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A high level conference focused on the many technology and business developments that are underpinning the Cloud, mobile IT, Big Data and other buzz topics, and the exhibition space provided very real evidence that the solutions are already available to help the theory become a reality.
DCS brings you a flavour of the news stories that were presented at the event – with many companies also hinting at major announcements to come over the next few months, as the vendor community seeks to ensure that it has the right products and services to help end users optimise their IT environments.
Dell completes go-private transaction
Dell announced the completion of its acquisition by Michael Dell, Dell’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, and Silver Lake Partners, a leading global technology investment firm.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, Dell stockholders will receive $13.75 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, plus payment of a special cash dividend of $0.13 per share to stockholders of record as of the close of business on Oct. 28, 2013, for total consideration of $13.88 per share in cash. The total transaction is valued at approximately $24.9 billion.
The transaction was approved by Dell’s stockholders at a special meeting of stockholders held on Sept. 12, 2013. Trading in Dell’s common stock will conclude at the end of business today, and the company has commenced the process to delist its common shares from the NASDAQ Stock Market.
“Today, Dell enters an exciting new chapter as a private enterprise,” said Mr. Dell. “Our 110,000 team members worldwide are 100 percent focused on our customers and aggressively executing our long-term strategy for their benefit.”
HP helps deliver high-quality patient care
HP revealed that Johnson Memorial Hospital has selected HP Converged Infrastructure to deliver high-quality patient care by increasing operational efficiencies, ensuring continuity and accelerating performance of mission-critical healthcare applications.
Franklin, Ind.-based Johnson Memorial Hospital was faced with multiple aging and disaggregated external disk storage systems from EMC. These systems required manual allocation of physical storage resources to specific applications, resulting in management complexities, delayed response times and rising maintenance costs.
The hospital needed an easy-to-manage system that offered robust disaster recovery capabilities, high availability of medical records, and compliance with new regulations. The hospital also needed its critical MEDITECH environment to quickly adapt to advances in medical technologies.
Johnson Memorial Hospital replaced its legacy infrastructure with an HP Converged Infrastructure composed of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HP StoreOnce Backup, as well as HP ProLiant DL380 Blade Servers and HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures. As a result, business-critical applications perform 50 times faster and the hospital’s information systems experience zero downtime.(1) This provides clinicians with instant and reliable access to information that ensures high-quality patient care. Since moving to the new environment, the hospital also reduced ongoing maintenance fees for a key application by $50,000 for a projected savings of $250,000 over the next five years.
“Our existing IT environment was siloed and required IT staff to spend most of their time fixing point solutions, resulting in inefficient healthcare services,” said Scott Krodel, vice president and chief information officer, Johnson Memorial Hospital. “HP Converged Infrastructure enables us to manage our IT environment holistically and proactively, allowing us to use technology to enhance the delivery of care and services to our patients.”
Replacing disparate primary storage systems with a single HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage array enabled the hospital to flexibly allocate unused storage capacity where needed, reducing the storage capacity for one of the hospital’s radiology applications by 25 percent. The hospital therefore decreased storage footprint and energy consumption without compromising application performance. The ability to flexibly allocate storage as needed also minimizes future hardware investments as the healthcare provider adopts new applications.
Since incorporating the HP StoreOnce 4000 Backup system into its disaster recovery strategy, Johnson Memorial Hospital has experienced four times faster backup and 10 times faster recovery speeds compared to its previous solution. Daily data backups are now completed in one hour and the time spent on weekly backups has been reduced from six hours to just one hour.
A key component of HP Converged Storage, HP StoreOnce Backup ensures business continuity while maximizing capacity utilization by deduplicating backup data and storing only one copy on disk. This enables data to be efficiently replicated using low-bandwidth replication from a primary data center to one or more disaster recovery sites. In the event of a failure, workflow can continue as the HP StoreOnce Backup system splits the backup process into small segments for rapid data recovery.
Increasing backup density with the HP StoreOnce Backup system’s 91.1:1 deduplication ratio enables Johnson Memorial Hospital to store 36.2 TB of data within 397 GB of disk space. Organizational and IT productivity is strengthened with the ability to effortlessly restore users’ data within two to three hours—more than four times faster than the hospital’s legacy solution.
To ensure business continuity, the healthcare provider also deployed an additional HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage array at its disaster recovery site. Between data replication and backups, the hospital’s two data centers deliver three levels of redundancy for all critical components, including automatic backups to HP StoreOnce performed every six hours without impacting workflow.
Johnson Memorial Hospital also leverages the HP 3PAR Management Console to improve data center efficiency with simplified management and automatic provisioning of virtual volumes and drives with a few mouse clicks.
“Hospitals are under significant pressure to reduce costs while struggling to manage digital record growth, which makes implementing modern storage a business imperative,” said Chris Riley, vice president, U.S., Storage, HP. “HP Converged Storage delivers the scalability to accommodate future data growth, while providing high availability and application performance, enabling Johnson Memorial Hospital to focus on patient care.”
The new HP Converged Infrastructure at Johnson Memorial Hospital also has accelerated the speed of test backups and the ability to update services as well as add storage or servers. The ability to rapidly modify applications significantly improved the hospital’s agility in responding to new regulatory requirements.
Johnson Memorial Hospital also worked with HP and HP partner and MEDITECH solutions provider Park Place International to migrate the hospital’s MEDITECH electronic health record, healthcare information system, radiology, clinical and financial systems, resulting in additional efficiencies.
HealthShare NSW chooses Oracle
The services delivery arm for NSW Health, HealthShare NSW, has selected Oracle systems to deploy a new technology platform to assist with the organization’s strategic growth program. Oracle Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, were chosen as the hardware infrastructure due to high performance and the ability to process payroll data in around a quarter of the time presently possible with legacy hardware. The decision to deploy Oracle Engineered Systems follows HealthShare NSW’s rollout of Oracle E-Business Suite, running on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, to support the payroll and HR requirements of NSW Health’s 140,000 staff.
HealthShare NSW will deploy Oracle Engineered Systems comprising Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud as part of a hardware refresh to meet new processing requirements, increase service center efficiency, reduce operational costs and support the work of NSW Health clinicians.
Key criteria for the new infrastructure included increased performance and scalability, standardization and the ability to provision for future growth. HealthShare NSW identified a direct connection between the ability to reduce data processing times and increased efficiency of service center operations and associated costs; faster processing drives costs down.
Oracle Engineered Systems were chosen for their demonstrated ability to deliver a 6-8 times performance improvement over the current platform. During a Proof of Concept (POC), HealthShare NSW found that Oracle Exadata was able to perform a given process twice as fast as its nearest competitor.
HealthShare NSW’s decision to put in place an optimized technology platform was driven not only by a natural hardware refresh cycle, but also by system consolidation requirements and data centre reform initiatives to save IT costs and improve service levels.
HealthShare NSW also intends to improve agility, cut costs, and improve service levels by utilizing the Oracle Exadata platform as the foundation for an Oracle Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solution. The solution provides a consolidated, consistent database thus reducing HealthShare NSW’s dependence on the need for specialized database administration skills.
The platform refresh follows the rollout of a Corporate IT program by HealthShare NSW to consolidate its ERP requirements to support HR and payroll services, as well as financial and procurement functions. HealthShare has rolled out Oracle E-Business Suite, incorporating Oracle Human Capital Management, to more than 129,000 NSW Health staff, with another 11,000 staff to be incorporated as part of the final phase.
Oracle E-Business Suite Human Capital Management (HCM) has enabled HealthShare NSW to architect a global foundation for HR data and improved business processes. Oracle E-Business Suite HCM delivers a set of best-in-class human resources functionality that helps enable increased productivity, accelerate business performance and lower cost of ownership.
The applications are underpinned by Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, which helps enable HealthShare NSW to provision the solution quickly, thus orchestrating deployment and supporting deep integration into Oracle E-Business Suite.
The Corporate IT Program requirements also called for a new state-wide identity management system. HealthShare NSW selected Oracle Identity Management to enable single sign-on for all NSW Health staff.
In addition, elements of Oracle’s middleware portfolio will be used to help streamline the deployment, provisioning and ongoing management of HealthShare NSW’s enterprise applications. Oracle SOA Suite in conjunction with Oracle WebLogic Server will help HealthShare NSW simplify its current and future application integration requirements enabling it to reduce risk around application deployment, speed time to market and respond to business requirements.
Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance plays a critical role in delivering application and database data across all Healthshare NSW data centers, providing HealthShare NSW enterprise-class storage capabilities with unmatched Oracle integration, high performance, efficiency, simplified management and low TCO. Integrated with Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata engineered systems, the ZFS Storage Appliance uses InfiniBand to perform high speed application and database backups and restores.
The Oracle Engineered Systems platform will be established in the new Whole of Government data centers with applications migration planned for late 2013, and full production status planned in 2014.
DataCore sets the ‘new’ standard for Software-Defined Storage platforms
DataCore Software announced significant enhancements to its SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization platform. The latest version sets a new standard in software-defined storage, extending the architecture’s scalability and scope beyond traditional storage and storage area networks (SANs). Drawing from experience with more than 10,000 customer deployments worldwide, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V R9.0.4 provides universal management services and comprehensive infrastructure-wide features to improve on the native capabilities of different storage devices and brands, helping organizations overcome vendor-specific and hardware-related shortcomings.
The new SANsymphony-V comes at a time when technology pundits are declaring the traditional storage model broken. Major storage hardware vendors have been impacted and are trying to reshape offerings or buy time by touting a move to a “software-defined” world; hoping to counter IT department buyers who no longer accept the “throw more hardware at the problem” approach. SANsymphony-V answers IT concerns with powerful features and a long-term strategy for controlling costs, especially addressing new technologies such as high-speed flash and the need to curtail purchases of disk storage capacity.
“DataCore continues to set the bar in software-defined storage,” said the Founding Analyst for SSG-NOW, Deni Connor. “While other vendors take small steps or hold out future promises, DataCore builds upon its field-proven storage virtualization technology with this new release of SANsymphony-V. The latest enhancements deliver real benefits - offering greater scalability, expanded scope, higher performance and richer management tools for today’s diverse data centers, using an approach free from hardware manufacturer biases to derive maximum value from storage investments.”
The Software-Defined Storage Architecture that Runs on the Server-side, the SAN or Both
With the new release, DataCore expands its scope to automate and optimize the performance and use of both flash and spinning disk storage resources on the application server-side, within the SAN or across both. Additional new features and benefits of SANsymphony-V include:
“With DataCore we can provide better solutions and choice to our customers, increasing their efficiency and buying power,” said Dan Molina, chief technology officer for NTH Generation, a leading IT solutions provider. “The new enhancements in SANsymphony-V are right on target; DataCore understands what organizations need right now to reap the benefits of a software-defined datacenter. Equally important, the ability to span all types of hardware means customers not only get the most from storage investments, they avoid vendor lock-in and gain the flexibility to take advantage of future market developments.”
Real World Answers for a Software-Defined World
The new storage “world order” is driving the urgency for DataCore’s device-independent software layer, especially among IT organization’s eager for ways to pool, provision and centrally manage unlike storage assets. A key driver is the need to optimize lightning fast solid-state memory technology with multiple tiers of lower cost, higher capacity disk drives used to balance application performance objectives against budget constraints. Often, the manufacturer for each class of storage will be different or the tools to control each disparate. Various generations of incompatible equipment are also found in data centers. Where the software needs to reside to optimize performance and capacity is also undergoing a change.
DataCore has always believed that software portability and hardware interchangeability are the essential elements of a software-defined architecture. The new world order requires smart, vendor agnostic storage virtualization and management software that can automate and optimize storage workloads to span both the application server side and the SAN, and SANsymphony-V uniquely answers these new demands.
“EMC’s recent ViPR announcements have focused the spotlight on the severity of the broken storage model and this has incited a search for suitable alternatives,” noted Paul Murphy, vice president of marketing for DataCore Software. “Since its inception, DataCore has set the standard for software-defined storage. Unlike ViPR, DataCore has no hardware bias or API-dependencies. SANsymphony-V not only federates varied devices, regardless of make or model, it goes further by shaping them into a cohesive, responsive and continuously available storage infrastructure.
“ViPR is limited in functionality and is designed more like an add-on translator and dispatcher of API commands in order to reconcile EMC’s family of incompatible storage devices. This only propagates the ‘keep buying more hardware’ model and delays customers from an inevitable move needed to achieve the full value of software-defined storage,” continued Murphy. “DataCore accelerates IO performance and auto-tiers storage across application servers and storage networks. It automatically balances both fast ‘in memory’ technologies and spinning disks for optimal performance and cost efficiency. According to ‘real-world’ customers, our platform delivers the right software automation for productivity and makes storage interchangeable, enabling them to shop for the best value from suppliers, now and into the future.”
Emulex introduces Gen 5 Fibre Channel Flash Services
Emulex Corporation announced new Gen 5 Fibre Channel (FC) Flash Services technology, which is designed to enhance the quality of service (QoS), optimize I/O performance and increase return on investment (ROI) in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache. Emulex Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology is built on existing FC industry standards, eliminating vendor lock-in, and includes exclusive ExpressLane™ and CrossLink™ features, which provide priority queuing and in-band FC message passing. Emulex Gen 5 FC Flash Services technology is available as a no charge upgrade to currently shipping Emulex Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and doesn’t require any additional hardware purchases.
“Flash and cache technologies are driving tremendous opportunities to accelerate applications and maximize QoS for virtualized and cloud environments,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “We are enabling best-of-breed solutions with partners’ and OEMs’ flash and cache products by ensuring that Emulex FC and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) products provide the highest I/O operations per second (IOPS), lowest latency, in-band device-to-device message-passing and intelligent automation.”
ExpressLane Feature
As flash storage is deployed into mixed storage environments or with hybrid storage arrays, the combination of data from rotating media and flash devices can cause congestion on the Storage Area Network (SAN), resulting in reduced performance and diminished ROI. Emulex ExpressLane gives high priority, mission-critical workloads more chances to transmit by tagging the associated Logical Unit Number (LUN), so that flash traffic receives precedence. Emulex ExpressLane technology offers:
CrossLink Feature
New flash-based infrastructures, especially caching solutions, require coordination between nodes. East-West traffic (servers communicating with servers) has increased significantly with the use of technology such as VMware vSphere® vMotion® cache migration, which requires constant coordination between server nodes. Current solutions (TCP/IP and UDP) suffer from connectivity issues between nodes, including latency issues, poor QoS, excessive host CPU utilization, and lack of coordination with other storage devices. Emulex CrossLink provides an in-band FC message passing solution that ensures storage device connectivity and delivers optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols. Emulex CrossLink technology offers:
Emulex also revealed that it is working with Brocade to improve the reliability, availability, and manageability of Gen 5 Fibre Channel (FC) based storage area networks (SANs) in the enterprise data center and the cloud. Specifically, Emulex and Brocade have worked together to integrate Brocade’s ClearLink diagnostics technology into Emulex LightPulse® Gen 5 FC Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).
“As customers migrate mission-critical, private cloud, and flash-accelerated workloads to Gen 5 FC fabrics, performance, quality of service (QoS) and infrastructure reliability become more critical,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “ClearLink is the first of the Gen 5 FC capabilities that Emulex will be providing to ensure the reliability and management of storage network configurations when connected to Brocade Gen 5 FC SAN fabrics.”
ClearLink Diagnostics
Detecting faults in the physical infrastructure remains challenging and the ability to quickly identify and isolate optics and cable problems can make a significant difference in operational expenditures (OPEX) for both pre-production and production environments.
With ClearLink diagnostics, data centers can identify and isolate optics and cable problems much faster – in a matter of minutes instead of days. For new SAN installations, ClearLink allows administrators to validate that their SANs can operate under full data loads prior to deploying production applications.
ClearLink diagnostics deliver these capabilities by performing a series of tests on both Brocade Gen 5 FC switches and Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs. This includes running a series of electrical and optical loopback tests that can detect problems with the physical cabling and optics that could result in increased error rates and intermittent problems.
ClearLink enables best practices for deploying or changing the physical ports and cabling within the SAN infrastructure by allowing administrators to verify end-to-end connectivity and performance prior to moving to production. These capabilities help IT administrators and architects maximize application uptime and performance while reducing overall OPEX by allowing them to distinguish between faults due to marginal cable, optics modules, as well as connector or optics seating.
“Brocade’s ClearLink diagnostics technology has proven itself over the past couple of years by improving the reliability and availability for Gen 5 Fibre Channel SANs,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president, Data Center Storage and Solutions, Brocade. “We are very pleased to work with Emulex to broaden the ecosystem for ClearLink which, as a result, will increase the overall value that Gen 5 Fibre Channel delivers across our mutual customer’s SAN environments.”
“While SANs have always brought the gold standard in reliability and availability, they have not actively addressed physical challenges that remain one of the top pain points in the data center,” said Ben Woo, managing director, Neuralytix. “Emulex and Brocade are working together to build on Fibre Channel’s core values of reliability, availability and performance, allowing SAN administrators to increase customer satisfaction through improved application uptime, resulting in fewer customer support calls.”
“Cables and optics are one of the primary problems we see in our lab tests,” said Dennis Martin, founder and president, Demartek. “The ability to identify and detect from a centralized console where the issue lies, saves a tremendous amount of time and aggravation during new system setups, and having a proven solution supported by two of the leading Fibre Channel vendors in the market will be of great benefit to the industry.”
Quantum introduces Cloud Backup Services Program
Quantum Corp. announced a new program enabling managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) to expand their businesses with a cloud backup service powered by Quantum's virtual deduplication appliances and vmPRO™ backup software. Using an all-virtual, all-software approach and unique capacity-based subscription pricing, Quantum's program allows MSPs and VARs to brand, market and sell cloud Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings that scale as the provider's revenue grows, thereby reducing the need for large up-front capital expenditures on hardware.
Capacity-Based Licensing for Virtual Backup and Deduplication
Under the program, service providers license virtual appliances from Quantum on a capacity basis and then offer their own branded cloud-based backup services to end users. This approach makes the providers a more valuable partner to their customers and enables those customers to quickly realize the benefits of using deduplication for cloud backup.
Enabling Partners to Easily Brand, Market and Sell Their Own Backup-as-a-Service
By participating in the Quantum program, MSPs and VARs have access to all of the tools necessary to provide industry-leading backup and disaster recovery services to their customers and quickly maximize their investment, including:
Quantum Deduplication Technology as the Foundation of Efficient Cloud BaaS
Quantum's best-in-class DXi®-Series deduplication is the key to making cloud-based data protection more affordable for customers. Deduplication reduces backup capacity requirements by as much as 90 percent, requiring less bandwidth to get data to the cloud and less cloud storage capacity for that data, resulting in lower costs. Deduplication also accelerates the recovery process and makes cloud-based DR more cost-effective. With DXi deduplication, users can keep a full copy of their data on premise, providing a more efficient day-to-day recovery process while keeping an off-site backup copy in the cloud that is ready when needed.
SNIA Europe announces 2013-2015 Board of Directors
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Europe announced its new Board of Directors elected by its members for the 2013-2015 term. This group of nine IT industry experts will be accountable for the development of high-level tactics and the provision of guidance, direction and focus for the organisation’s activities across EMEA. Four directors hold the officer positions of chairman, vice chairman, secretary and treasurer. Other members of the Board are responsible for membership, technology, events, marketing, education and working directly with the association’s regional country committees. The new Board is made up as follows:
Bob Plumridge, the current SNIA Europe Chairman, said "It has been my great pleasure to serve as Chair of SNIA Europe for the last 4 years, it has been a period of great change, both in terms of technology and the evolving needs of our customers, for both SNIA and the industry as a whole.
I wish to thank all the present and former members of both the Board and the Country Committees for all their dedication and hard work in helping to continue to drive the changes needed to SNIA Europe in order for SNIA Europe to remain both relevant and viable in today's ever changing world. I also look forward to continuing to contribute in whatever capacity to SNIA Europe and the industry as a whole"
Markus Pleier, the current SNIA Europe Vice Chairman, said "I look forward to working with the new Board. Our team of volunteers is committed to providing the highest level of support and I am proud to be a part of such a dedicated team. In addition, with our new SNIA Europe membership structure in place, I truly believe we are demonstrating that SNIA Europe is now more open than ever before to all parties in the industry. I would like to welcome new members and offer the service of this new board to jointly driving Storage adoption and awareness through professional education".
SNIA Europe has been supporting the storage industry for more than ten years, and as a regional affiliate of the global SNIA organization, SNIA Europe advances the interests of the EMEA storage industry by driving the evolution and adoption of storage standards and technologies, educating the market and influencing relevant EU and national policies.
With a large base of member companies spanning the global storage market, open to vendors, channel partners, industry influencers, and academics, SNIA is a true industry catalyst that connects professionals within the IT industry, enabling knowledge exchange and thought-leadership for the benefit of both the industry and storage professionals. Its members bring their collective expertise to educate IT professionals on key storage technologies such as: Big Data & Analytics, Cloud Storage, Data Management, Storage Management, Data Protection Storage Security, Business Continuity and emerging technologies such as Flash and Software Defined Storage.
As a non-profit, vendor-neutral organisation, SNIA Europe actively recruits members in order to consistently maintain a well-balanced, valued, storage-focused industry organization that provides an invaluable community where storage professionals can engage with and learn from their peers. SNIA Europe members are open, easy to approach and always willing to listen to, help educate and influence the industry community in a highly collaborative way and based on common goals and strategic direction. The collective voice of SNIA Europe's members can be heard through our interaction with industry's leading press and analysts, presenting at key industry events, delivering vendor-neutral webcasts, storage certifications and trainings.
Ardent Leisure selects Brocade
Visitors to Dreamworld, Australia's largest theme park, will soon be enjoying wireless Internet access that is every bit as good as the park's 50 rides and attractions thanks to a major network upgrade program being rolled out by its owner, the Ardent Leisure Group. In order to meet customer demand for connectivity across its properties and embrace new entertainment opportunities over time, the group turned to Brocade to provide a high-performance network based on the Brocade® ICX® family of switches. Delivered by Brocade's local partner, ASI Solutions, the new network will enable Ardent to quickly and efficiently evolve alongside its ever-changing business environment.
While Dreamworld is the largest single asset in Ardent's leisure portfolio, the group has 138 assets across Australia, New Zealand and the United States. These assets include: WhiteWater World and SkyPoint Observation Deck on the Gold Coast, health clubs, marinas and bowling centers across Australia and New Zealand, and multi-attraction entertainment centers in the United States. The portfolio has been built through a series of acquisitions by Ardent, and has resulted in what is now one of Australia's leading leisure groups. In the process, however, the group has also come to own disparate networking systems.
The aging network infrastructure across the key sites mentioned above was constraining the services and service levels Ardent could provide. As such, the lack of performance, reliability and manageability in the local area networks at Ardent's sites were beginning to impact service delivery. At Dreamworld, for instance, the throughput of WiFi access points was constrained by their 100 megabit per second (Mbps) performance limits.
"Our portfolio is diverse and IT demands vary, but one thing we certainly need across all sites is much better manageability. As we acquire sites -- such as the gyms we bought at the end of 2012 -- we generally find that they are running consumer-grade equipment. We're quite cost-conscious and our IT team is always busy so we were looking for a local area networking solution that would work without fuss when installed, which is where Brocade comes in. We've been running its Fibre Channel SAN switches for six years and never had to reboot them," said Steven van Rooyen, Ardent's Group Network Administrator.
"Our inspiration to consider Brocade solutions was influenced by Gartner as we seek to work with market innovators in order to achieve the most value from our budget, and for this Brocade is right on target," he said.
At Dreamworld, Ardent has deployed a Brocade ICX 6610 switch stack in its server room, acting as the site's network core. Brocade ICX 6610 switches provide chassis-like capabilities in a stackable form factor, supporting Gigabit per second (Gbps) wire-speed, non-blocking performance across all ports. The switches can be stacked using four full-duplex 40 Gbps stacking ports that provide 320 Gbps of backplane stacking bandwidth with full redundancy -- eliminating inter-switch bottlenecks.
In addition, Ardent has extensively deployed Brocade ICX 6430 switches across the Dreamworld site to provide Gigabit Ethernet network access, with power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities that support WiFi access points and voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones.
"Brocade helped design the Dreamworld network, taking extra effort to ensure that it was correct, while ASI Solutions was very helpful in getting the project done. The result is that all the performance bottlenecks have been eliminated and, thanks to manageability of the entire infrastructure, it takes five minutes to turn on a feature whereas it used to take all day to change switch configurations," said van Rooyen.
For Greig Guy, Brocade's Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand, Brocade's solutions are ideal for an ever-growing network such as Ardent's that also adds applications for its end users: "The move from a disparate structure to a centrally managed network design will deliver true business and technology benefits for Ardent Leisure. In a sense this strategic upgrade will let them punch above their weight from a networking perspective."
Brocade also revealed that it will discuss and demonstrate its blueprint proposal to extend the advanced networking capabilities of the OpenStack Networking framework, Neutron, during next week's OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. The Dynamic Network Resource Manager (DNRM) blueprint is intended to simplify the deployment and management of physical and virtual networking resources within cloud infrastructures.
Public and private clouds are evolving beyond homogeneous, pooled resources as organizations seek to deliver improved efficiency and choice through multivendor support. By leveraging a native, heterogeneous approach delivered by DNRM, OpenStack cloud environments can address the needs of specific applications or services.
Highlights of the Brocade DNRM proposal include:
Brocade is also updating several other OpenStack contributions in its continued drive toward open networking solutions.
FalconStor® names Guy Berlo as Vice President and General Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa
FalconStor Software, Inc. announced the promotion of Guy Berlo to Vice President and General Manager for its EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
In this role, Berlo will drive FalconStor’s sales operations within the region, as well as continue to build and foster relationships with strategic partners, including Munich-based Fujitsu Technology Solutions GmbH and Concat AG. Berlo will work out of FalconStor’s Germany office in Munich, which is now the EMEA headquarters, and oversee the company’s EMEA offices in France and the UK.
Berlo joined FalconStor in 2001, started up the German operations, and most recently served as Vice President of Sales and Operations for FalconStor’s Central Region in EMEA. He has extensive experience in the IT sector including management roles at Auspex, debis (Daimler Benz Interservices).
“We’re delighted to promote Guy to lead FalconStor’s EMEA region,” said Gary Quinn, President and Chief Executive Office of FalconStor. “Guy has proven to be a valuable asset to FalconStor over the past 12 years, working with customers to provide superior support and forming strategic alliances that help the company grow in this region. We congratulate him and fully expect to see him thrive in this new role.”
“We have collaborated with FalconStor for more than 10 years to create and deploy storage virtualization and data protection solutions in enterprise environments,” said Olaf von Heyer, Chief Executive Officer of Concat AG, a FalconStor channel partner in Germany. “I’d like to congratulate Guy on his new role. In all my experiences working with him, I believe Guy has the right experience and the right team in place to strengthen FalconStor’s position in EMEA.”
Fusion-io enhances ION Data Accelerator
Fusion-io announced new updates to its record-breaking Fusion ION Data Accelerator all-flash shared storage solution. With broader high availability (HA), increased performance and scalability, as well as simplified sharing and manageability, the new features enhance the appeal of ION Data Accelerator as an ideal flash-based storage consolidation solution for enterprises seeking to add a record-breaking flash performance tier for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and other mission critical applications.
“Fusion ION Data Accelerator delivers outstanding performance for enterprise database workloads and has also recently set a number of world records in VMware VMmark scores with our OEM partners,” said Afshin Daghi, Fusion-io Vice President of Systems Engineering. “Fusion ION Data Accelerator removes storage-related performance bottlenecks to maximize performance for enterprise applications. This new release enhances the enterprise appeal of the ION Data Accelerator solution with features that deliver expanded options for high availability, scalability and management across the datacenter.”
In addition to support for performance acceleration in highly available Fibre Channel SAN environments, Fusion ION Data Accelerator 2.2 now supports HA deployments in high performance InfiniBand and iSCSI environments for critical applications like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The new HA support in ION Data Accelerator provides the data availability database administrators require to ensure businesses can operate seamlessly while delivering breakthrough performance.
Fusion ION Data Accelerator now also features increased performance and scalability with higher bandwidth 56 gigabit FDR InfiniBand and 40 gigabit iSCSI interfaces. Customers can scale their database environment up to 448 gigabit in a single ION Data Accelerator by adding multiple, low latency, high bandwidth interfaces. This high performance connectivity simplifies network management and eliminates the potential storage network infrastructure performance limitations that exist with storage arrays serving demanding I/O applications. In addition, ION Data Accelerator extends the useful life of traditional storage by offloading performance related storage tasks.
Provided with Fusion-io products such as Fusion ION Data Accelerator at no extra charge, the Fusion ioSphere management software now offers simplified ION Data Accelerator manageability at scale in mission critical environments. Fusion ioSphere provides configuration and operational management of HA deployments and shared storage for multiple application environments. Independent storage pools can be concurrently created and managed within ioSphere for each application sharing the flash performance tier. Administrators can also dynamically and easily expand host connectivity as applications horizontally scale performance with the addition of new servers.
HGST ships record 100 million 7.0mm 2.5-inch Mobile Hard Drives
HGST revealed that it has shipped more than 100 million Travelstar™ Z-series, 7.0-millimeter (mm), 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD). As the 7.0 mm HDD market maker, HGST also launched the new 2.5-inch, 1TB, Travelstar Z5K1000 drive – the industry’s fastest 7.0 mm 5,400 RPM HDD with best-in-class shock robustness for thin, ultra-portable laptops, Ultrabooks, external storage and ultra-compact CE devices. Embraced by all of the top global PC OEMs, HGST’s 7.0 mm Z-series HDD family features common connectors and mounting points for easy integration into existing systems to enable greater design flexibility for new thinner, lighter and more robust consumer electronics devices.
“The 7.0 mm 2.5-inch mobile market continues to be a strategic space for HGST as evidenced by our record 100M shipments,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “With the addition of our new 1TB Travelstar Z5K1000, HGST continues to offer the market’s broadest 5,400 and 7,200 RPM 7.0 mm 2.5-inch hard drive portfolio to meet the needs of a diverse mobile computing and storage segment.”
ASUS is an early adopter of the new Travelstar Z5K1000 drive and states, “As a company we’re disrupting the mobile computing landscape again with our ASUS Transformer Book Trio. To deliver game-changing technology for the mobile lifestyle, we need partners who are pushing the boundaries of innovation while allowing us to deliver an affordable solution to our customers. The HGST 7mm Z-series line has eliminated capacity and design limits without compromising reliability for our customers.”
According to IHS, the demand for thin HDDs is predicted to reach 140 million units by 2017, due to the increasing demand for ultra-thin PCs and tablets. The expanded HGST 7.0 mm Z-series will help feed this demand. With 1TB of capacity in a true 7.0mm format, an industry-first 6Gb/s SATA interface, an ultrafast 3.0 second boot time, as well as a 32MB cache, the rugged, low-power Travelstar Z5K1000 mobile HDD offers manufacturers the features required to design new, thinner systems. With its 26 percent slimmer z-height compared to traditional 9.5mm 2.-5-inch drives, and weight of only 95 grams, OEMs and integrators have an opportunity to differentiate product lines by utilizing space savings to produce thinner, lighter devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow.
“Hard drives will remain the mass storage vehicle of choice, having the best cost-per-GB ratio of any storage medium on the market,” said Fang Zhang, analyst, storage systems, IHS. “Also, as consumers create and consume more and more digital content, the need for additional storage becomes essential. Because of this, 7 mm HDDs, especially HGST’s 1TB Travelstar Z5K1000, will continue to play a major role in the thin and light device segment moving forward.”
Based on a unique, compact, two-disk 7.0 mm design, the new Travelstar Z5K1000 family features 1.6 watts (W) read/write power and 0.5W low-power idle, and delivers a nearly silent operation at 2.1 idle/2.2 seek bels. It also offers the industry’s highest operating shock at 400G/2ms and non-operating shock at 1000G/1ms to protect against bumps and rough handling in mobile environments. A dual stage actuator is included for track miss registration improvements for greater data integrity and reliability, as well as Advanced Format to improve drive capacity and error correction capabilities of the drive.
Travelstar Z5K1000 is the seventh generation self-encrypting drive (SED) to feature HGST’s Bulk Data Encryption. HGST’s hard drive-based encryption is a highly attractive option for any company routinely carrying sensitive information on laptops or portable storage devices. Designed to the Opal specification established by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), the SED encrypts data using protected keys in real time, providing users with the highest level of data protection available. It also speeds and simplifies drive re-purposing. By deleting the encryption key, the data on the drive is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.
