storage

Rackable Teams Up With NetApp to Offer Storage for Customized Data Center Solutions

September 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Rackable Systems, provider of servers and storage products for large-scale data centers, today announced a partnership with NetApp to offer customers best-of-breed server and storage solutions for enterprise environments.

Under terms of the agreement, Rackable Systems is joining NetApp’s Embedded Systems Vendor Program and will integrate NetApp storage into Rackable Systems’ built-to-order Eco-Logical data center server and infrastructure offerings.

Rackable Systems’ data center solutions including NetApp’s FAS series will be available immediately worldwide via its direct sales and channel partners.

Rackable Systems

NetApp

Unified Network Storage Provider agàmi Folds After Burning Through $45 Million In 6 Months

August 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

This isn’t the prettiest of stories: Valleywag and the Mercury News are reporting that unified network storage startup agàmi Systems has left the building. The company is shutting down after raising a lot of money, most recently picking up $45 million in Series C financing.

Back then, the fundraising was led by Advanced Equities (recent reports about this particular VC firm itself have been far from positive either) with participation from current investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Kleiner Perkins, APEX Venture Partners, Alta Partners, TIF Ventures and Duff Ackerman Goodrich, and new investments from ITOCHU Corporation and David Stiles (CEO), and was going to be used to ramp up sales & marketing.

Too little, too late, apparently.

More than two weeks after the shutdown, agàmi’s Web site was still up and touting the company as “the leading provider of unified network storage solutions.”

The official word:

“Agami’s board has decided to shut the company down as the efforts to raise further capital didn’t materialize in time. It’s really unfortunate, but that is true,” said Sreekanti. “The company is going through a process of the liquidation of assets, so I don’t have anymore details than that.”

And the reaction from NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven:

“You don’t raise $45 million and then get shut down. That doesn’t make sense.”

Agàmi employed between 80 and 100 people, with most in Sunnyvale, some in Hyderabad, India. Questions remain whether Agami had burned through its funds or whether some of agàmi’s investors, pulled back money that was contingent on technology or sales progress.

agami Systems

Demand Media Picks 3PAR for Scaling Utility Storage

August 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3PAR, provider of utility storage, announced today that Demand Media has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage to support its rapidly growing social media business. (see our previous coverage on 3PAR)

Demand Media uses its network of vertically-oriented web properties to connect content creators and large audiences with advertisers. To improve infrastructure agility, storage scalability, and capacity utilization over the data lifecycle, the social media company has implemented multiple 3PAR InServ Storage Servers in addition to 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software. Demand Media has also chosen to deploy an entire virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint, which combines 3PAR Utility Storage with products from HP and VMware to create a complete utility computing environment.

Due to the rapid expansion of its business, Demand Media found that storage scalability and flexible, easy database and storage management were becoming critical requirements. To keep up with growth, Demand Media determined that it needed to enhance its server and storage infrastructure. The social media company promptly sought out a highly-virtualized server and storage platform that would enable greater flexibility and scalability than their previous infrastructure. They ultimately decided to implement 3PAR Utility Storage and a complete virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint. “3cV” stands for the combination of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, HP BladeSystem c-Class, and VMware Infrastructure.

To support their virtual datacenter, Demand Media chose to deploy the 3PAR InServ S800 Storage Server with 188 terabytes of storage and two 3PAR InServ E200 Storage Servers with 36 terabytes of storage. Demand Media’s 3PAR deployment also utilizes several 3PAR software products including 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR Virtual Copy, and 3PAR System Reporter.

3PAR

Symantec Sets Up Virtualization Lab in Japan

July 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec today announced that Symantec Japan has opened its new “Virtualisation Solutions Lab” for customers and partners, as the company continues to deliver on its virtualization strategy.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab will enable Symantec Japan to test and optimize Symantec’s products for specific virtual environments quickly, and provide customers and partners with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and see demonstrations of solution deployments for their environments. With this new facility, Symantec Japan claims it can better support its customers and partners who decide to implement virtualization solutions, as market needs for virtualization continue to grow rapidly.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab is located within the Japan Engineering Center at Symantec Japan’s headquarters (Minato-ku, Tokyo), which is responsible for all technological verification required for Symantec’s products before their release into the Japanese market. With the launch of this new facility, the Virtualisation Solutions Lab will introduce comprehensive virtualisation solutions for data centres in VMware environments.

The line-up of solutions to be provided by the Virtualisation Solutions Lab is as follows:

Comprehensive backup solutions using Veritas NetBackup for VMware environments
Failover solutions with high availability of guest OS and VMware applications using Veritas Cluster Server
Backup and restore solutions for P2V (physical to virtual) system images using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery
Deployment solutions for virtual servers using the Symantec Altiris platform

Symantec Japan plans to work closely with Citrix Systems and Microsoft to test virtualization solutions for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments at the Virtualisation Solutions Lab in addition to VMware Infrastructure 3. In addition, Symantec Japan plans to organize regular product familiarization seminars as it continues to expand its range of solutions for its customers and partners.

[Source: ITWeb]

Symantec

Symantec Teams Up With Citrix, Enhances Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Suite

June 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec has announced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, which it claims to be the first solution to offer advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer technology. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure aims to preserve all of the key storage management benefits enterprise customers rely on in their physical environments, but are not available in current file-system based virtualization approaches.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. It uses a client/server architecture that establishes a unique, individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Since it leverages Storage Foundation, Symantec claims its users can realize all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is expected to be available in the fall of 2008 with proposed pricing starting at $4,595 per 2 socket server.

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.”