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Storage Insider: Staying The Course At Snw
(InfoWorld) - Storage Networking World Fall in Orlando is one of the never-ending storage carnival's most popular merry-go-rounds, but his time I had to pass on attending: too many things to do in my lab. Nevertheless, I've had so many vendors briefing me over the last few weeks that I didn't miss much of the news announced at the show. That's good, because this iteration of SNW will be remembered for important strides in technologies such as disk drive encryption, SAS, and iSCSI. Disk drive encryption seems to be, at least for now, the undisputed realm of Seagate. In fact, Seagate introduced encryption for its laptop drive last year, and is now doubling that effort (unchallenged so far) with the second-generation Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (Full Disk Encryption), which should become available in 2007. According to Seagate, the Momentus FDE.2 implements AES 128 encryption and will have features to improve security and simplify management. These features include limited access before authentication, protected passwords, the ability to quickly erase the content, and the ability to unlock the drive from an emergency recovery file. Seagate calls the technology developed to secure its disk drives "DriveTrust" (not much of a stretch there), and I hope that those enhancements will persuade laptop manufacturers to trust the drive and start offering FDE as a standard option on their systems. It's undeniable that there is a need to better secure laptop data, but it is not limited to government agents and bank managers who take their work home. FDE fills the bill here, too: For an additional fee (one that Seagate estimates should be less than most encryption software), having a laptop equipped with FDE would be an effective and affordable theft deterrent. Disk encryption has the potential to become a disruptive technology, but let's not discount that possibility for SAS (serial attached SCSI), too. At least two vendors, LSI Logic and Xyratex, are announcing new SAS products at SNW. Xyratex's claim to fame is putting the first SAS enclosure on the market, so I am not surprised that they cloned a successful FC RAID enclosure to create a 12-drive SAS-SATA version, the E5402E. With expansion units, you can pile up a max of 60 drives, which should provide plenty of tiered storage to a midsize datacenter. LSI Logic is bringing to market a 12-drive SAS/SATA enclosure, the MegaRAID SAS 1300 JBOD, that offers no onboard RAID. However, LSI also is announcing two PCI Express SAS controllers, the 8708ELP and 8888ELP, both offering RAID 6 to protect from double disk failures. What's the significance between these announcements? Tier One vendors get more SAS products from which to choose, and it marks yet another step toward replacing old parallel SCSI (and perhaps also a significant share of FC drives) in your datacenter. My last pick from SNW Fall is OnTarget 3.0, an iSCSI target application from Adaptec that promises to make IP storage networks easily available to SMB customers. However, an end-user will probably never hear about OnTarget, because Adaptec is counting on VARs and systems integrators to install the solution on plain vanilla servers according to customers' specifications. Sounds like something we've heard before from other vendors, but Adaptec has armed OnTarget with some interesting features, including a management application that consolidates storage provisioning from internal drives and the network under a single GUI. Moreover, OnTarget can schedule up to 256 snapshots and build a twin system with automated data mirroring and failover. The actual price of those systems will be set by the VAR, but Adaptec estimates that the OnTarget onus will be moderate, as little as $1,500 for an entry-level configuration. Could OnTarget persuade the reluctant DAS (direct attached storage) crowd to opt for the convenience of a storage network? I hope so. Perhaps this will be the next quiet revolution coming from SNW Fall 2006. Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.... More

Storage Insider: Simplified Storage For Small Businesses
(InfoWorld) - This was a rather busy week, no doubt because of the impending Storage Decisions conference. There's nothing like an industry event to fire up the marketing machines, but I was intrigued by the fact that many of the new products and announcements were going small -- as in small business. Several vendors announced new storage solutions for SMB customers with a common thread: SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives and direct connection to a host. Take, for example, HP's StorageWorks MSA60 (Modular Storage Array), a storage array that mounts up to 12 SAS or serial ATA drives in 2U of rack space. For more capacity, you can buy up to three similarly shaped expansion units and daisy-chain them to the MSA mothership using SAS connections. This would give you up to 48 drives in 8U. The MSA60 has no built-in RAID controller, which means that attaches directly (via SAS) to a server mounting the HP SmartArray P800 RAID controller. You can attach two MSA60s (and their expansion modules) to a server so configured. Sometime next year, HP will release a similar array that mounts small-form-factor drives instead of the MSA60's 3.5-inch drives. The new array, dubbed the MSA70, should be more compact and environmentally friendly, with 50 drives per enclosure that can be doubled with a single 2U expansion unit. LSI Logic is also courting SME customers with a new product line bearing the promising name "Simplicity." The first product in the Simplicity line, the 1333, features 12 SAS drives, a 2U enclosure, and the 1331 expansion module with the same capacity and form factor. Each 1333 can connect up to three 1331s for a total of 48 drives. Host connectivity is via SAS. The 1333 has its own RAID controller and can mount up to six SAS host connectors, three for each controller. Support for SATA drives should become available next year. Simplicity is also the name of the array's management software, an application that, according to LSI Logic, makes creating snapshots, copying volumes, and doing general configuration tasks as easy as the product name suggests. LSI Logic's announcements should be followed shortly by its OEMs (IBM, for example) putting on the market products based on the same architecture. However, its interesting to note how the two new solutions from HP and LSI Logic -- although based on the same SAS technology and targeting the same customers -- differ. The most obvious difference is that HP's solution proposes a host-centric approach where the P800 controller makes for easy connectivity to servers such as the Proliant or the recently announced AIO600, HP's unified file-serving and block-serving solution based on Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003. By contrast, the LSI Logic solution can stand on its own as a storage server, but also attaches easily to a host via SAS. Moreover, with dual controllers and up to six host connections, the Simplicity line can be shared by servers that are part of a Microsoft cluster configuration. Which solution will SME customers prefer? Less-adventurous customers will probably choose the MSA60, while space-constrained datacenters will find the contained format of the MSA70 irresistible. But customers who see more networked storage in their future may find that the Simplicity line could be a good first step in that direction. Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.... More

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