SAN

Compellent Technologies Introduces Live Volume for Business Continuity Automation

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Compellent Technologies today announced it will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume.

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent‘s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

Based on Compellent‘s Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

Compellent‘s Live Volume integrates with the industry‘s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company‘s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch.

LeftHand Networks Reports Impressive Numbers

August 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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LeftHand Networks today announced it has achieved 110 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. LeftHand Networks attributes its notable growth to strong customer demand for iSCSI SANs, larger SAN deployments and significant repeat business from existing customers, as well as its VMware go-to-market partnership and substantial channel expansion.

“Achieving triple digit revenue growth and surpassing key milestones of 3,000 customers and 11,000 systems sold is gratifying and reflects the significant advantages that LeftHand Networks’ SANs deliver to the market,” said Bill Chambers, founder and CEO, LeftHand Networks. “With an annual sales growth rate of 110 percent this year, compared with IDC’s market projection of 50 percent growth for the IP SAN market, LeftHand Networks continues to gain share and drive innovative product advancements.”

The company also claims demand has grown for LeftHand Networks’ Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESX Server, a VMware certified solution that provides highly available applications and storage without requiring an external SAN. The VSA is available for purchase as a standalone solution or as part of Virtualization Solution Kits consisting of LeftHand Networks’ VSA software combined with VMware virtualization software.

LeftHand Networks

Sanbolic Bridges Hyper-V And Shared Storage Networks

July 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Sanbolic today announced (PDF) that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines can now be stored on a single shared storage area network (SAN) storage volume using Sanbolic Kayo File System. The virtual machines can then be moved independently between physical host servers using Quick Migration because all host servers have shared access to the virtual machines.

“Kayo FS is a new product that provides file-level shared access to a SAN volume from multiple physical host servers and is designed specifically to provide a cost-effective shared LUN solution for Hyper-V virtual machines,” said Momchil Michailov, Sanbolic’s founder. “Sanbolic is already shipping Melio FS, which is an advanced clustered file system with byte-range locking that can also provide concurrent read/write access to application data on SAN storage from multiple Windows physical or virtual servers. Kayo FS is aimed at a much broader group of customers who we expect will adopt server virtualization now that it is component of the Windows Server 2008 platform.”

Sanbolic’s product portfolio also includes Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager, which are designed to support Windows applications which benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool simultaneously accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64 bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes.

These products can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware. Windows directory, reporting, and clustering features are supported. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined workloads in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.

Kayo FS will be priced at $299 per host server and sold in a 5 license bundle.

[Source: Scott Lowe]

Sanbolic

Silicom Provides Server Adapters For Mystery Storage Company In Its Virtualization Appliances

May 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Silicom today announced that its quad-port Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapters have been selected by an unnamed “leading storage company” as a standard component in its virtualization appliances. Silicom’s adapters will reportedly be used to enhance the throughput of the appliance as required in high-traffic and mission critical environments, and to prevent I/O bottlenecks at the appliance level.

Virtualization appliances are an innovative solution for the IT department’s need to be able to change the configuration of complex Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) without disrupting system availability. The virtualization appliance separates the logical and physical representation of storage resources, independently managing the relationships in order to free the main system from the task.

“Virtualization is on the rise as a significant market trend, and the emergence of Virtualization Appliances is good news for Silicom,” said Shaike Orbach, Silicom’s President and CEO. “Our role is to provide the technology needed to assure a high level of throughput, preventing I/O bottlenecks and other roadblocks that can limit an appliance’s performance. In installation after installation, our innovative cards have proven their ability to ‘unclog’ the pipes, resulting in an appliance that continues to work at top speed in all environments.

“This order validates the need for our server adapters in Virtualization appliances and gives us an important entry point into the Virtualization arena. This has the potential to become a significant market for Silicom as we believe that more and more virtualization appliances will be launched by additional companies over time.”

Marathon Technologies Releases everRun Software

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

We’ve covered the beta launch of Marathon Technologies’ everRun software a little over a month ago, and now the company has officially released the product.

Customers can download a free 15-day trial of everRun VM. The latest version of Citrix XenServer 4.1 is also available as a trial edition. everRun VM suggested retail pricing is $2000 per server (perpetual license) for customers that have Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. everRun VM with Citrix XenServer 4.1 Enterprise Edition is $4500 per server for a perpetual license.

Marathon Technologies Releases Virtualization Tool, Attempts To Simplify Disaster Recovery With everRun VM

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Marathon Technologies made a splash at the fall 2007 VMworld show with a preview of its everRun VM product for high availability and disaster recovery and will formally announce the product today; it’s available in beta and is expected to ship in April, according to the company.

Based on the same everRun automated availability software employed by over 1,800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

With virtualization moving beyond test and dev environments and into the realm of key business applications, more CIOs are looking for high availability (HA) solutions now. If those apps are running in a VM, the last thing IT would want is a slowdown or outage for business users. The higher profile the app, the greater the need for a high availability solution for VMs.

Marathon is betting that its product will appeal in particular to midmarket CIOs, some of whom have had a hard time justifying the cost of traditional high availability/disaster recovery solutions, many of which require the added expense of a storage area network (SAN) and staffers with specialized SAN skills. Marathon’s product can use direct connect attached storage, which is a plus for CIOs who don’t have a SAN and don’t want to pay to install and maintain one.

Marathon’s product works only with the Citrix /Xen virtualized server architecture, not marketshare-leader VMware‘s. Microsoft Hyper-V support is planned at a later date, but no VMware support is on the drawing board, according to Marathon (which cites its ability to get its product to market faster and ensure proper performance with the Citrix/Xen architecture, among the reasons for this decision.).

By the fourth quarter of this year, Marathon is expected to ship everRun VM Lockstep Option, providing system-level fault tolerance, designed for scenarios where you lose a whole server for any reason, for example, if you lose a building in a fire. This will essentially be an add-on solution to everRun VM, the company says. Customers will be able to set the desired level of protection VM by VM, to keep costs down for VMs that don’t need the highest level of protection.

Also check out the interview our occasional guest blogger Tarry Singh did with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick, where he reveals more information about the pricing strategy.

“everRun VM is available in two flavors. For companies that already have XenServer Enterprise, they can buy everRun VM for $2,000 per physical server. If they don’t have a hypervisor installed, they can buy an integrated bundle from us that includes XenServer Enterprise Edition and everRun VM for $4,500 per physical server. That’s for a perpetual license by the way. We’ve briefed a lot of channel partners and potential customers on the product and the pricing and more than once we’ve had them respond, “what’s the catch.” There is no catch. We’re just trying to make this so easy and inexpensive that companies don’t have to think to hard about adding it to XenServer.“

[Source: The Register UK]