InfoStor

Eight years ago, most IT organizations’ ideas of affordable remote disaster recovery (DR) would have consisted of tape backups stored off-site and the potential use of a third-party col- location facility in the event remote system recovery from tape was needed. While still one of the most affordable options today, this method for remote DR comes with trade-offs: primarily, a gap of several hours to several days in both time to recover and the amount of data lost since the last backup to tape.

Tackling the problems associated with NAS silos, which lead to storage sprawl, startup Gridstore is prepping software and storage node building blocks that can pool NAS devices in a grid configuration. The NASg platform works with existing, standalone NAS devices and/or with storage nodes, or building blocks, that will be delivered by Gridstore’s channel partners and OEMs. NASg is in beta with the startup’s partners, with the official product launch expected around March.

Storage startup Gluster has become the latest vendor to develop an open-source storage platform that scales to hundreds of petabytes in a single volume across commodity storage nodes. The companyr recently announced the general availability of its Gluster Storage Platform, which combines the open-source GlusterFS file system with an operating system layer and a management interface to aggregate disk and memory resources into a single pool of capacity under a global namespace.

The IT world is driven by change in the various technologies that affect the overall environment: networking, servers, storage systems, operating systems and applications.

In more good news for the rebounding storage industry, revenues from external disk systems grew 19% in Q3 2010 vs. Q3 2009, topping the $5 billion mark, according to a report from IDC. Revenues for the total (external and internal) disk systems market grew to almost $7 billion, representing an 18.5% year-over-year growth rate. Total capacity shipped grew 65.2%. In the external array market, EMC held on to its #1 spot by a wide margin, with $1.35 billion in Q3 revenue and a 26.1% market share.

2011 seemed to be all about Big Data, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSDs), unified storage and integrated storage appliances. So what will 2012 bring? InfoStor talked to several veterans in the storage networking field about what they expect to see. Unlike other data storage fads that come and go within a few months, cloud mania will continue unabated in the year ahead.

ScaleIO, a Palo Alto Calif-based storage software startup, emerged from stealth today to announce that it had secured $12 million in funding. The company plans to use the money to boost its sales operations in support of its ScaleIO ECS software. The funding round was backed by Greylock Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and private investors, including Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain. ScaleIO’s early customers include SAP, Check Point Software and the Irish airline, Aer Lingus.

El Segundo, Calif.-based InfraScale recently launched FileLocker, a cloud-based and privately deployable file storage, sharing and syncing platform. According to InfraScale CEO Ken Shaw, his company’s template for enterprise-grade cloud file storage was influenced by “what SharePoint was” before feature bloat set in.

It’s time for the annual look into the crystal ball. InfoStor asked industry experts what they expected in 2013, and here’s what they said. It goes without saying that unstructured data growth will continue unabated. Therefore, we will continue to see new products for integrating analytics and storage of unstructured data.

HP has released some updates to its Converged Storage portfolio. This includes backup, dedupe, 3PAR arrays and storage services – all available in a single architecture. This is part of an overall convergence strategy that has been going on among the big storage vendors for a year or two – and HP is no exception. HP StoreAll Storage is a single platform for object and file data access that can accommodate a big data archive and cloud storage.