Storage Clarity

Storage Bytes - April 7, 2010

2010-04-07T10:03:00.013-06:00

Storage Clarity news as of April 7, 2010.

1. Canadian storage company, Synetic, now offering FileLock archive & compliance software.

Storage Clarity is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Canadian headquartered storage manufacturer/distributor Synetic, to bundle Grau Data’s FILELOCK disk archiving software with Synetic data storage products. For further information please refer to the press release: http://bit.ly/d1z0s2

2. Storage is now reselling Millenniata archive products.

Millenniata has developed an extremely robust archive DVD disc, "Millennial Disc , or M Disc", that is designed to reliably preserve data for 50+ years; even in harsh environments. The M Disc can be read in any DVD+R compatible DVD reader. For additional information, please visit Storage Clarity's web site, http://www.storageclarity.com/, or Millenniata's web site, http://www.millenniata.com/. For those customers wanting to try out the technology, Millenniata is offering evaluation kits consisting of a M Disc writer and 16 M Discs.

Now, it's fair to say that a number of 120 mm media manufacturers claim to have archival grade DVD media. But, Millenniata's M Disc is not your ordinary DVD disc. Recently published test by the US Navy at China Lake confirms this with the M Disc being the only 120 mm disc to pass the tests.

In an attempt to confirm both the China Lake results and Millenniata's claims from an average users perspective, Storage Clarity has begun it's own testing of the M Disc. A rather informal, but practical set of tests comparing the M Disc against a typical off the shelf DVD disc. Results of the first test, a one week "freezer test", will be published in this blog later this month.

March 2010 Newsletter

2010-03-03T16:06:00.005-07:00

March 2010 newsletter: http://bit.ly/btC08J

Newsletter highlights include:

1. Storage Clarity Partners with Grau Data.
Storage Clarity is now reselling Grau Data’s FILELOCK audit-compliant archiving software throughout North America. FILELOCK is an easy to use, storage hardware independent, application transparent software product that prevents the alteration or deletion of files stored on standard Microsoft NTFS volumes for a specified retention period.

2. Storage Clarity partners with Avere Systems.
Storage Clarity has just signed on with Avere Systems. Avere has developed the FXT family of auto-tiering NAS appliances. The FXT appliance can significantly accelerate the operation of one or more NAS devices transparently.

3. Scale Computing Achieves VMware Ready Status Scale.
Computing has just announced that VMware has certified their 1, 2 and 4 TB storage nodes.

4. Expect 4 KB Sectored Hard Drives’ this year.
Hard disk drive manufacturers are moving from 512 byte sectored drives to 4 KB sectored drives. By using a larger sector size, manufacturers can increase both drive capacity and drive reliability.

5. InPhase Technologies Closes.
Holographic storage manufacturer InPhase Technologies ceases operations. It appears that InPhase ran out of funding before being able to deliver a commercial Tapestry holographic drive.

Storage Clarity Partners with Grau Data to Offer Grau's FILELOCK Solution

2010-01-22T12:40:00.009-07:00

Storage Clarity is very pleased to announce that Storage Clarity is now offering Grau Data's FILELOCK archive/compliance solution.

FILELOCK is a flexible, scalable, cost effective and compliant hardware-independent WORM file system for Microsoft Windows based platforms. Simply stated, it turns any NTFS volume into a WORM NTFS volume.

FILELOCK features include:

Files are WORM locked after creation to prevent modification or deletion.
File retention times can be set from seconds to forever.
Applications can transparently utilize WORM capability without modification, using third-party programs, API's or proprietary file systems.
File system utilities work unmodified (e.g., replication, mirroring, backup, auditing & virus checking).
Audit compliant (e.g., SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act & SEC Rule 240.17a-4)).
Completely storage hardware independent. Works with any standard NTFS volume.
Works with virtual machines (e.g., VMware) and cluster environments.
Even existing NTFS file systems can subsequently be write-protected.
SnapLock (NetApp) compatible.

Preserving/archiving unstructured data is extremely easy with FILELOCK.

For additional information on FILELOCK, please visit Storage Clarity's web site: http://www.storageclarity.com/

Press Release: http://storageclarity.com/Grau_Data_FILELOCK_Press_Release_-_Jan_19_2010.pdf

FILELOCK brochure: http://storageclarity.com/Filelock-en.pdf

2009-10-04T16:57:00.001-06:00

End of Magneto Optical Storage

For three decades, Magneto Optical (MO) drives have been used to store and retrieve digital information randomly on removable, cartridge WORM and erasable optical disks. With the beginning of Oct 2009 came the official end of SONY MO drives. With little fanfare, SONY Electronics, the last MO drive manufacturer, ceased manufacturing of their last MO drive, the F551, a 5.2 GB Multi-Function (MF) optical drive.

This End of Life (EOL) was expected. Early in 2004, SONY announced that their magneto optical drive products were being replaced by their new Professional Disc for Data (PDD) optical drive, a blue laser based product with a disc capacity of 23 GB, only to announce the EOL of the PDD optical drive two years later as they shifted their focus to consumer Blu-Ray optical drives. With PDD dead, the only professional optical storage product SONY offered was MO. Then in early 2008, SONY announced the EOL for the F561 drive, a 9.1 GB MF optical drive, leaving SONY and its MO customer base with only one remaining MO drive, the F551. As of September 30, 2009, the F551 MO drive will no longer be manufactured.

Obviously, the MO drive market was not a huge market. In fact, it was a shrinking niche market given the explosion of hard disk drives with never-ending increasing capacities and shrinking prices. Simply stated, optical storage technology has not been able to keep pace with magnetic disk and tape technologies. With professional and consumer optical technologies currently limited to 60 GB or less per media, automated robotic libraries/jukeboxes are needed to boost optical storage system capacities. Despite these market obstacles, MO technology offered important features/benefits for the professional removal storage marketplace that existing magnetic and consumer optical technologies lack. In particular MO technology was an industry standard technology, ANSI/ISO, that offered robust and reliable storage with media life times rated at 50 years and drives that automatically verified and corrected write operations on-the-fly. These features, plus others, made it a good storage technology for archiving and compliance applications.

Currently, Alliance Storage Technologies (ASTI) Ultra Density Optical (UDO) storage technology is the only direct replacement product for the MO marketplace. Available in capacities of 30 GB (UDO1) and 60 GB (UDO2) per cartridge, both WORM and erasable, UDO has a larger capacity than MO and a significantly faster performance than MO. Unfortunately, UDO optical drives cannot read and/or write MO disks; but given an identical media cartridge form factor, single libraries with mixed UDO and MO media have been popular.

For further information on ASTI's UDO products, or ideas on how you can upgrade/migrate an existing MO/UDO storage system, please contact Storage Clarity at http://www.storageclarity.com. Storage Clarity is a storage integrator and value added reseller that specializes in archival, compliance and data-protection solutions, and related services.

First Posting

2009-09-28T11:39:00.002-06:00

This is the first post for Storage Clarity's blog, and my first post.
The purpose of this blog is to communicate information and news concerning Storage Clarity and it's marketplace to existing and new Storage Clarity customers.
Hopefully, it's not too boring and maybe even thought provoking.

A short blurb on Storage Clarity...
Storage Clarity is a storage integrator and value added reseller that specializes in archival, compliance and data-protection solutions and related services.
Web Site: http://www.storageclarity.com

Storage Clarity solutions/partners include: ASTI(Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc)/Plasmon, DAS UDO optical libraries, drives and network archive appliances; QSTAR Technologies, network applicances (archive, HSM, CAS, email, DICOM & PACS) and archival storage management software; ProStor Systems, removal hard disk, RDX, based network archive appliances; Scale Computing, NAS/SAN cluster storage systems; and Infortrend, DAS & SAN hard disk storage systems.

Storage Clarity services include: Planning, requirement/technology/product/vendor/solution assessments; Implementation, installation/training; Support, telephone/email/on-site; Data, archiving/migration/conversion/risk/compliance and recovery; and optical storage system upgrading and/or replacement.