Week of August 18th, 2008

Issue 1

EMC Goes Solid State - With EMC’s recent announcement of a Solid State Disk option a lot of our customers are asking about it.

First and foremost to leverage EMC Solid State Disk you have to upgrade to the latest CX4 family of products. If you have purchased a Clariion solution in the last two years then it probably does not make financial sense to upgrade. That said we offer stand alone SSD solutions that we can integrate into your current SAN. Not only will these solutions provide you the benefits of SSD the will also be more cost effective per GB.

Does SSD make sense for you? The customer most likely to benefit from SSD is one who has a very high I/O database application and you believe that storage IO is your bottleneck.

SSD is an investment. We can help identify the applications in your environment that would see benefit from its use and identify what files within that application should reside on.

Data Domain connects to NetBackup - Last year NetBackup introduced an API set called OpenStorage (OST). This API allows advanced disk backup devices to offer improved integration with NetBackup. Data Domain appliances optimizes backup storage by eliminating redundant data, making efficient disk storage of backups possible. With the integration to NetBackup via OST you can manage the process within your NetBackup console reduces the number of application interfaces you need to maintain and simplify the interconnection of the two product.

For our NetBackup customers this makes Data Domain and ideal solution. For a detailed description of this solution see “A Backup API”

Expanding your Server Virtualization Project - We have assisted many customers with VMware Planning and Rollout. One of the considerations during those plan is the elimination of servers where the network IO would be to big of a bottleneck for that application to be hosted in a virtualized environment.

The challenge is that you can only put so many 1GBE cards in the virtualization host and a standard 10GBE card is under utilized. What is needed is IO virtualization (IOV). IOV will virtualized the IO workload and allow it to be dynamically allocated to individual virtual machines.

For more on IOV see “Maximize server virtualization ROI with network I/O virtualization”

HP enters the Deduplication Market - With not one but two entries HP has now bursts into the deduplication market place. HP has segmented the market into high end solutions that need performance and mid-range solutions that want simplicity.

In the large enterprise where that amount of data to be backed up causes a issue in making backup windows, HP via its relationship with Sepaton has chosen to use deduplicate data after the entire backup job has completed (also known as post process) so that no performance impact will result of the deduplication process.  The challenge with the post process method is that it does add a layer of complexity to the solution because you have two storage areas to manage.

In the medium sized enterprise HP has chosen to utilize its on intellectual property and deliver a system that deduplicates data as it is received. The goal being to keep make the solution easier for smaller IT staffs to manage.

With all the suppliers entering into the deduplication market it may be challenging to decide what deduplication solution is best for your environment. Let GC-Stor help. We have experience with all of these solutions and can help you determine what is the best fit for your specific environment.