Data Robotics ships Drobo iSCSI SAN

Data Robotics today released its first iSCSI SAN storage array that, like its other low-end arrays, manages itself and allows any capacity or brand of disk drive to be mixed, matched and exchanged without any downtime. The new system extends the number of Smart Volumes - Data Robotics' thin provisioning that pools capacity from all eight drives - so users can now create as many as 255 virtual storage volumes, up from 16 volumes in the current Drobo model. Data Robotics' DroboElite offers automated capacity expansion and one-click single- or dual-drive (RAID 5 or 6) redundancy for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

The latest addition to the Drobo family of arrays is aimed at the small to mid-size business market and resellers selling into the virtual server space, according to Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. "Virtual servers tend to use a lot of small LUNs (logical unit numbers)," said Jim Sherhart, senior director of marketing for Data Robotics. For example, if a user were to initially set up DroboElite for dual drive failure, he could switch to single-drive failure with one mouse click. The DroboElite is also able to drop from higher to lower levels of RAID with no manual intervention. Users can also change out drives, adding higher-capacity models, in 10 seconds - with no formatting required, according to Sherhart. Tarun Chachra, chief technology officer at marketing company KSL Media , has owned two Drobo USB arrays for about a year and a half.

DroboElite can support VMware environments and advanced functionality including VMotion, Storage VMotion, snapshots, and high availability. He purchased four DroboPro arrays in June for use in two offices for Microsoft Exchange replication and backups for about 16 servers. Chachra said he was impressed that he could simply go out and buy a 1TB, 7,200 RPM SATA drive for $69 and stick it in the DroboElite, saving him money on total cost of ownership on pricier SAS drives. He's also beta testing the DroboElite, which he plans to purchase for backing up his VMware servers because of its higher throughput with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and greater number of creatable volumes. Chachra has been comparing his existing DroboPros, which can be configured with up to eight 2TB drives, to what he'd previously been using for backups: a Hewlett-Packard AiO400R array with four 500GB drives. The HP array runs the same iSCSI stack as the DroboPro, but it uses Windows 2003 Storage Server as a backup and replication application.

Chachra said the DroboPro cost about $3,500 compared with the AiO400, which cost $5,219. The HP array was set up for RAID 5 right out of the box and couldn't be changed; the DroboPro offers both RAID 5 and 6 interchangeably. The HP has forced Chachra to reboot his backup server every three days or so because it would hang up and couldn't handle bandwidth, he said. "We don't have huge IT teams looking at servers, so it's better for us to have something that can tolerate a higher driver failure rates," he said. "We also don't stock a lot of hard drives. The DroboElite also offers a non-automated thin provisioning feature called Smart Volumes that allows users to create new volumes in seconds and manage them over time by pulling storage from a common pool rather than a specific physical drive allocation. The main thing, though, is redundancy and having Exchange available all the time." "I don't know that an enterprise is going to run out and deploy this for 2,000 or 3,000 [users], but for small or mid-size shops, this is cost effective and it works as well as it should," Chachra added. Smart Volumes are also file system aware, which allows deleted data blocks to be immediately returned to the pool for future use.

Geoff Barrall, CEO and founder of Data Robotics, said the DroboElite can deliver cost savings of up to 90% compared to other iSCSI SANs "by combining cost-effective hardware with robust iSCSI features." The DroboElite is currently available starting at a price of $3,499, with multiple configurations selling for up to $5,899 for a 16TB configuration (using eight 2TB drives).

Cloud Engines updates Pogoplug media sharing device

On Friday, Cloud Engines introduced the second generation of its Pogoplug multimedia sharing device. The new version adds several new features. The Pogoplug is designed to plug into your home or small office network and let you access and share content of USB hard drives over the Internet using a standard Web browser.

First off, it now has four USB 2.0 ports instead of one so you can connect multiple USB hard drives or flash drives without the need for a USB hub. It works with H.264 video, as well as common photo types, but doesn't support DRM media. Along with that, there's now support for global search across multiple drives. (It still connects to your router using gigabit Ethernet.) Also new are improved transcoding and wider support for streaming movies on the Web or to an iPhone app; the ability to automatically sync photos, music, videos, and other content from apps such as iTunes and iPhoto; tighter integration with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace; automatic organization of your music, photos, and videos; and an address book that remembers the e-mail addresses with which you've shared content for future sharing. (Many of the enhancements will be available to current Pogoplug owners as well.) Pogoplug supports OS X 10.4 and higher as well as Windows XP and Vista, and Linux; Safari, Firefox 3, IE 7, IE 8, and Chrome Web browsers; and hard drives formatted as NTFS, FAT32, Max OS Extended Journaled and non-Journaled (HFS+), and EXT-2/EXT-3. Although there are no specific bandwidth requirements listed, the company says that a typical DSL connection (with 512 Kbps upload speed) works fine. Cloud Engines expects to ship the new Pogoplug before the end of the year for $129, and is currently taking pre-orders.

Ciena to buy Nortel unit for $521 million

Ciena has agreed to acquire Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks business for approximately $521 million in cash and stock. The two companies earlier this week confirmed they were in an advanced stage of negotiations for the sale.  Ciena will pay $390 million in cash and 10 million shares of Ciena stock for Nortel's MEN business. Hottest tech M&A deals of 2009 The MEN business includes Nortel's optical networking and Carrier Ethernet assets.

Ciena's stock closed yesterday at $13.05. The product and technology assets to be acquired include Nortel's long-haul optical transport portfolio, including the 40G/100Gbps systems; metro optical Ethernet switching and transport solutions; Ethernet transport, aggregation and switching technology; multiservice SONET/SDH product families; and network management software products. The assets to be acquired generated approximately $1.36 billion in revenue for Nortel in 2008 and $556 million in the first six months of 2009. Nortel says it has deployed 430,000 optical nodes to more than 1,000 customers in 65 countries, making Nortel – along with Ciena – one of the leading optical transport and switching vendors worldwide. "We believe this transaction will position us for faster growth by giving us greater geographic reach, broader customer relationships and a deeper portfolio of solutions," said Gary Smith, Ciena's CEO and president, in a statement. "We believe we are best positioned to leverage these assets, thereby creating a significant challenger to traditional network vendors." Ciena says it expects to offer employment to at least 2,000 Nortel employees, which represents more than 85% of Nortel's optical networking and Carrier Ethernet workforce. The agreement also includes all patents and intellectual property that are predominantly used in the businesses, and provides for the transition of substantially all of Nortel's Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet customer contracts. As of July 31, Ciena employed 2,110. Nortel's bankruptcy: A long time coming "Today's announcement is a positive step forward for the future of Nortel's Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet customers and employees," said Philippe Morin, Nortel MEN president, in a statement. "The sale of these businesses to a strong and stable buyer enables the innovation of one of the foremost leaders in the optical industry to continue to thrive." The transaction is subject to a "stalking horse" competitive bidding process and requires the approval of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice Ciena expects hearings before those courts to approve bidding procedures, break-up fee and expense reimbursement will be held within the next several weeks, followed by a bid period and a potential auction, with final sale hearings to be held thereafter. Nortel is liquidating assets after having failed to restructure the company under Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a viable telecom competitor.

The transaction is also subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of necessary regulatory approvals. To date, Nortel has sold its CDMA and LTE wireless assets to Ericsson for just more than $1 billion and its Enterprise Solutions business to Avaya for just less than $1 billion. It's also looking to sell its GSM wireless business. 

NEC upgrades to HYDRAstor grid storage system

NEC Corp. today unveiled several upgrades to its flagship HYDRAstor grid-storage system , adding write-once, read many (WORM) capabilities and the ability to encrypt data in transit. NEC officials said that the upgraded software will increase performance by 67%, while boosting security by improving HYDRAstor's ability to archive mission-critical data. "Over 70% of even high I/O data from source applications such as databases have not been touched after 6 months. The upgraded system also provides deduplication capabilities for more third party backup applications.

A lot can be off loaded onto more efficient platforms," said Gideon Senderov, director of product management for NEC's IT Products Group. The new RepliGrid in-flight data encryption capability protects data as it's being transmitted between HYDRAstor grids and data centers, he added. The new HYDRAlock WORM capability allows administrators to lock out any changes to documents or other records, maintaining a chain of custody for regulatory purposes, Senderov said. NEC also announced that it will allow users to license additional physical capacity that can be activated without adding additional components. A new quota management system allows administrators to set limits to the maximum effective capacity allocated for each file system and its associated application. For example, can now license as little as 12TB of capacity in a 24TB configuration and then pay a fee to activate additional capacity as needed.

The quota management system also offers threshold notifications as well as the ability to set aside a capacity reserve for other applications, such as critical archive data. The upgraded system can deliver up to 1.8TB per hour per accelerator node and up to 90TB per hour for the largest supported configuration of 55 accelerator nodes and 110 storage nodes, according to the company. Previously, the HYDRAstors grid architecture had a default capacity of 256 petabytes for all applications. "We are really looking forward to taking advantage of the new in-flight encryption and quota management functions," said Scott Ashton, a LAN/WAN specialist at TLC Engineering for Architecture Inc., an Orlando, Fla.-based engineering firm. "We've really seen the return on our initial investment as we've been able to take advantage of each new upgrade with HYDRAstor since our early adopter installation in 2007." NEC said that the performance boost comes from software enhancements and more efficient inter-node data transfer and communication protocols. Accelerator nodes are the controller blades with the CPU processing power and storage nodes are the system blades with disk storage capacity. NEC today also introduced lower-capacity, or "entry-level" models of HYDRAstor offering raw storage capacities of 12TB (or over 150 TB effective capacity); 24TB (or over 300 TB effective capacity) and 36 TB (or over 450 TB effective capacity). "A highly resilient storage solution primed for archiving, that self-evolves with the ability to intermix several generations of technology, offers global deduplication, great scalability, and automates provisioning, migration, workload balancing and system management will be the key features of a storage solution that the market will demand," said Dave Russell, a vice president at researcher Gartner Inc. The new application-aware deduplication feature allows newly-supported third-party backup applications such as IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC's NetWorker, as well as previously previously supported Simpana from CommVault and NetBackup from Symantec, to take advantage of the data reducing feature.

With the exception of WORM capability, the customers can install the latest HYDRAstor upgrades for free. The WORM upgrade costs $14,000 per accelerator node.

Mobile WAN operators raise 'openness' bar

It was a productive week for mobile WANs, with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint all making announcements that broke new ground for the licensed operators. One reason for the demand is that, theoretically, you could bypass paying for a separate voice plan for using AT&T's legacy circuit-switched GSM network. Especially noteworthy: * AT&T caved to pressure to allow VoIP traffic on its 3G data network from the iPhone, something customers have been demanding. Note, though, that VoIP traffic over the 3G data network will consume kilobytes on your data plan if you don't have an unlimited domestic plan.

Top 10 must-have iPhone business apps * Verizon Wireless said it has partnered with former nemesis Google to develop two open source Android devices this year and associated applications. And if you're traveling out of the country, usage rates can be astronomical, so you're better off using VoIP over Wi-Fi (already supported) in those locations anyway. Note that the devices will support the Google Voice application that AT&T recently shunned for its iPhone amid much public fanfare. T-Mobile and Sprint also each announced intentions to launch Android phones made by Samsung, leaving AT&T as the only carrier without publicly announced plans to offer an Android device. * T-Mobile introduced an enterprise version of its UMA-based service, which allows Wi-Fi calling over its GSM network. Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed surprise "that Verizon Wireless would emerge as the 'open' leader" among the mobile operators, though he said the two companies have been in cahoots on the Android project for 18 months. The Research in Motion BlackBerry-centric service is integrated with your corporate PBX features and dial plan, so users can pick up or make a call from either their desk phones or their BlackBerries.

Verizon Wireless offers such a managed service, too, says Rob Arnold, senior analyst at Current Analysis, but without the Wi-Fi calling capabilities. T-Mobile's Wi-Fi Calling with MobileOffice involves T-Mobile installing and managing a BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS) server on your premises. Note that you could also buy, install and manage an MVS server yourself. The difference is that the service offers unlimited Wi-Fi calling over T-Mobile's GSM core network for free to enterprise customers with 100+ T-Mobile lines or for $9.99 per month per line for companies with fewer than 100 lines.