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Drobo’s New B1200i Storage Product Delivers Most Automated, Application-Driven and Affordable Storage on the Market Today

SAN JOSE, Calif. - August 24, 2011 - Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today introduced a new Drobo for business solution, the Drobo B1200i, which features technological breakthroughs and an unprecedented combination of automation, affordability and application awareness for the small and medium business (SMB) market.

The new 12-bay Drobo provides business customers with a unique storage solution for VMware, Microsoft Exchange and other business applications – offering advanced and sophisticated capabilities for customers without large enterprise budgets or deep storage expertise. The new Drobo takes an application-driven approach to storage, cutting cost and complexity while automating modern data protection, capacity planning and application performance.

The new Drobo B1200i builds on Drobo's track record of providing "Small Box, Big Storage" by delivering a solution that is uniquely:

Automated

• Automated BeyondRAID™ technology optimizes advanced data protection without the need for specific storage expertise or configuration
• Automated thin provisioning and reclamation delivers enterprise-class expandability and storage utilization features in a simplified, automated manner
• New, automated data-aware tiering solves performance tuning issues that have traditionally taken storage administrators weeks or months to address

Application-Driven

• Adjusts in real-time to changes in application workload, without the need for user or admin intervention and tuning
• Uniquely utilizes SSD technology in the same pool as conventional disk drives to accelerate the most demanding operations – automatically, based on application workload

Affordable

• Available at prices starting under $10,000 for 12 TB of SAS storage
• The most efficient and cost-effective way to utilize SSD technology – unlike traditional tiering or SSD solutions, Drobo allows customers to incrementally add SSD drives in the same box and in the same storage pool as traditional media – resulting in optimal price-performance
• Designed, like all Drobos, to be the easiest to use and most automated product in the market, resulting in reduced configuration and tuning time, and lower operating costs

Supporting Quotes

"There are three major challenges for SMB storage and backup - data protection, capacity planning, and application performance optimization. Drobo represents something new for SMBs: easy, automated, hands-free, no-tuning, application-driven storage and it solves all three primary storage challenges at an affordable price. Application-driven storage addresses the way business works today."
-George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland

"Applications are at the core of any business and virtualization enables organizations to deploy the infrastructure required with flexibility and agility. Storage is the foundation for every virtual environment and Drobo's iSCSI products are designed for simplicity and stability, to optimize virtual machine and application performance. Drobo's data-aware tiering technology provides enterprise capabilities to organizations that don't want to spend time tuning, and they want storage to be smarter – simple, scalable and automated."
-Duncan Epping, author of Yellow-Bricks, a leading virtualization blog

"Automated data-aware tiering is as revolutionary to application performance as BeyondRAID™ was to easy and reliable data protection. SMBs are often forced to cobble together multiple, expensive solutions, spending disproportionate money and time on storage rather than delivering applications that meet user needs. Drobo for business is different in that it continues to meld even more 'big technology' with 'Drobo ease-of-use', all in one box - for the best storage experience ever."
- Tom Buiocchi, CEO, Drobo

Useful Links

• B1200i Overview: http://info.drobo.com/resources/b1200i
• The Automated Tiering Experience: http://www.drobo.com/resources/tiering.php
• Drobo for Business: http://www.drobo.com/products/drobosanbusiness.php

Availability

The new Drobo 12-Bay iSCSI SAN storage for business model B1200i is available now for purchase at http://www.drobostorage.com/.

Drobo and Veeam Deliver Optimized Data Protection Solution for VMware Customers

Industry Leaders Combine Best-In-Class Products to Provide Easier, More Affordable Backup and Replication for Virtualized Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif. - August 29, 2011 - Drobo, makers of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today announced that it has collaborated with Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, to deliver a simple and affordable data protection solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs). The joint solution between Drobo's SAN storage for business product line and Veeam's Backup and Replication software provides SMB customers with a comprehensive storage, backup and replication solution for production VMware environments.

"The Drobo B800i or B1200i combined with Veeam is a 'dream team' combination for VMware backup and replication," said Charles Bass, vice president of vendor relations and strategic accounts for storage distributor Promark Technology. "It's a proven solution -- there are hundreds, if not thousands of small and medium business customers already using Drobo and Veeam together. Drobo delivers automated on-site data protection; Veeam adds industry-leading backup and replication software, and both are VMware Ready Certified technologies. What more could you ask for?"

"Drobo is committed to ensuring customers have access to the best software solutions for VMware backup and replication, and Veeam has clear industry recognition as a leader in the space," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "We're excited to be a part of such a compelling solution that many of our mutual customers have already deployed and endorsed."

Drobo's business products are currently the storage of choice for over 25,000 business customers, and Veeam's Backup and Replication software protects more than 1.5 million virtual machines worldwide.

"We've relied on Drobo for disk-based backup for our VMware environments, and Veeam supplemented the built-in Drobo capabilities with great software-based replication for VMware," said Rick Louie, Director of Infrastructure at OnTargetJobs. "We believe that these two products together create the best value on the market, and their responsiveness to our requests for mutual certification prove we've made the right investment."

Drobo products, known for being uniquely automated, application-driven and affordable, are based on patented BeyondRAID™ technology and certified for use with VMware, Veeam, and other leading technology products. Drobo's most recent SAN Storage for Business product, the model B1200i, further extends the company's technological innovation with the introduction of automated data-aware tiering.

Drobo will be demonstrating these solutions, including the new Drobo model B1200i, at VMworld booth 1153 in Las Vegas August 29th thru September 1st.

EMC VNX Sets Performance Density Record With Lustre —Showcases "No Compromise" HPC Storage

EMC VNX7500 Achieves Industry-leading Performance Density with Lustre—Delivers HPC Community Enterprise Class Five-9’s Availability and High Density

SC11—SEATTLE - November 10, 2011 At SC11, the international conference on HPC, networking storage and analysis, EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), today announced that it set a performance density record with Lustre—delivering  2GB/sec per rack U. Using the industry standard XDD benchmark, Terascala, the leader in Fast Data storage management, validated that the single VNX7500 delivers up to 8 GB/s read and 5.3 GB/s write sustained performance on a 4U dual storage processor with the Lustre file system. The benchmark results validate the EMC VNX7500 and its ability to deliver the industry's most reliable—with five-9's availability—and powerful unified storage system complete with global support, delivering the raw performance required in HPC environments—with "no compromise".

The EMC VNX7500 is powered by the latest multi-core Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and delivers HPC customers the option to leverage enterprise Flash drives and the FAST Suite, where Flash can be efficiently used as both a high performance storage tier and as a caching tier. Additionally, a dual VNX7500/single rack solution that can deliver up to 16GB/s sustained read performance and has the flexibility to support up to 1.6PBs—is ideal for customers looking for a high density solution, or with large amounts of data. The sheer throughput that the VNX7500 delivers to HPC customers using Lustre is ideal for environments where a high, single stream of performance is required—most often in universities and laboratories, core IT applications for, life sciences and supercomputing environments.

EMC will be demonstrating a proof-of-concept that includes the VNX7500 and a Terascala Integrated Storage Information System (TISIS™) appliance in a Lustre environment in the EMC Isilon booth (#2609) and Intel booth (#2121) at SC11.

EMC Quote

Eric Herzog, Vice President, Product Marketing and Management, EMC Unified Storage Division

"Lustre is driving new achievements and capabilities in the HPC community. EMC extends its offerings in the HPC community with our VNX unified storage solution, which Terascala has validated with record setting benchmark results. The VNX, optimized for HPC processing infrastructure, delivers customers enterprise-class five-9's availability, global support, and the sheer performance necessary to enable HPC customers with the industry's most powerful storage for Lustre environments. With the combined breadth of EMC's VNX and Isilon products, EMC delivers the broadest set of solutions spanning the needs of the HPC community."

Terascala Quote

Rick Friedman, Vice President, Product Management at Terascala

"With the VNX, we achieved the highest XDD benchmark throughput of any platform tested with the Terascala Integrated Storage Information System (TISIS™) in a Lustre environment. In HPC environments—where performance is everything—the VNX7500 delivered.”

Availability: Buy EMC VNX, EMC CLARiiON, & EMC Symmetrix @ http://www.buyemcstorage.com/

Dell Delivers New Storage Solutions for the Virtual Era Built on Its Fluid Data Architecture

At its Dell Storage Forum customer and partner event, Dell today announced new solutions built on its Fluid Data Architecture to optimize cost, performance and protection as storage scales with a growing organization. New solutions include its first unified Dell EqualLogic platform, updated Dell EqualLogic software capabilities, a Dell Compellent demonstration of 16Gbps Fibre Channel, and the introduction of Fibre Channel on its PowerVault product line.

These solutions represent a milestone in Dell’s vision for a Fluid Data Architecture designed to help customers efficiently and flexibly manage data. Dell is uniquely unencumbered by legacy storage technologies and rigid philosophies that do not support customer needs in the Virtual Era. Instead, Dell is focused on the development and acquisition of storage intellectual property that delivers productivity and efficiency gains for highly-virtualized data centers.

Dell EqualLogic FS7500
The EqualLogic FS7500 adds scalable network-attached storage (NAS) capability to the EqualLogic product line – making it the only high-performance, scale-out unified storage for midsize deployments. The EqualLogic FS7500 uses the Dell Scalable File System, a high-performance, clustered file system based on Dell intellectual property. The Dell Scalable File System architecture incorporates features formerly found only at the very high end including advanced caching, load balancing and multi-threading for fast I/O processing. This is the first step toward Dell’s long-term vision of a uniquely feature-rich, highly-scalable file system. As with all EqualLogic products, new features will be made available to customers at no additional charge.

File storage systems historically have been difficult to expand because of file system size limitations and the complexity of managing multiple file servers. Unlike other unified storage solutions, with the FS7500, there are no 8, 16 or 50TB maximum limits on file system size. A single EqualLogic FS7500 file share can scale up to 510TB (raw capacity).

IBM Delivers Technology to Help Clients Protect and Retain Big Data

Overcoming Storage Complexities with HP Storage Essentials 6.2

Recently, we launched HP Storage Essentials Storage Resource Manager (SRM) software 6.2, a new enhancement to our Business Service Automation (BSA) portfolio. We designed HP Storage Essentials 6.2 to help our customers increase performance monitoring, reduce management costs in heterogeneous environments and ultimately manage storage more efficiently.

HP P4000 Storage System and Microsoft's Volume Shadowcopy Services (VSS)

A new feature found in the HP 4000 Storage System (HP LeftHand) is tighter integration with Microsoft's Volume Shadowcopy Services (VSS).  I sat down with Adam Carter, Product Manager - HP P4000 solutions, to discuss our VSS integration and to help us understand it better.

1.         Usability Corner (UC):  What is VSS integration?

Adam Carter (AC):  VSS is a framework that Microsoft provides to take snapshots in concert with applications.

2.         UC:  Why is this important?

AC:  Integrating with VSS ensures the application is in the correct state when the snapshot is taken.  This means that no I/Os are in "flight" or uncommitted - making sure all files associated with the application are in sync with the application and the storage solution. In addition, this also handles the application's volumes being spread across multiple volumes.

Cisco and Dell to Deliver Combined Next Generation Data Center Solutions

Cisco and Dell today announced that they will collaborate to deliver next-generation IT solutions that help customers simplify their data center infrastructure by pooling storage, computing and networking infrastructure resources to more rapidly support business applications in virtual data center environments.  The companies expanded their existing global Solution Technology Integrator agreement to include Cisco’s Nexus 5020 data center switching systems as part of the Dell enterprise infrastructure solutions with Dell servers and storage solutions.

According to the agreement, Dell will add Cisco’s Nexus 5020 switches that support both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to its Dell PowerEdge™ server and Dell EqualLogic™, PowerVault™, and Dell/EMC™ storage solutions. The Cisco and Dell combined solutions help customers simplify the management of their next-generation data center  with a unified networking fabric that consolidates LAN, SAN and server cluster network environments into a single high speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric that supports protocols such as Fibre Channel, FCoE, and Internet Small Computer Storage Interface (iSCSI).

Made in IBM labs: IBM research sets new record in magnetic tape data density

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, January 22, 2010 — IBM researchers today announced they have demonstrated a world record in areal data density on linear magnetic tape — a significant update to one of the computer industry's most resilient, reliable and affordable data storage technologies.

This breakthrough proves that tape technology can increase capacity for years to come, which has important implications, as tape storage systems are more energy efficient and cost-effective than hard disk drive storage systems. As the physical world becomes increasingly networked with sensors, vast amounts of data are amassed in various formats from medical images to security camera feeds to supply chain sensors to financial records. All of this data needs to be archived, replicated for disaster recovery, and/or retained or regulatory compliance.

IBM Launches New Storage Cloud Solution for the Enterprise

BOSTON, Mass. - 06 Oct 2009:  At its Information Infrastructure Analyst Summit IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced its intention to enter the cloud storage space with the launch of the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud, IBM Information Archive and new consulting services.

Traditional storage cloud solutions have piqued the interest of many enterprise clients for their very low price points, but these systems have mostly been limited to ‘sandbox’ use cases for secondary or tertiary copies of data or for use in development and test environments in which data does not have to be frequently accessed and does not tend to grow into large scales.

The IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud offering that utilizes low cost components in a true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition. Hallmarks of the solution include support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files, and scale-out performance previously limited to the largest ‘high performance computing’ systems.