that's the best for all kinds of situations," he said. "The different approaches characterize what happens to writes to storage. All PSO solutions handle reads of capacity-optimized data at wire speeds."

By way of examples, Burgener cites Ocarina Networks as "the most application-specific player on the primary side," with, as of late September, 112 different algorithms — or 112 different file types that its Ocarina ECO System could identify, including TIFF, MPEG, Word, and PPT files.

"They've actually got an algorithm that's specific to each one of those," he said. "So if you're dealing with, say, pictures, or an online photo database, Ocarina [with its post-processing approach] is a pretty good fit for that — and why Kodak chose them, because these algorithms give them higher data reduction ratios than you could get out of a more generic technology like, for instance, what Storwize is using against that particular data set."

On the other hand, if your goal is to increase your storage capacity at every point in the data's lifecycle, you're probably better off using an inline approach, like Storwize's STN appliances use, said Burgener, because that data is constantly being optimized.

The difference, he said, is that "the Ocarina approach is going to end up using more storage capacity in the earlier days or weeks of a particular piece of data's lifecycle, but then it ends up reducing it as it gets older, whereas Storwize's approach is much more 'let's reduce it right away.'"

In addition to Storwize, Ocarina Networks and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), which Burgener said has "basically packaged a de-duplication capability with their Data ONTAP operating system, so that every NetApp box that goes out has got that capability [to do PSO]," Burgener cites Hifn (NASDAQ: HIFN) and greenBytes as two players to watch in the PSO space.

With its Express DR family of PCI Express cards, Hifn OEM customers have a choice of using an inline or a post-processing approach to PSO, said Burgener, making the solution attractive to organizations with virtual tape libraries (VTLs) and backup appliances.

As for greenBytes, its new, just-coming-out-of-beta Cypress NAS, with its Sun/ZFS+-based approach, make it very appealing to Solaris users who are running ZFS, he said. "It also might make greenBytes an attractive acquisition candidate for Sun," he added.

Benefits of PSO

The main benefit of PSO is that it reduces the overall space and power required for primary storage. Primary Storage Optimization also "shortens overall backup-and-restore times, since less data must be written to or retrieved from disk for any given data set," explained Burgener, and, "in cases where data sets must be shipped across networks, the smaller, capacity-optimized data sets require less bandwidth, thereby reducing network traffic."

PSO can also be used with Secondary Storage Optimization solutions, oftentimes resulting in a significant overall reduction in space and power consumption. Though as Burgener cautioned, "data reduction ratios with combined use will vary based on the actual solutions used and the workload types. The only way to really understand the benefit PSO, or a combination of PSO and SSO together, will provide is to test it on specific workloads."

The Pitfalls

As with other storage technologies, there is a performance versus capacity trade-off with PSO. "Access latency is a problem that is a real concern for primary storage, though not so much for secondary storage," said Burgener.

"In-line approaches (the Storwize approach) have to deal with this; it's less of an issue for post-processing approaches (the Ocarina approach), but the issue with post-processing is that it will definitely require more storage capacity," he said. "How much more depends on what schedule the post-processing is run on (e.g., within hours of writing the data, within days of writing it, or within months of writing it, etc.)."

That's why, he noted, it's important for storage and network administrators to understand their organization's particular storage challenges and weigh the pros and cons of each approach before choosing a PSO solution.

The Future's So Bright

Over the next 12 months, Burgener sees the adoption rates for both primary and secondary storage optimization solutions accelerating. "There are still a lot of end users who have heard about the technology but don't really understand how it works yet, and as more and more vendors [like EMC, IBM and Symantec] get into the space, they're going to hear more about this."

Indeed, from what Burgener has seen happening in the storage industry, and the economic arguments for doing storage optimization being so compelling, he believes that PSO is almost a forgone conclusion. "Why would you spend 10 or 20 times as much to store a piece of data if you don't have to? And there's no risk associated with doing capacity optimization. I think we're going to see this penetrate rapidly."

"It's not there right now," he said, but over the course of the next 12 months he expects PSO adoptions to increase, though "we don't think the market is going to be as large as the secondary side, just because there's a lot less data."

Burgener also predicts that within the next 12 months or so, we're "going to see one or two of the WADS vendors [like Cisco or Riverbed] make public comments that are going to put them in direct competition with people like Storwize and Ocarina in the PSO space," as well as some industry consolidation as some of the larger players snap up the smaller, more specialized vendors (such as Sun Microsystems acquiring greenBytes).

For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/data-reduction.php

About Us

Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.

Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts

Best Practices for Tier 0 Storage - January 22, 2009

Tampa Florida -- Companies are starting to use solid-state drive (SSD) technology in a high-performance tier of storage called Tier 0.

Tier 1 storage, also known as production storage, can be considered the first class cabin for production data. Tier 2 and lower storage tiers were developed to handle data that is not quite as critical or does not need the performance characteristics of Tier 1 storage.

Now there's a new tier of storage: Tier 0. Tier 0 is solid-state memory-based storage which is used to improve performance beyond what current Tier 1 storage can offer. In the past, Tier 0 storage has been in the form of a RAM disk and was quite expensive. In fact, to justify the high cost of RAM disk, you had to not only know for certain that your performance problems were storage-based, but also be able to show a return on your investment in RAM disk.

Today, however, this is changing. The dropping cost of solid-state devices is making SSD technology more accessible throughout the data center. But while these cost reductions in SSDs are broadening the technology's appeal, the primary consideration for when a company chooses a SSD option is still performance.

Matching the performance of a 4U SSD would take a huge and expensive disk array with a large disk LUN striped across many drives. As always, simplicity wins out. Given the choice between a simple 4U SSD or a large disk array with a complex drive setup, many customers are choosing SSDs, says Brian McCarthy of Sencilo Solutions.

SSDs come in two forms: RAM-based systems and flash memory-based systems. Flash memory is what is changing the SSD landscape. Although flash does not have the performance of a RAM-based system, flash is significantly faster than traditional disk-based arrays -- even the top-performing arrays -- making it, for some data centers, the perfect solution.

RAM-based systems are more expensive than flash. For instance, a common capacity purchasing point today for flash-based SSDs is 2 TB. That 2 TB of flash memory would typically list for about $190,000. A common RAM-based capacity purchase is 128 GB and that would list for about $70,000. If a RAM-based SSD were purchased in 2 TB, it would come to more than $1 million.

While sales of flash-based systems are now outpacing RAM-based systems (in total capacity), RAM-based SSD systems sales are increasing on a per-unit basis as well. When you need RAM-based performance, you can usually justify the extra expenditure.

Unlike flash-based SSDs, RAM-based systems are not sensitive to the amount of data being written to them. There is a theoretical limit to the amount of writes that a flash-based system can handle. Additionally, flash-based systems do not offer the same level of write performance as RAM-based systems.

As a result, in scenarios where there are very active files with significant write I/O like those that have redo logs or Undo Segments, RAM-based systems are usually the better alternative. Database environments where redo logs or Undo Segments are choking current disk I/O capabilities are where the most significant I/O increase can be measured and the return on investment quickly realized.

How to create a Tier 0
The first step in establishing a Tier 0 is identifying the data that should go on the system. With RAM-based systems, these are applications with high write I/O transactions. In these applications, specific files can be identified as "hot," meaning that the files are so active they need more I/O than the disk subsystem can deliver.

Let's return to the situation above, where redo logs or Undo Segments from databases are placed on a RAM disk. The three most likely solutions are to upgrade to a faster (and more expensive) disk array; spread the data across more drives in the array (leaving you more vulnerable to a double drive failure); or buy an SSD. These high write I/O applications are ideal for RAM-based systems as opposed to flash memory. The other driving factor in RAM SSD installations is low latency. For many applications, latency is more important than absolute peak IOPS numbers, though the best combinations offer both low latency and high IOPS.

Data that would do well on flash-based systems is from read-intensive applications or at least those with a more normal level of writes. If the flash system has a large enough RAM cache, it can also support high bursts of writes, meaning it is suited to applications that require significant disk I/O but where individual hot files cannot be identified, such as data warehouses.

Flash-based systems offer higher capacities than RAM-based systems, as well as lower power consumption. Because of the capacities available with flash-based SSD, it is now possible to move entire databases onto a SSD.

Protecting Tier 0
How can you protect this new Tier 0? It is, after all, memory. Flash is typically sold in modules that are grouped in an array set, with one module designated as a parity drive. This effectively builds a RAID 3 protection strategy. Also, like the memory in your USB thumb drive, flash drives do not need power to maintain stored data.

But since RAM drives do require power at all times, protection becomes an overriding concern. Some RAM-based systems use battery backup and have built-in hard drives to store data in the event the system is shut down manually or by a power outage. During a power loss, the system's battery will keep the unit running and the system will copy its contents to the hard disk drive(s), in case power does not return before the battery runs out.

RAM-based SSDs also leverage error correcting memory (ECC) and IBM's Chipkill technology. (HP offers an equivalent system, called Chipspare.) These technologies offer a form of advanced error checking and correcting (ECC) technology that protects computer memory systems from any single memory chip failure, as well as multi-bit errors from any portion of a single memory chip.

For example, Chipkill performs this function by scattering the bits of an ECC word across multiple memory chips, such that the failure of any one memory chip will affect only one ECC bit. This allows the system to reconstruct the contents of the memory contents, despite the complete failure of one chip.

Chipkill is frequently combined with dynamic bit steering, so that if a chip fails (or exceeds a threshold of bit errors), a spare memory chip replaces the failed chip. The concept is similar to that of RAID, which protects against disk failure, except that now the concept is applied to individual memory chips. When Chipkill was developed by IBM in the 1990s, it was focused on mainframes and high-end Unix systems, but it is now being utilized in SSD. A study done by IBM on the effect of Chipkill suggests that it decreases the likelihood of data loss in a memory system by two orders of magnitude.

RAM-based systems: Are they green?
Are RAM-based systems green? On a power per TB comparison, the answer is no, but that comparison is not real-world. The traditional method of getting more performance to an application hungry for disk I/O is to create LUNs with a high drive count in them. The more drive spindles in the array group, the faster the disk I/O performance. These extra drives require more power and typically, especially in non-virtualized storage technology, there is a vast amount of wasted disk capacity, especially in non-virtualized storage environments. The user has to sacrifice effective capacity utilization for speed.

SSDs do not need extra spindles; they deliver high speed out of the box. The result is a lower number of devices and therefore a lowering of power consumption rates.

Performance expectations
A typical hard disk drive performs 4- to 5-msec reads or writes and approximately 150-300 random I/Os per second. A RAM-based SSD does .015 msec reads and writes and about 400,000 I/Os per second. A flash-based SSD does about 0.2 msec reads and 2-msec writes. I/O performance is 100,000 random I/O per second on reads and 25,000 I/Os per second on writes.

Texas Memory Systems has developed a cached flash SSD. By leveraging a RAM-based cache, it delivers similar performance numbers to RAM-based SSD on cache hits and as a result delivers the best of both worlds.

Companies who pioneered the SSD market, such as Texas Memory Systems, are now being joined by storage array manufacturers like EMC, Sun, NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems in an attempt to address this rapidly expanding market. NetApp and HDS, for example are expected to deliver SSD solutions this year as well.

For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/prod-ssd.php
About Us

Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.

Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts

How to choose which Backup type is right for your Data - January 22, 2009

At the request of Tech Target's - Rick Olin email address: rolin@techtarget.com we have been asked to remove this article


For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at:

Data Backup software for VMware ESX and how they Compare - January 20, 2009

At the request of Tech Target - Rick Olin rolin@techtarget.com has asked us to remove this article


For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/prod-storagesoftware.php

About Us

Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.

Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts