QLogic to Provide FCoE Converged Network Adapters to Dell

QLogic announced that its 8100 Series CNAs are now embedded within a broad range of Dell PowerEdge servers, including the new Intel Xeon 5500 "Nehalem"-powered PowerEdge R610 and R710 rack servers, T610 and T710 tower servers and the M610 and M710 blade servers. The energy efficiency of VMware virtualization, Nehalem-based Dell servers and QLogic FCoE combines in a highly effective way to address the needs of today's companies that face scarce power resources. At a time when many users in populous metropolitan areas such as New York and Tokyo have reached peak capacity and simply cannot get any more power into their buildings, the need to decrease data center power usage is more prevalent than ever. In accordance with this requirement, customers are increasingly deploying VMware, FCoE and Nehalem-based servers with lower power consumption characteristics to slash power costs. The real-world business need to reduce power costs is fundamentally fueling the shift to FCoE with Dell and QLogic positioned at the apex of this market opportunity.

"This design win from Dell caps off an already impressive year for QLogic's single chip FCoE technology that has included numerous other Tier 1 OEM wins," stated Bob Laliberte, senior analyst Enterprise Strategy Group. "As organizations look to gracefully migrate to energy efficient converged networks based on 10 Gig Ethernet in 2010, QLogic and its partners like Dell will be well positioned to deliver industry leading solutions."

"We see Ethernet as the best way to create a single enterprise fabric. QLogic's CNAs help us offer customers a high-performance, energy-efficient path from legacy Fibre Channel SANs into a next-generation environment built on 10 gigabit Ethernet," said Larry Hart, senior manager, Dell Networking.The QLogic press room provides complete technical details

Symantec enhances Veritas Storage Foundation, Cluster File System & Cluster Server

Symantec announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, the industry-leading heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for UNIX, Linux and Windows environments. This release enables organizations to capitalize on new storage technology, such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning, while continuing to reduce costs and complexity through improved performance and scalability. Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of applications is now possible with Veritas Cluster File System through tight integration with Oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2 –allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.

“As organizations evolve to meet changing business needs, they require an optimized storage infrastructure that is dynamic and flexible,” said Josh Kahn, vice president of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. “With this launch, Symantec is providing customers with the ability to effectively utilize the latest storage innovations—from SSDs to thin provisioned hardware and even virtual environments including Hyper-V—while also providing capabilities needed to optimize any storage or server platform. Storage Foundation gives enterprises the complete solution they need to transform their data centers and enable business success.”

Symantec’s content-aware, dynamic storage tiering capabilities ensure organizations’ storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance. This provides complete, coordinated server and storage visibility and policy based, non-disruptive information movement. Storage Foundation automatically optimizes heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage. Storage Foundation is the only storage management solution that can automatically discover SSD devices from leading array and server vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently. The Symantec product portal offers complete feature and technicla details

Storage Software Market Posts a Small Increase Sequentially in Q3 09 (IDC)

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter (2Q09).

“The storage software market was barely able to maintain a positive sequential growth rate in the third quarter of 2009,” said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC. “For the second quarter in a row, only two of the top 5 vendors displayed a positive growth over the previous quarter. EMC and IBM displayed positive growth rates of 5.7%, and 6.9% respectively, while Symantec, NetApp, and CA each had negative growth rates from the previous quarter of –2.1%, –8.9%, and –3% respectively.”

“In the third quarter we saw EMC regain the top spot in the replication market, with 10.7% growth over 2Q09, while NetApp declined 10.1%. Last quarter NetApp made a big push for their fiscal year end, which for the first time made them the market leader, but NetApp has fallen back to second position with 29.5% market share, where EMC has a 32.5% share,” added Margossian. “Two out of the top three vendors in the data protection and recovery market grew sequentially (IBM and EMC) while the leader Symantec declined at 1.2%. Symantec is still the market leader with 31.1% market share, and IBM and EMC having 14.1% and 12.8% market share respectively.”

IDC Finds Signs of a Turnaround in the Enterprise Storage Market

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a 10.0% decline year over year, totaling $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market declined to $6.0 billion in revenues, a 9.6% decline from the prior year's third quarter, driven by continued weakness in server systems sales. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 2,661 petabytes, growing 21% year over year.

"Although the external disk storage market posted another year-over-year decline in the third quarter, the rate of decline has started to slow. Moreover, the market experienced a sequential gain over the previous quarter, with many of the top storage vendors posting increases," said Steve Scully, research manager, Enterprise Storage at IDC. "The stability in the storage market that IDC first began to see last quarter is now being felt more broadly by storage vendors."

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide External Disk Storage Systems Factory Revenue, Third Quarter of 2009

(Revenues are in Millions)
Vendor		3Q09 Revenue		3Q09 Market Share		3Q08 Revenue		3Q08 Market Share		3Q09/3Q08 Revenue Growth
1. EMC**		$1,059		24.2%		$1,136		23.4%		-6.8%
2. IBM		$577		13.2%		$617		12.7%		-6.5%
3. HP		$517		11.8%		$609		12.5%		-15.0%
4. Dell		$407		9.3%		$447		9.2%		-8.8%
4. NetApp		$381		8.7%		$395		8.1%		-3.7%
Others		$1,429		32.7%		$1,654		34.1%		-13.6%
All Vendors		$4,370		100.0%		$4,858		100.0%		-10.0%
Source: IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, December 3, 2009

Index Engines Achieves One Terabyte Per Hour Indexing on EMC Data Domain Storage System

Index Engines announced that it has joined the EMC Velocity Technology and ISV Program. In addition, Index Engines announced jointly conducted test results of indexing performance and capabilities on EMC® Data Domain® deduplication storage systems. The Index Engines 3.0 platform is able to perform full content and metadata indexing of backup data stored on EMC Data Domain systems, enabling users to avoid time consuming restores prior to the indexing process. During recent tests conducted by Index Engines with support from EMC, a single indexing node of the Index Engines 3.0 platform achieved sustained rates of over 1 TerabyteData Domain DD690 storage system. per hour on a Data Domain DD690 storage system.

The format of backup data, by design, is optimized for restores versus the indexing process that accompanies eDiscovery efforts. Identification and search efforts associated with eDiscovery are putting pressure on IT managers to leverage backup and recovery infrastructures to discover data that may be relevant to litigation. Typically this has necessitated the full restoration of backup data to enable indexing—an arduous, multi-step process that requires a large cache of disk. With the Index Engines platform and EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, backup data can be indexed directly at high speed without having to restore multiple versions of backups to disk. Instead, a comparably small index of relevant data is created that users can evaluate and then choose what to extract. The combined solution is unique in its capability to enable customers to index deduplicated backup data and enables a markedly more efficient approach to the eDiscovery process.

The interoperability of Index Engines and Data Domain storage systems enables users to index, search, classify and extract both backup and archive data stored on Data Domain systems for fast and easy discovery, backup management, storage assessment and reporting. A combined EMC Data Domain – Index Engines environment allows users to quickly find and recover only what they need. Easy access to stored data enables management to better understand the profile of the data in order to make more intelligent decisions. Additionally, users can determine what content is no longer necessary and what needs to be migrated to archives.

Fibre Channel Industry Association Sponsors Third FCoE Plugfest

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), a non-profit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators and vendors, today announced the completion of its third FCoE Plugfest the week of November 16th at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL).

In collaboration with the FCIA, leading Fibre Channel vendors worked in concert to ensure interoperability for the technically stable FCoE standard. This year's Plugfest provided a forum for testing the interactions between multi-vendor storage arrays and Converged Network Adapters (CNA) in a single FCoE environment including data center bridge exchange (DCBx) switches utilizing the FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) approved in the FCoE standard. Participating companies in the Plugfest included Brocade, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Fulcrum Microsystems, HP, IBM, Intel, JDSU, Mellanox, NetApp and QLogic.

"In addition to looking at Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) capable switches, this Plugfest incorporated multiple targets and diverse CNAs in PCI option card and blade form factors operating concurrently in a single FCoE environment including multiple adapters from different vendors in a single server," said Bill Martin, FCoE Plugfest chair and engineer consultant for the Office of Technology at Emulex. "This added testing validates interoperability of multiple CNA vendors in a single environment and allows the industry to move forward toward quick implementation of an interoperable converged network environment."