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

2012-01-01T15:58:19-08:00

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

2011-12-01T16:03:53-08:00

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

2011-11-11T20:41:47-08:00

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

2011-06-08T14:15:48-07:00

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).

World IPv6 Day: Tech industry's most-watched event since Y2K

2011-06-08T14:08:58-07:00

June 08, 2011, 10:06 AM — The nation's largest telecom carriers, content providers, hardware suppliers and software vendors will be on the edge of their seats tonight for the start of World IPv6 Day, which is the most-anticipated 24 hours the tech industry has seen since fears of the Y2K bug dominated New Year's Eve in 1999.

More than 400 organizations are participating in World IPv6 Day, a large-scale experiment aimed at identifying problems associated with IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4.

BACKGROUND: Large-scale IPv6 trial set for June 8

NASA Awards $2.5 Billion Services Contract to HP

2011-06-01T23:42:06-07:00

HP Enterprise Services has been chosen for a single-award firm-fixed-price, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract worth up to $2.5 billion over a four-year base period with two three-year option periods by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

HP will provide end-user desktop services and devices that will increase NASA’s efficiency and allow its employees to more easily collaborate in a secure computing environment.

As a part of NASA’s Agency Consolidated End-User Service (ACES) Program, HP will modernize NASA’s entire end-user infrastructure by delivering a full range of personal computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users. The modernization is expected to deliver significant productivity gains and cost savings to NASA.

“NASA personnel use IT to support NASA’s core business, scientific, research and computational activities,” said Michael Sweigart, procurement officer, Shared Services Center, NASA. “HP will provide, manage, secure and maintain these essential IT services for the agency.”

Under the ACES contract, HP will provide a variety of Computing Seat, Tier 2/3 Service Desk Support and Collaboration Services to more cost-effectively manage NASA’s end-user infrastructure at all NASA sites across the United States. Computing seat and cellular seat services are designed with security and collaboration capabilities to help the NASA team safely share information.

“The ACES contract will help evolve NASA’s IT environment to a centralized, adaptable IT infrastructure to enable economies of scale, agency-wide visibility and improved management and security,” said Dennis Stolkey, senior vice president and general manager, U.S. Public Sector, HP Enterprise Services. “HP will build on our deep industry, infrastructure and end-user services expertise to support this significant work for the agency that is pioneering the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

HP will be teaming with numerous small businesses to meet NASA’s small business participation guidelines and diverse mission needs. The contract will be managed at the NASA Shared Services Center in Stennis, Miss., and will serve all NASA centers and facilities.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

IBM Unveils Breakthrough Software and New Services to Exploit Big Data

2011-06-01T23:38:57-07:00

ARMONK, N.Y., - 20 May 2011: As companies seek to gain real-time insight from diverse types of data, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new software and services to help clients more effectively gain competitive insight, optimize infrastructure and better manage resources to address Internet-scale data. For the first time, organizations can integrate and analyze tens-of-petabytes of data in its native format and gain critical intelligence in sub-second response times. IBM also announced a $100 million investment for continued research on technologies and services that will enable clients to manage and exploit data as it continues to grow in diversity, speed and volume. The initiative will focus on research to drive the future of massive scale analytics, through advancing software, systems and services capabilities. The news comes on the heels of the 2011 IBM Global CIO Study where 83 percent of 3,000 CIOs surveyed said applying analytics and business intelligence to their IT operations is the most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years. Today's news further enables Smarter Computing innovations realized by designing systems that incorporate Big Data for better decision making, and optimized systems tuned to the task and managed in a cloud. According to recent IT industry analyst reports, enterprise data growth over the next five years is estimated to increase by more than 650 percent. Eighty percent of this data is expected to be unstructured. The new analytics capabilities pioneered by IBM Research will enable chief information officers (CIOs) to construct specific, fact-based financial and business models for their IT operations. Traditionally, CIOs have had to make decisions about their IT operations without the benefit of tools that can help interpret and model data.

IBM Delivers Technology to Help Clients Protect and Retain Big Data

2011-05-13T13:22:13-07:00

ARMONK, N.Y., - 09 May 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new tape storage and enhanced archiving, deduplication offerings designed to help clients efficiently store and extract intelligence from massive amounts of data.

The amount of information generated is increasing dramatically each year driven by armies of sensors, mobile devices, social networks, cloud computing and public sources of information like the Web. At the same time, demand for storage capacity worldwide will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 49.8 percent from 2009-2014, according to IDC (1). Clients require new technologies and ways to capitalize on the growing volume, variety and velocity of information known as "Big Data."

IBM continues to invest in the development of tape storage as an inexpensive, efficient way to store massive volumes of data. For example, IBM is today detailing seven significant improvements to its portfolio of tape and other storage archiving products, including the industry's first tape library system to provide over 2.7 exabytes of automated, low cost storage -- enough to store nearly 3 times all the mobile data generated in the U.S. in 2010 (an exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeroes).

IBM System Storage™ TS3500 Tape Library is enabled by a new, IBM-developed shuttle technology -- a mechanical attachment that connects up to 15 tape libraries to create a single, high capacity library complex at a lower cost. The TS3500 offers 80 percent more capacity than a comparable Oracle tape library and is the highest capacity library in the industry, making it ideal for the world's largest data archives.

For example, the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand uses two TS3500 Tape Libraries to support a sophisticated POWER supercomputer used to tackle challenges in such fields as energy, aerospace, weather and climate modeling. The libraries together hold 5 petabytes of data, the equivalent of more than 1,000,000 DVDs. This means that if a DVD were written to the tape libraries at the rate of one every minute, it would take more than 2 years before their capacity was exhausted.

IBM to Deliver New Optimized POWER7 Products, Inspired by Watson Technology

2011-04-14T13:22:13-07:00

ARMONK, N.Y. - 12 Apr 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new workload-optimized POWER7® systems, including a performance boost to the Power 750 -- the same server used in Watson, the Jeopardy! winner -- that provides even faster processing capability than each machine used in the computer genius.

The new Power blades and upgraded Power servers are built to manage the world's most demanding emerging applications, used in healthcare management, financial services, scientific research and more. The specialized demands of these new applications rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time.

The enhanced IBM Power 750, the same system that powers Watson, has been enhanced with several options, including a faster POWER7 processor, to handle the most challenging analytics workloads.

For instance, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth is using two IBM POWER7 blades to study the effect of disturbances, called gravitational waves, on black holes in space. Increased knowledge of gravitational waves will help physicists and astronomers to understand some of the most fundamental laws of physics. They will provide new information about the dynamics of large-scale events in the Universe, like the death of stars and the birth of black holes.

"We are running billions of intense calculations based on Einstein's theory of relativity on the POWER7 blades," said Gaurav Khanna, professor of physics at UMass-Dartmouth. "Running POWER7, I'm able to get results as much as eight times faster than running the same calculations on an Intel Xeon processor. Calculations that used to take a month to run are now finished in less than a week. This means that I can do eight times more science in the same timeframe than I could do before."

New IBM server architecture boosts app performance, cuts energy costs

2010-03-14T00:04:18-08:00

IBM on Tuesday announced new System x and BladeCenter servers, which are based on a new server design that the company claims will boost application performance while reducing energy costs in data centers.

The EX5 servers take a step away from traditional x86 server architecture in which processors and memory are locked together. The new server architecture decouples memory from the processors into separate units, according to IBM.