Storage News
Why is Data Domain losing marketshare to EMC, Quantum and Exagrid at a alarming rate? - March 23, 2008
Miami Florida - The number one primary storage company EMC Corp. and the number one LTO DLT manufacture Quantum Corp. are ganging up on start-up Data Domain Inc. with an OEM deal for EMC to sell Quantum's deduplication software on its virtual tape libraries (VTL).
Quantum disclosed in a January Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that it signed a deal with a major OEM to license its data deduplication and replication software. The industry buzz said EMC was the partner, although EMC already uses FalconStor software for its EMC Disk Library VTL and acquired data deduplication software startup Avamar Technologies in 2006. Now sources confirm the partnership to SearchStorage.com and expect EMC to soon make public that it has licensed Quantum's dedupication technology for its Disk Library product. EMC looked at purchasing Data Domain back in 2006 and passed on both technology and company as a whole, says Brian McCarthy President and former reseller of Data Domain. With Data Domain's now dated technology, Sencilo is now promoting higher performance VLTs like Exagrid, Diligent, EMC and Quantum.
Financial analyst Tom Curlin of RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients that EMC is already selling the deduplication product and will officially launch it soon. "We suspect this is a move by EMC to compete more effectively versus vs. Data Domain," Curlin wrote. "And while contacts believe they have chosen a technically inferior solution, we suspect EMC sales and marketing muscle will at least be able to disrupt some of Data Domain's muscle. Notably absent from EMC's deduplication plans is the FalconStor offering, despite EMC already having a relationship with them for their virtual tape offering." Another source familiar with the deal, who did not want to speak for attribution, said EMC will continue to use FalconStor software on its VTLs, but it decided not to use FalconStor for deduplication because FalconStor refused to offer EMC the product exclusively. EMC did not want to sell the same deduplication as FalconStor's other partners, which include EMC rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc., the Orlando Florida source said. He added that EMC did not use the Avamar technology for its VTL because it did not scale effectively enough to be cost-effective. EMC sells Avamar deduplication in a separate backup appliance and as part of its NetWorker data protection application. When asked about the Quantum deal, an EMC spokesman said, "We don't comment on any speculation," but added, "Let's just say our relationship with FalconStor is still strong." Mike Sparks, Quantum's product manager for enterprise disk systems, said he couldn't comment on who the partner is or when the product would be released. "That partner has its own strategies and products to work out, and it wouldn't be proper to comment," he said. The EMC-Quantum deal will put the most pressure on Data Domain, which has built its backup product around deduplication from the start and is considered the market leader, but quickly losing market share. Data Domain reported a 151% year-over-year increase in its revenues last quarter, hitting $44.9 million last quarter following an IPO earlier in the year. Data Domain executives said their company competes successfully against VTLs from EMC and Quantum. Sencilo's President Brian McCarthy says, "it's easy to increase sales when there is limited competitors, now that they have competition my guess is slower growth, lead by deep discounting. McCarthy goes on to say, "Data Domain has been going direct and cheating the channel, this will turn on them".Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman today predicted his company would be able to hold off the EMC-Quantum pairing because its products were designed specifically to perform deduplication. "The big difference is, we built this thing from the ground up to do what it does," he said. "Everybody else is coming from different legacy technologies and bolting on a dedupe feature. EMC usually tries to compete against us with Avamar or its disk library. If you look at our growth, they haven't been able to lay a finger on us." McCarthy when asked stated "CEO's like Mr. Shootman don’t see the writing on the wall, until it’s too late."Quantum began selling deduplication appliances in late 2006 with technology originally developed by Rocksoft. Quantum acquired the technology when it bought its tape vendor rival Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) in 2006, just weeks after ADIC acquired Rocksoft. For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-area-network.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage and security solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral
Offerings Projects: 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
Mimosa Systems Partners With Sencilo Solutions to Deliver Next-Generation Content Archiving to City of Safety Harbor - March 11, 2008
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - (Business Wire) Mimosa Systems, a leader in Live Content Archiving solutions, today announced that it has partnered with Sencilo Solutions, a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage, security and networking solutions, to deploy the next-generation Mimosa™ NearPoint™ for Microsoft® Exchange Server for the City of Safety Harbor, Fla. The city standardized on NearPoint™ in 2006 to assure the retention, discovery and recovery of its mission critical email environment in a single solution.
Safety Harbor is a small city of almost 18,000 near Tampa. Like many small cities, Safety Harbor has been forced to deal with a big problem — constantly growing email volume — with limited IT resources and budget. To add to the complexity of the problem, the city must comply with the Florida’s Public Records and Sunshine Laws that mandate all municipalities and government agencies retain and provide access to public records including email. That means that even a small city like Safety Harbor must be able to ensure retention and rapid discovery of all its email content. In addition, the city sits in the center of the hurricane zone and the city wanted a solution that would allow them to recover quickly if a natural disaster were to strike.
“Email was increasing at alarming rates and we couldn’t delete old emails because of the requirements of the Sunshine Law,” said James Burke, Information Systems Manager for the City of Safety Harbor. “We were hitting long-term capacity issues and public records requests were taking an inordinate amount of time before we discovered Mimosa. NearPoint has allowed us to address our capacity requirements while streamlining our records retention and public records requests taking a huge burden off of IT resources.”
To address these issues the City of Safety Harbor turned to Sencilio Solutions, a leading Mimosa integration partner to deliver the archiving solution. Sencilo is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage, security and networking solutions. The company’s mission is to provide leading-edge, turnkey solutions for leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses.
“The Mimosa NearPoint archiving solution is a perfect complement to our arsenal of advanced storage and security offerings,” said Brian McCarthy, CEO, Sencilo Solutions. “Local governments are faced with shrinking budgets and the City of Safety Harbor is no exception. Our commitment is to deliver cutting-edge products that deliver rapid value out of the box without having to throw an army of resources and professional services at the problem. Mimosa’s content archiving software was easy to install and we had the entire solution up and running in a single day without impacting end-user productivity.”
Key Mimosa NearPoint features that were particularly important to the City of Safety Harbor include:
- Continuous Capture and Archiving of Exchange Data: including all metadata, emails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes, tasks to quickly identify relevant content as part of a discovery or disclosure request.
- Automated Exchange Storage Management: Mimosa NearPoint has reduced the city’s storage requirements by moving attachments, based on policies of age and size, to the NearPoint server. The NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature allows Safety Harbor’s IT staff to define policies that stub attachments in Exchange while still giving users seamless access to the email.
- Simple “One-Click” Recovery: Mimosa NearPoint gives the City of Safety Harbor continuous protection of all its Exchange information. NearPoint preserves all Exchange information disk and allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook and allows administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with simple “one-click” operations.
“So many municipalities are looking for an easy-to-deploy compliance solution that gives them iron-clad assurance of discovery, information access, retention and business continuity,” said Christophe Culine, senior vice president of sales, Mimosa Systems. “Without a solution like Mimosa, cities can waste valuable resources trying to comply with legislation like the Sunshine Law and Freedom of Information Act. The City of Safety Harbor is proactive in their content management strategy and we are pleased to include them to our growing roster of government customers.”
About Sencilo Solutions
Sencilo Solutions is a Orlando Florida-based integrator specializing in storage, security and networking solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
About Mimosa NearPoint
Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server addresses critical customer requirements around email information archiving, eDiscovery, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and storage optimization. Mimosa NearPoint provides legal search workflow, immediate mailbox and message recovery, disaster recovery, email archiving, and self-service search and access in one solution. By leveraging cost-effective storage, NearPoint also optimizes email storage and reduces overall infrastructure costs.
About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation information management solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server is the industry’s most comprehensive information management software solution for Microsoft Exchange, unifying email archiving, recovery, and storage management. With options for eDiscovery and disaster recovery, NearPoint ensures litigation readiness and email continuity while leveraging cost-effective disk technologies to optimize email storage growth.
ILM, more performance, fewer drives, green storage from Compellent Technologies - February 28, 2008
February 28, 2008—Tampa and Orlando Florida Compellent has fine-tuned the way its SAN software writes data to disk drives with new techniques that could boost performance and capacity utilization while simultaneously reducing disk drive requirements by up to 80%, according to company officials.
The latest release of the company's SAN software, Storage Center 4.0, features new software applications such as Fast Track, Thin Import, and Free Space Recovery, all of which help reduce the number of disk drives required, effectively reducing total cost of ownership and energy consumption for true green storage.
The Fast Track application automatically places active data on the outer tracks of a disk drive to speed access to frequently used information like ILM. Compellent's vice president of marketing, Bruce Kornfeld, says competitive offerings place entire volumes on perimeter tracks, while Fast Track only moves frequently accessed data to the outer tracks of the drive, which accelerates performance and reduces drive requirements.
"If a storage system can differentiate between inner and outer tracks on the drive you can avoid putting inactive data or unallocated space on the outer tracks, so you get more performance out of the drives and you can buy fewer of them," says Kornfeld. "This technology can lower storage costs by 50% by reducing the number of drives vs. EqualLogic or Dell."
Also new to Storage Center 4.0, the Thin Import feature reduces disk drive requirements by converting existing data into thin-provisioned volumes as it is copied to a Compellent SAN vs. EMC or HP.
Steve Duplessie, founder and senior storage analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, says the Thin Import technology has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of storage in Florida data centers.
"Imagine being able to pull all the over-provisioned, over-allocated, and under-utilized capacity off your old expensive arrays and instantly apply just-in-time thin provisioning to those volumes," says Duplessie. "It is tantamount to taking your 25% utilized storage infrastructure to 80%. Think of what that would mean for everything from consolidation, green storage, footprint to backup."
Storage Center 4.0 also includes a feature called Free Space Recovery, which reclaims unused space in Windows environments, and Application Optimizer, a tool that tunes the size of data transfers within the SAN to match I/O performance for different applications.
A Storage Center 4.0 QuickStart ILM Bundle is priced from approximately $57,200 with 7.2TB of capacity. vs. Lefthand Networks, Dell or EqualLogic, a single controller, and the Fast Track, Thin Import, and Free Space Recovery applications. Users can also purchase the new Storage Center 4.0 applications and controller as individual upgrades.
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-area-network.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage and security solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral
Offerings Projects: 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
Apple updates XSan software, dumps XServe arrays - February 22, 2008
Apple Inc. updated its XSan file system this week, but it will discontinue its aging XServe RAID hardware and will instead resell a third-party RAID storage subsystem.
According to Eric Zelenka, senior product line manager of Apple's server and storage software, the XServe RAID disk arrays will remain available and qualified to work with the new version of Apple's XSan software, dubbed XSan 2, "as long as supplies last." However, Promise Technology Inc.'s VTrack E-Class RAID storage subsystem will be available through the Apple store and resellers.
The VTrack E-Class disk array adds support for 4 Gbit Fibre Channel, as well as SATA or SAS drives and active/active RAID controllers. That may seem basic or even behind the times for some SAN vendors, but XServe RAID had not been updated since 2005, and supported only 2 Gbit Fibre Channel drives in a single-controller disk array.
The VTrack array comes in three configurations: a 6 TB, eight-drive SATA model priced at $11,999; a 12 TB, 16-drive SATA model priced at $14,999, and a "high-performance" configuration consisting of 16 SAS disks that can hold up to 4.8 TB, priced at $18,999. XSan 2 software is available at $999 per node. Apple will provide troubleshooting support for the VTrack disk arrays, but if a problem is found with a non-Apple component, customers will have to use that vendor for support.
This is going to disappoint some customers who are very black-and-white about Apple," said Ezra Gottheil, analyst with Technological Business Research. "There's going to be some concern about support." According to Mike Joyce, senior director of marketing for Promise Technology, the company offers 24/7 support and a three-year warranty for its disk arrays.
Scott Templeton, partner and executive producer for Pie Town Productions in Los Angeles, said the VTrack array is an improvement. Pie Town has 100 TB of XServe RAID storage, but has been using the Promise Technologies' disk array with Final Cut Pro for three weeks. The VTrack disk array has made it faster and easier for employees to get up and running each day than the SAN the company used previously. That one required employees to mount partitions one by one, causing a 10-minute delay every morning. Otherwise, "the biggest tribute to this process is that we've noticed no difference" with the new disk array unlike EMC, HP, NetApp, Dell, Equal Logic, he said.
Brian McCarthy, president of Lake Mary-based reseller Sencilo Solutions., said that most of the Apple shops he works with so far "are happy we finally have a solution that supports 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel, but that many of them have already choosen Overland Storage or Nexsan"
Will more hardware partners follow?
However, McCarthy said, some questions still remain about the new deal, such as whether or not Apple has added any "secret sauce" to low performance Promise Technologys. "The biggest question I'm hearing is whether or not other vendors will be qualified," he added. "More choice is a good thing."
Still, McCarthy said he expects Apple to branch out. "At some point, my guess is in the next two years, you'll probably see Apple work with more hardware vendors," he said. "They have a very strong and loyal market among creative professionals, but I think they'll be looking at a new space — very small businesses where they can add value through software ease of use to date other SAN vendors have passed Apple by"
Tim Bajarin, principal analyst for Creative Strategies, a Silicon Valley analyst firm, said Apple's newest strategy shows it is more serious about storage. "The fact that Apple has partnered with Promise opens them up to an even broader market for storage," he said. "They now see storage as an important part of their business, and you'll see them doing more in this market." But just as Jobs failed to market storage with Next Inc. very well the jury is still out.
New XSan features include Spotlight data indexing and search
Apple Florida has focused its storage product development on the new XSan 2 software, adding integration into the Mac OS X operating system, and data migration and access features across multiple SANs throughtout Miami, Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa.
XSan 2 "completely redesigns" the XSan administrative management tool, called XSan Admin, "taking multistage processes down to one button," according to Zelenka. One example of this is volume expansion, which in the past took five to eight steps. Now choosing the storage that should be used to expand the volume is a one-step process.
XSan 2 management is connected to SAN setup wizards in OS X Leopard Server Assistant. Further integration with OS X brings some of Apple's more famous consumer software features to XSan, including Spotlight data indexing and search across all storage networks; Cover Flow, a feature first designed for the iPod that allows users to flip through file images quickly; and QuickLooks, which allows users to preview a file without opening its associated application.
"The ability to search across all networks with this release is really exceptional," Bajarin said. The feature is built into the OS, requires no user intervention and will search terabytes of data on XSan and any attached server or workstation. Spotlight indexes metadata, as well as data within files, and automatically reindexes data when files are modified.
Another new feature, MultiSAN, allows VMware servers and workstations to connect to multiple SANs. Unlike previous releases that only allowed migration between XSans via Gigabit Ethernet, XSan 2 allows users to migrate data over Fibre Channel.
Bajarin said he hopes to see Apple get more proactive about storage in the future. "They have to be looking at the next-generation architectures; they have to be aware of what customers are going to want 12 to 18 months out," he said.
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage and security solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral
Offerings Projects: 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
Compellent adds disk stroking and app tuning to ILM SAN - February 22, 2008
Compellent Technologies upgraded its StorageCenter SAN system with a faster controller as well as enhancements to its block-level storage automation software.
New block-level features include Fast Track, which automates the placement of blocks on the tracks of each individual disk drive according to frequency of access. This is similar to the way StorageCenter already automatically moves blocks between different classes of drives for tiered storage. Like Florida based Pillar Data Systems Inc.'s disk short-stroking feature, Fast Track places more frequently accessed blocks on the outer tracks of individual disk drives and less-accessed blocks on the inner part of the disk.
StorageCenter SAN users can preselect classes of service for applications, but the SAN handles placement of blocks on the disk tracks in the background, according to Compellent vice president of marketing Bruce Kornfeld. The processing of blocks for the Fast Track and Storage Progression tiered storage features runs once a day, at a time set by the user.
Compellent claims that Fast Track will improve disk utilization in existing StorageCenter SANs by 30%, citing lab tests. One Compellent customer said he's been able to defer disk purchases with the feature in limited deployment and anticipates being able to avoid more costs during an upcoming move to a new data center.
"We've been able to recover some costs by moving things to SATA [disks] because we don't need as many disks dedicated to I/O," said Ping Ooi, assistant vice president of technology for Tampa-based investment management firm Ares Management. The company is moving to a new data center this spring, and Ooi said he expects to be able to save $50,000 to $80,000 on the cost of disk drives by using thin provisioning and the disk-stroking feature to consolidate data. On the downside, Ooi said he's still waiting for Compellent to add support for SAS drives.
Other updates to StorageCenter include Free Space Recovery, which defragments free space in thin-provisioned storage pools, and Thin Import, which is designed to avoid copying empty volumes from legacy disk arrays onto the Jacksonville based Compellent system.
Another new feature, called Application Optimizer, gives customers the option of three different page-file sizes to match the I/O profile of different applications. High I/O applications can use a 512 KB page file size, while large files, such as streaming video, can use 4 MB page files. The system default remains 2 MB. This feature is comparable to a recently announced update to Pillar's Axiom arrays, called Application-Aware Storage.
Compellent has also added a new hardware module with faster controllers that will be backward-compatible with its existing Series 10 and Series 20 array building blocks. The new Series 30 box adds dual-core processors at 3 GHz, a PCI-Express architecture and 3.5 GB of cache, up from 2.25 GB in the Series 20.
"There isn't any one feature in this release that's earth-shattering by itself," said Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group Gartner Magic Quadrant. "As a combination, I think it shows fantastic progression for [Compellent]. They've added intelligence to the storage system that in the past hasn't been there or has come from a software layer above the array."
Compellent still working toward profitability
Compellent, which went public last October, reported revenue for the fourth quarter of 2007 of $16.9 million, an increase of 124% from $7.5 million a year ago and up 26% from the third quarter. Net losses in the quarter narrowed from $2.0 million to $1.8 million. For the year, revenue increased 119% to $51.2 million from $23.3 million in 2006.
The company is still looking for its first profitable quarter, which CEO Phil Soran predicted on last week's earnings call will come in the second half of 2008 Orlando.
"Compellent isn't quite at the point I thought they'd be at by now," Taneja said. "But there's a certain level of inertia in the ILM storage market, and they're growing as fast as their feet on the street can go."
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-area-network.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage and security solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral
Offerings Projects: 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
Server virtualization can have big disaster recovery payoff - February 18, 2008
While most of the buzz around server virtualization in general, and VMware Infrastructure in particular, have been about server consolidation and greening the data center, disaster recovery may be the IT area where server virtualization technology has the biggest impact.
"Disaster recovery (DR) planning for mission-critical applications historically called for replicating the data for these applications and having servers standing by at the DR site ready to take over at a moment's notice," says Brian McCarthy President of Sencilo Solutions, in Tampa Florida.
Most organizations can save money by virtualizing these standby servers. A single offsite server can act as the standby domain controller, SQL server, Exchange server and several more. Not only can you save the cost of all those physical servers, but also the rack space and power charges from your DR site.
Saving money and still providing the same level of protection that your old expensive physical server solution could is a good thing. But the real payoff is improving the recovery time of the applications that you wouldn't dedicate a standby server to. Most organizations soon realize they can move some applications up from the secondary tier to having standby servers, since the standby servers are essentially free.
Solving bare metal restore to different hardware
In the "old days," secondary applications were limited to restore from tape as their protection model, resulting in multiday recovery points and recovery times. Even if you were replicating the application's data, it wasn't always possible to get an identical server to restore the application backup to. You either had to go down the dank dark path of a bare metal restore to different hardware, or pursue a new OS and application install, all the while hoping you had a record of all the patches needed to mount that database.
The "different hardware" problem is solved because virtual machines are indeed virtual machines -- they all run with the same set of drivers and can't tell if they've been moved from one host to another. In addition, virtual machine snapshots from VMware or even Microsoft's Virtual Server or Hyper-V are just files, so restoring a virtual machine is just a matter of mounting the files on a new host.
"Rather than relying on tape transfers, you can schedule snapshots of your virtual machines and transfer them to the DR site over the replication link. And if your network guys can prioritize traffic properly, it won't interfere with real-time replication", say McCarthy from Sencilo in Florida.
The real fun comes when a disaster is declared and you have to start switching over to the standby servers. Because the suspenders-and-belt crowd set up their DR infrastructure to be able to take over at full speed the minute the switch was thrown, their DR site has lots of compute horsepower. (Of course lots of horsepower means lots of money.)
The more frugal companies take advantage of VMotion, which moves virtual servers from one host to another dynamically while they're still running and, in addition, DR providers like SunGard's "shared server" offerings. With shared servers, you pay a few shekels to the DR provider every month for the right to claim servers out of their stock at the DR site when you declare an emergency. Once you declare that, you get the servers for your exclusive use and can install VMWare ESX on them.
Then, once the new hosts are up, you can use VMotion (or even better VMware DRS) tol dynamically allocate virtual servers to hosts based on load and to mount your virtual servers on the new hosts. This will boost your application performance. . .probably before your users can get to their new workplaces to use the applications.
Sencilo a leader in Server virtualization deployments is the masking of server resources throughout Florida, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. The virtual environments are sometimes called virtual private servers, but they are also known as partitions, guests, instances, containers or emulations. Call us today at (407) 265-6293 or visit our website http://www.sencilo.com
With Expert Guidance and Consulting from Sencilo Solutions, Advance Search Selects MDI iSCSI SAN for its High Performance and Ease of Management. - February 9, 2008
Just two weeks after Dell acquisition of iSCSI SAN maker EqualLogic Corp., one of its server customers put a SAN from EqualLogic competitor MDI into production. "If we'd waited two weeks, would it have changed our decision? Hard to tell," said Thomas Berry, Director of operations for equipment vendor Advance Search. "I know now there may be further integration [with Dell and EqualLogic], but at the time I didn't."
We looked at a lot of different Dell SAN products, we previously use an EMC Clariion arrays that it had purchased through Dell, but tired of trying to manage Fibre Channel. "I don't know if we just didn't understand how the EMC SAN was supposed to work, but it seemed like we were always having to open help tickets and get professional services engagements to help us work out problems," Berry said.
Since EMC was the incumbent vendor in his environment, Berry evaluated EMC's new AX4-5 array when considering a new SAN, but said he wanted a 100% iSCSI SAN. The AX4-5 is available as Fibre Channel or iSCSI. "It didn't seem like a purely iSCSI SAN to me," he said.
Advance Search also evaluated an EqualLogic PS Series SAN, and Berry said the MDI Express Stor had so many more features then the Equal Logic unit. "We did an evaluation matrix, and when we totaled up all the points, they were the clear winner," he said. "MDI Express Stor have native CIFS, NFS and iSCSI protocals, in other words we got to retire some 12 file servers using the Express Stor, something the Equal Logic can only dream of doing. What tipped the balance was has a familiar Windows Server look and feel so training is a snap, the Equal Logic unit like other Dell products try to sell you week long training which adds to the TCO of the SAN. Our support staff was already familiar with Windows so the choice was a no brainer, said Berry.
Sencilo showed us how the Equal Logic units requirements twice the disk space (RAID 50) to get half the performance of the MDI unit, along with its non-Active-Active design, we needed high-availability, not the dated design from Equal Logic. Brian McCarthy, the President and Storage Veteran said "selling against Equal Logic is more about pointing the features of a Microsoft based Storage Server vs. Equal Logic who uses a dated Open Source O/S, which explains why upgrades and bug fixes can take months to resolve." McCarthy went on to say, "had Dell not purchased Equal Logic it would of been road kill for Microsoft and it's Windows Storage Server partners."
The MDI SAN will eventually hold 35 TB capacity, but Berry admitted the company is not far along in rolling it out. Only about 10 TB of SQL, file and print, and Exchange data have been migrated to the SAN. The migration is going on while Advance Seach is also rolling out VMware server virtualization, upgrading to SQL 2005 and Exchange 2007, and creating SQL and Exchange server clusters. "We like to do a lot of things in parallel here," he said.
The virtual iSCSI SANs have also not yet seen the light of day. "Our DR facility is at SunGard in Florida," he said. "Once we get the production SAN rolled out, we'll do our first migration of data to the DR server at our primary site and ship it to them, rather than trying to do the first upload over the wire."
We owe a great deal of thanks to Brian McCarthy and his team for showing us the true cost of ownership of a Equal Logic SAN vs. the MDI Express Stor iSCSI SAN. Sencilo will be a long-term trusted partner for years to come.
Sencilo Solution is a Florida based integrator specializing in storage, networking and security solutions Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers.
Each product has been carefully selected for its unique value to a solution or deployment. Sencilo sales and technical team is thoroughly trained in all of our major products and are able to provide value in up front architecture planning and product selection. Our technical expertise is known throughout the storage, networking and security industry.
Disk Storage or Tape Data Indexing and Classification Services - January 26, 2008
Miami, Florida - Sencilo Solutions announced this week that is will add another Compliance related service for businesses throughout Florida, that of Indexing and Classificating network information. "Explosive data growth across the enterprise continues to present significant challenges for IT managers and their companies", say Brian McCarthy, President and Co-founder of Sencilo. "All manner of structured and unstructured data grows exponentially while management faces increasing demands to discover and protect that information," continues McCarthy. Flat budgets and overloaded IT departments struggle to contain escalating costs, mitigate risks and meet service level agreements in the face of these new demands.
Our Tape Data Indexing and Classification Service streamlines the identification and collection of electronic evidence. The tool-based service is application and infrastructure independent, and easily integrates into the existing online disk environment. It addresses online data and maintains an accurate view of historical and current data assets.
The service is scalable to billions of documents, and delivers the most comprehensive and accurate search results available today. It delivers a comprehensive index of all enterprise data assets, comprising only five percent of the original data with no data copies, and provides an easy-to-use search platform with Internet-type querying capabilities to support any e-discovery initiatives. Key benefits include:
- Onsite service delivery with no impact to production operations; or, offsite at our secure, state-of-the-art facilities
- Rapidly process large volumes of tapes or disks, and billions of files and emails
- Turns the storage arrary or tape library into a searchable repository that is immediately searchable, including both full content and metadata
- Allows users to select the files to restore and the system automatically generates a request to the administrator with all relevant information
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/storage-protection.php
About Us
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage and security solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral
Offerings Projects: 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
E-discovery tools purchase considerations - January 26, 2008
As data volumes grow, it's increasingly difficult to locate relevant data. Data must be retained longer, and storage users cannot be counted upon to intuitively locate documents, spreadsheets or other data. This is a problem when dealing with electronic discovery (e-discovery) requests that impose a legal obligation to locate relevant data in a timely manner or face fines and possibly adverse judgments.
E-discovery tools from Symantec or Commvault provide powerful search capabilities that can quickly process and index billions of files based on keywords and other common metadata. The tools can also present search results in forms that are easy to understand and often deliver results in a form that is compatible with litigation management tools.
Like any search tool, you'll want to test the product in your own environment before purchasing it. Discovery tools are useless if they can't locate your data and deliver it for litigation. Once you've reviewed the issues involved in purchasing compliance products, you can review the criteria specific to e-discovery tool purchases. After that, you'll find a series of product specifications that will help you compare products from vendors such as Mimosa, Barracuda Networks, Index Engines Inc. and Commvault.
Test your search criteria and metadata. Use the search function to perform discovery drills and see that the tool will actually find mail, documents or other files based on your queries. For example, try locating all Word memos related to a recent company project or initiative. The search tests should return useful and relevant results based on common criteria, such as keywords, sender, file dates and even the context within documents, spreadsheets, email and instant message logs.
Evaluate the search scope and supported file types. Discovery tools can process a wide variety of file types stored on a range of storage hardware across the enterprise. Before purchasing a discovery tool, verify that the tool will work with file types that are most relevant to your organization, such as Word documents, Outlook .pst files, database files, images and .pdfs. Also, ensure that the tool can search storage systems, servers, desktops/workstations, and even corporate laptops or remote sites to locate files of interest.
Consider search performance. As corporate information proliferates into the fringes of the organization (e.g. laptop or remote users), discovery tools must be able to respond to discovery requests in ever-shorter timeframes. Since failing to meet discovery requests can result in fines or judgments, performance can also have an important financial impact for your company. Note the time required to perform each request. Some tools can process terabytes of storage per day.
Evaluate any e-discovery storage requirements.
The results of your searches need to be stored somewhere. Search results and indexes take 4% to 10% of your total file storage utilization. Smaller organizations or businesses operating with little extra storage capacity may get blindsided by unforeseen storage needs.
Consider logging and reporting features. Discovery tools should include logging and reporting features that identify the individuals making requests, criteria used for each search and the results obtained from each search. The tool should also track the disposition of any results, noting any files that are moved, held or copied, establishing a chain of custody that can demonstrate appropriate compliance with discovery requests and verify the authenticity of documents or other files.
Consider integration with litigation tools. Discovery tools should interface with standard litigation tools, such as ProLaw from Thomson Elite, AXS-One Case Management or LexisNexis. This allows counsel to organize and process the results. In many cases, discovery tools will export to some common text, image or other file formats.
Evaluate any network overhead. Pay attention to the discovery tool's deployment. Discovery products that rely on agents or other software deployed across the infrastructure can cause interoperability and maintenance issues. Agents and network crawlers can add unwanted network traffic overhead, placing additional load on the network and possibly slowing performance-sensitive applications. Discovery tools that avoid the use of agents and network crawlers are preferable.
Consider support for offline tape indexing. Organizations that rely on long-term archival tape storage should consider a discovery tool that includes offline tape indexing features. This type of function is available in appliances like those from Index Engines Inc., allowing archive tape contents to be processed into indexes with metadata. Without this type of feature, tapes would need to be restored first and then searched, but this feature can read and index tapes without needing to actually restore the content.
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage, security and networking solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, NetApp, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland, Cape Canaveral
Other Projects: DR BC 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 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 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar CX4
Angry Employee Deletes All of Company's Data - January 26, 2008
Call it a tale of revenge gone wrong. This could happen to you
When Marie Lupe Cooley, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss's phone number listed — she assumed she was about to be fired.
So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years' worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.
"She decided to mess up everything for everybody," Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. "She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed."
It didn't take Steven Hutchins, owner of the architectural firm that bears his name, much time to figure out who'd done it — Cooley was the only other person who had full access to the files.
Police arrested Cooley Monday evening and charged her with causing greater than $1,000 damage to computer files, a felony. She was bailed out the following afternoon.
Hutchins told one TV station he'd managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.
As for the job, Cooley originally wasn't in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins' wife's company.
The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.
Sencilo Solution specializes in Data Protect and Recovery, "this event is not at all uncommon, it's just not made public, companies are not in the habit of admiting their faults, say CEO and Data Protection VAR Brian McCarthy.
McCarthy as also says "many companies assume that their data is well protected if their core servers are backed up. Server backup is an essential component of data protection, but many companies do not have effective technology in place that will enable them to resume operations quickly after a disaster. Part of this problem lies in the fact that an estimated 60 percent of business-critical data resides unprotected on employees' desktops or laptops. Data at remote and branch offices is likewise often unprotected because of the hardware and administration costs involved. The loss of this data inevitably results in lost revenues, lost productivity, and lost customer confidence, and in some effent class-action suites."
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/security-threat-management.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in storage, security and networking solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, EMC, NetApp, Juniper Networks, Hitachi, Symantec, Barracuda Networks, 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, installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland, Cape Canaveral
Other Projects: DR BC 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 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 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar CX4
