Storage roundup: Compellent Portable Volume helps RHS slash backup times and more

By Antony Adshead, UK Bureau Chief 20 Jan 2010 | SearchStorage.co.UK

Storage UK News Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has upgraded to Compellent Storage Center 5 and is using its Portable Volume component to cut replication times by 80%. The portable disk drive product allows the RHS to fully back up production data totalling approximately 5.5 TB every two days from its central London headquarters to its Vauxhall disaster recovery (DR) site. Previously, the organisation used Compellent replication over its wide-area network (WAN), which resulted in backups being weeks behind due to insufficient bandwidth.

Compellent Portable Volume is an external disk drive product that mirrors the logical unit number (LUN) structure of production and secondary storage-area networks (SANs). The product allows users to copy data to its volumes, physically transport them offsite and move data over to mirrored LUN volumes at the DR site with no further configuration.

Martin Taylor, converged network manager at the RHS, said Portable Volume successfully addressed a situation that could only otherwise be resolved by spending a lot more money on the organisation's WAN link. "The problem we faced was replicating to the DR site via a limited WAN connection," he said. "We're a mid-sized organisation and a charity. If we had money to throw at a bigger WAN connection we would, but this way of doing things cuts replication time down by about 80%."

LinkShare deploys 3PAR tiered SAN to cut costs, power consumption

Online marketing business LinkShare deployed 3PAR InServ Storage Servers in its virtual data centre to support increased activity during the holiday shopping season. LinkShare chose tiered InServ arrays to handle heavy traffic over the period and expects to save up to £125,000 per year on administration costs while also cutting data centre footprint and power consumption by 50%. The InServ arrays' autonomic storage management capabilities dynamically distribute workloads across array resources and reduce storage administration time.

DataCore boosts virtual disk capacity to 1 PB

Virtualised data storage vendor DataCore Software has increased the size of its virtual disks from 2 TB to 1 PB. The DataCore product – which also incorporates thin provisioning – allows users to create RAID-enabled SANs from commodity and distributed direct-attached storage (DAS). The company expects to offer up to 2 PB capacity in future.

Gridstore launches clustered NAS

Network-attached storage (NAS) vendor Gridstore has launched the beta of its new NASg storage platform. The Gridstore NASg platform virtualises existing NAS or NASg storage nodes into a single pool of storage to eliminate single points of failure and boost network and processing efficiency. It helps eliminate server network bottlenecks by utilising parallel IO to the storage nodes. NASg also aggregates processing power across a grid of client machines to eliminate server-based processing bottlenecks.

Modern Networks gains top APSP NetApp rating

Hertfordshire-based reseller Modern Networks has achieved the level of Authorised Professional Service Partner (APSP) with NetApp, which is NetApp's highest professional services partner status. The APSP accreditation will enable Modern Networks to offer professional services in addition to its existing NetApp storage solutions portfolio. With the accreditation, Modern Networks will now have access to the same tools and methodologies used by NetApp professional service engineers.

PoINT releases v2.0 of tiering tool

German vendor PoINT Software & Systems has released Version 2.0 of PoINT Storage Manager. The product allows users to manage tiered storage on Windows NTFS-based systems and NetApp FAS products. The product migrates less frequently used data from high-performance drives to more cost-efficient media.

Tags: Storage companies,  VIEW ALL TAGS

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT Storage companies Storage roundup: UK data backup practices behind those of France, Germany; and more Storage roundup: Visual effects studio opts for LTO-4 tape drives, shuns disk; and more Iron Mountain Digital spends $112 million on Mimosa Systems for on-premise data archiving Storage roundup: College uses clustered NAS; new Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture; and more EMC: No plans to kill Clariion Overland Storage rips and replaces business plan, emphasizes Snap Server NAS Oracle pledges to continue Sun's open source storage and tape products Storage roundup: Fujifilm warns UK users about grey market tapes and more EMC sees IT spending recovery, plans further cloud storage push in 2010 Data center migration tips for SMBs

RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary