Kevin Komiega's Storage Blog Archives for April 2010

April 22, 2010 -- All signs are pointing to recovery in the data storage market as EMC, IBM and NetApp are all reporting big – in some cases record breaking – earning and sales.

EMC this week reported all-time record Q1 revenue, 92% profit growth, record quarterly free cash flow and an increase to its full-year 2010 business outlook.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci called the past few months "the best first quarter in company history" and credited the double-digit growth to EMC's "private cloud strategy and focus on four multi-billion dollar markets."

For the full details of EMC's Q1 results see "EMC breaks first quarter sales records."

IBM is also feeling the storage love. Big Blue announced its earnings this week, including an 11% jump in revenue growth for its System Storage hardware business for 1Q 2010.

Rewind seven weeks and NetApp topped expectations with Q3 GAAP revenues of $1.01 billion compared to $746 million in the same period last year (see "NetApp hit$ a home run").

The big boys are pulling in big bucks. The data storage market isn't recession-proof, but data doesn't stop growing and there's always a need for storage capacity despite advances in data reduction technologies and consolidation efforts.

So what's behind the record-breaking numbers? Are we in the midst of a hardware refresh cycle? Has the storage market really rebounded? On the other hand, is it just a proverbial case of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" (or any other tier 1 vendor)?

April 7, 2010 -- NetApp is advancing its efforts in the cloud storage market with the acquisition of Bycast, a developer of object-based storage virtualization software that turns multiple storage devices across geographically dispersed locations into a single pool for storing fixed content data.

NetApp announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Bycast for an undisclosed sum. According to NetApp, the plan is to expand NetApp's reach in unified storage by adding object-based storage software to the mix.

NetApp claims that Bycast's products will strengthen its ability too serve vertical markets such as digital media, Web 2.0, healthcare, and cloud services providers.

"The addition of Bycast's products enables NetApp to offer our enterprise customers and service provider partners a complementary solution that enables them to efficiently build and manage a very large-scale global repository of data central to many IT-as-a-service offerings," Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp, said in a press release today.

Bycast's flagship product is its StorageGRID storage virtualization software. StorageGRID virtualizes heterogeneous storage devices – everything from high performance disk to tape – and runs on industry standard servers and provides a virtualization layer that sits between applications and the underlying storage hardware.

Applications store and retrieve data from the StorageGRID grid using CIFS, NFS, and HTTP. The system manages stored data using configurable policies that determine the degree of replication, geographic placement, and the storage tier on which data is stored.

Bycast positions StorageGRID as a cloud storage platform for service providers based on its ability to deliver multi-tenant digital archives across multiple sites.

Bycast claims to have about 250 customers under its belt and has OEM partnerships with HP and IBM, both of which sell the StorageGRID software under their own brands.

HP and Bycast have a strategic OEM partnership focused on medical image storage and archiving under the HP brand Medical Archive Solution (MAS).

IBM's System Storage Multilevel Grid Access Manager Software (Grid Access Manager Software) is based on StorageGRID and the IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS) combines IBM's TotalStorage and IBM System x servers plus the Grid Access Manager Software. In addition, IBM also uses Bycast's File System Gateway technology to provide a standard CIFS/NFS interface for the IBM System Storage DR550.

According to NetApp, the company will determine whether it will continue the existing Bycast partnerships as it works through the closing of the transaction. The deal is expected to close in May 2010, subject to closing conditions.

According to an e-mail statement to InfoStor, NetApp plans to keep "most of the Bycast team" and does not plan to lay off existing NetApp employees because of the acquisition. NetApp is planning "to eliminate a small number of positions at Bycast. While Bycast employees' roles are not changing as a result of the acquisition, Bycast groups are being integrated into NetApp's organization."

The company plans to turn Bycast's Vancouver headquarters into a technology center for responsible for existing Bycast products and future product development.

Bycast's engineering and product management groups will report to product operations, solutions specialists will report to field operations, sales resources will report to sales, and so on.

NetApp announced its cloud storage intentions earlier this year when it formed a cloud partnership with Cisco and VMware (see Dave Simpson's article "NetApp, Cisco, VMware collaborate on the cloud").

The partnership is based on developing the Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture, a reference design with the goal of enhanced security in cloud environments.

Dell also entered the object-based storage fray recently with last month's debut of the Dell DX Object Storage Solution, a new homegrown system that uses metadata to store fixed digital content in a scalable, flat address space (see "Dell jumps into object-based storage").

March 31, 2010 -- Microsoft is out to dispel some of the storage myths surrounding Exchange 2010 and promote the use of low-cost disks to reduce storage costs while actually improving the availability of Exchange.

According to a recent blog posted by Microsoft's Exchange guru, Astrid McClean, the software giant has been getting some interesting feedback regarding the storage capabilities – or lack thereof – of the company's the latest version of the company's Exchange e-mail application.

McClean maintains that not only does Exchange 2010 not require high performance storage, but also that IT admins can actually give users bigger mailboxes using low-cost storage systems.

Microsoft claims that built-in features including high availability and disaster recovery, storage system improvements, and self-healing from disk faults let customers use large, inexpensive disks in configurations that maximize data redundancy.

Some of the more interesting tidbits from Astrid's blog:

Exchange 2010 doesn't support NAS…but it does support a large range of storage options including SAN and DAS. Depending on your high availability model, storage can be configured using RAID or RAID-less (JBOD) storage. Different customers will require different solutions based on their requirements, but everyone has the ability to deploy large mailboxes at low cost.

Exchange 2010 supports up to 100,000 items per folder, up from 20,000 in Exchange 2007. In addition to this, Outlook 2007 SP1 Feb09 update, Outlook 2007 SP2 & Outlook 2010 provide good performance for Cached Exchange Mode for mailboxes up to 10 GB in size, and even larger (25GB) using faster disks like 7.2K drives or SSD.

McClean also says the Exchange 2010 store was improved to support very large mailboxes (100 GB+).

InfoStor conducted an interview with McClean prior to the launch of Exchange 2010 outlining some of the new storage features (see "Q&A: The storage implications of Exchange 2010").

In addition to McClean's blog, Microsoft has published a white paper outlining the storage features of Exchange 2010.

In related news, EMC recently became the first storage vendor to take advantage of an Exchange API that allows for integrated SAN-based replication with Exchange 2010 (see "EMC integrates replication tools with Exchange 2010").