IT managers may need more storage to handle all the storage announcements that occurred at this week's Storage Decisions show in Chicago as well as several other independent announcements.
In New York, Sun Microsystems unveiled several new storage systems, including a midrange system and a NAS device. The Sun StorEdge 6920 is a midrange storage array that scales as much as 65TB of internal and external capacity. Sun also introduced the Sun StorEdge 5210, a NAS device designed for entry-level departments and workgroups that share documents. The announcements were made during Sun's "Take Back Wall Street" campaign, during which the company made several hardware and software announcements designed to show financial investors that the company and its technology remain relevant in a fast-changing industry.
CommVault Systems was one of many companies to announce new products at the Storage Decisions conference this week. The company announced that its Galaxy backup and recovery software will work with Microsoft's Windows SharePoint Services. The new capability will allow for individual document recovery for Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 environments.
CommVault was also part of a group of storage companies participating in Microsoft's announcement of its Data Protection Server (DPS), one of many storage announcements occurring at the Storage Decisions show. DPS will not be available until next year, but it moved Microsoft into the disk-based backup and recovery market, a move many analysts saw as significant. "The big news here is that Microsoft has endorsed disk-based backup, and that is a big signal to everyone in the industry," said Bill North, storage analyst at International Data Corp. Other companies signaling their support for DPS include Dell, EMC, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Intel, Seagate Technology, and Sun.
EMC also announced that it is working with Microsoft to help IT organizations manage their Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail environments. The product, called the EMC Express Solution for E-Mail, is a combination hardware, software and services product that helps organizations manage e-mail messages by funneling older messages onto a single networked storage system.
Cisco Systems this week added two new products to its MDS 9000 family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches. Both the Cisco MDS 92161i fabric switch and the Cisco MSDS 9000 Multiprotocol Services Module are equipped with 14 Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Both products will support the latest version of the operating system for the Cisco MDS 9000, the SAN-OS 2.0, which is also being announced today. The two products are aimed at disaster recovery, remote backup, and business continuity applications, according to Cisco officials.
Veritas Software this week added support for IBM’s AIX environment across its storage management offerings today. New AIX support has been added for Veritas’ Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, Storage Foundation for Databases, Storage Foundation Cluster File System, Cluster Server, and Volume Replicator software packages. “We’re seeing a great deal of new installations of AIX, so it made sense for us to add support for the operating system,” said Bob Maness, senior director of product marketing at Veritas.
Veritas’ Storage Foundation 4.0 already supports Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Red Hat, and SuSe Linux.
