EMC announced on Monday software for its EMC Celerra network attached storage system that can reduce storage capacity requirements by as much as 50% in VMware environments. The EMC Celerra Plug-Ins for VMware Environments also increases the cloning speed over existing solutions and automates the failback process for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in Network File System environments. The new software lets VMware administrators more easily provision and manage VMware data stores and lets the perform snapshot or clone operations of individual machines.

Assessment: With this announcement EMC is catching up to the virtualization capabilities of other network-attached storage vendors such as EqualLogic and NetApp. The features EMC are introducing are essential in any NAS system that is connected to virtual machines.

Deduplication and virtual tape library vendor SEPATON today introduced a mid-range appliance to their deduplication offerings. The S2100-MS2 fits between the Rack Ready small enterprise appliance and the S2100-ES2 designed for large enterprises. The company also extended virtual tape library support for EMC NetWorker.

The S2100-MS2 to its credit is a multi-node system that allows for growth without forklift upgrades. The multi-node capability differentiates it from competitors such as Data Domain, who have only single-node systems.

The S2100-MS2 has an entry capacity of 36TB raw and 30TB usable and a maximum capacity of 192TB raw and 160TB usable. Its 1,200 MB/sec ingest speed is matched by 34.5TB an hour throughput. The appliance is also upgradable to the larger S2100-ES2. The system starts at $110,500.

3PAR InServ goes solid
Adaptive optimization with SSD provides huge performance boost

Much attention has been given to hybrid arrays that couple Solid State Drives (SSD) with rotating media. In fact, many industry experts are declaring the demise of high cost fibre channel drives as low cost Serial ATA drives (SATA), when coupled with a relatively small amount of SSD storage, can provide an extreme boost in performance at a relatively low cost. High end systems already have established the differential between Fibre Channel and SATA with tiering controls. 3PAR has about five years of experience in the autonomic processes involved in moving data between high cost drives and low cost drives. The newest InServ software option, coupled with enterprise class SSD’s, allows 3PAR customers to take advantage of the SSD speed without forklift replacements.

Adaptive Optimization — 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software is a new product option that requires 3PAR System Reporter software, version 2.7 or above. The algorithms intelligently monitor sub-volume-level performance in context with configurable policies to distribute storage workload across tiers and adapt to changing application demands.

Volume Management — InServ allows storage administrators to define a profile for each volume, and tiers of storage within the volume can be designated, for example, SSD, Fibre HDD, SATA HDD. Within each volume, Adaptive Optimization monitors the activity in regions of 128MB. This granularity allows the system to make autonomous decisions regarding the placement and movement of data either on a default basis, which places the ‘hot’ data on the fastest media, or by controls set by the administrator within the volume policy. Such controls include limitations on the amount of data moved, setting schedules for movement, setting the analysis period, and so on. This allows the administrator to tweak performance based on application knowledge. Additional controls allow the volume to be managed for maximum performance, which will bias placement to the fastest media, minimum cost, which will bias placement on the least expensive media, or balanced, which is the default setting and allows adaptive optimization to balance between speed and cost of storage.

Enterprise SSD – Each STEC MACH8 SSD in 50GB increments provides 10K Input-Output operations per second via a SATA interface. While individual drives from STEC can be ordered in higher capacities, InServ takes advantage of the parallel speed of multiple drives within the array. SSD’s can be added in 8 drive (400GB) increments to any InServ F-Class and T-Class Server Storage Array. A small amount of SSD goes a long way. 3PAR analysis shows that 2% to 5% of total storage in SSD provides an optimal boost in storage performance.

SSG-NOW Assessment — The addition of enterprise SSD support with adaptive optimization is another major performance feature that extends the InServ systems already industry-leading feature set. When coupled with other 3PAR features like autonomic volume provisioning and thin built-in, the solid state support will prove it is worth solid gold to customers requiring high speed storage performance.