Monday, September 22, 2008

SAN Buzz September III


This week, the solid-state storage technology receives the official blessing from SNIA: Launching the SSSI (solid state storage initiative), the industry association aims to:
  • Educate the industry on solid state storage to make it clear where this technology is best suited.
  • Develop standards for solid state storage to allow for better and more interoperable implementations.
  • Perform market outreach in the US and around the world to enable the highest penetration of solid state storage products possible.

Read a well-written assessment of the initiative here.

VMware used its VMworld event last week to outline some of the focal topics for their 2009 roadmap and much of it is actually related to a better and tighter integration of storage and storage networks with the VMware environments.

On the FCoE front, Qlogic this week announced the successful "plugfest-certification" of their converged network adapter (CNA) at a recent FCIA-sponsored event.

Lastly, both Fibre Channel vendors announced new products as well: CISCO adds 8 Gbps technology to their MDS line of products (obviously admitting to the fact, that FCoE is not going to take over the SAN market for 2008 and 2009!) while

Brocade rolls out a fibre channel encryption blade together with their "converged" SAN management tool DCFM (Datacenter Fabric Manager) which is eventually going to replace both, the Brocade Fabric Manager (FM) as well as the SANnavigator/McDATA based EFCM.

Monday, September 8, 2008

SAN Buzz September II



Big Information Infrastructure rollout today from IBM:


Today, IBM announces a series of new products and solutions to help clients manage their enterprise information.
They can be summarized as CARS:
Information:

Friday, September 5, 2008

SAN Buzz September


Exciting days and weeks:

Google celebrates its 10th anniversary by releasing an own Webbrowser, leaving the industry scratching their heads about the underlying strategy and plans. These days also mark the 6th anniversary of CISCO entering the SAN market. Read an excellent analysis of what CISCO achieved during that time and where they might have done better.


The battle in the storage industry about SSDs heats up with IBM publishing the results of a lab-test, using SVC with integrated SSD (cache, sort-of). Which in turn led to some interesting posts from companies who take a different approach.

The magnetic-media side of the business meanwhile is still doing great as IDC reports in the latest release of worldwide external storage market numbers: "Total disk storage systems capacity shipped in Q2 reach 1,777 petabytes, growing 43.7% year over year"
If you want to be personally involved with many of the players in this industry and want to build and own opinion about exciting technologies like SSD, data de-duplication, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) among many others, you should absolutely plan to attend the upcoming SNW (Storage Networking World) conference in Frankfurt, Germany.