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April 19, 2007—We wrap up our coverage of some of the product announcements at the Storage Networking World conference this week in San Diego with the following:
Dell became the first large storage vendor to ship tape drives based on the LTO-4 format, which provides 800GB of native capacity and a transfer rate of 120MBps. (Both specs can be doubled with compression.) In addition, LTO-4 drives include native drive-level encryption—a first for midrange tape drives.
Dell's PowerVault LTO-4-120 tape drives are priced from $4,000. Media starts at about $200 per cartridge.
Also on the encryption front, Crossroads Systems introduced the StrongBox TapeSentry encryption appliance, which includes front-end compression. Differentiating it from other stand-alone encryption appliances, TapeSentry is based on Crossroads' core router engine, providing full router functionality. The company claims wire-speed encryption.
Other features of the TapeSentry encryption appliance include multi-streaming for LTO-3 tape drives, four 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports (which can be configured in any combination of host or device connections), AES-256 encryption algorithm, role-based user management, an audit log, support for access controls with user-defined encryption policies, key management and security, crypto-signed logging, pass-through for non-encrypted I/O, buffered tape writes and inquiry caching, and support for heterogeneous (multiple formats) tape environments. The appliances are priced at approximately $25,500.
Encryption appliances provide an alternative to drive-level encryption and software-based encryption.
Arkeia Software used SNW to preview a "federated" data-protection appliance, dubbed EdgeFort, that integrates a number of components, including Arkeia Network Backup V6.1 software, disk-to-disk backup/recovery software with an integrated virtual tape library (VTL), encryption software, bundled client software for networked servers, remote management software, RAID-1 disk, and a choice of an LTO or DLT tape drive.
Xtore showcased a number of Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA subsystems, including the new XD 2000 RAID arrays, which support Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and/or Serial ATA (SATA) drives and can be configured with dual 4Gbps Fibre Channel or 3Gbps x4 SAS host channels per blade.
The XD 2000 includes RAID 50 Interleave (RAID 50i) for higher redundancy and availability. RAID 50i creates multiple RAID-5 drive strata within a single RAID set across single or multiple enclosures within a storage domain and protects against multiple drive failures (one per stratum). Xtore officials claim that RAID 50i does not have the overhead and performance penalties sometimes associated with RAID 6. The subsystems also support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6.
Other features of the XD 2000 include dual active controllers, logical volume virtualized storage, and support for up to 16 drives in a 3U enclosure.
Emulex, LSI, Oracle, and Seagate launched the Data Integrity Initiative (DII) to spearhead industry adoption of the Data Integrity Field (DIF) standard to enable end-to-end (application to disk) data integrity for storage environments. DII technology uses standardized data checking mechanisms that allow components to continuously monitor the integrity of data—both in-flight and at-rest. The technology not only detects errors, but also isolates and reports the sources of data corruption.
For more product highlights from the Storage Networking World show, see
SNW, Day 1 and SNW, Day 2.
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