TwinStrata launched CloudArray as an iSCSI virtual appliance in May 2010, and added a physical appliance later in the year. The gateway moves data off to public cloud providers. With CloudArray 3.0, TwinStrata is trying to appeal to customers who want to expand their SAN and private clouds.

“We are broadening our ecosystem of the private and public cloud, and also leveraging existing storage as a starting point,” TwinStrata CEO Nicos Vekiarides said. “We are enabling customers to create a hybrid configuration to combine existing assets.”

Vekiarides said by letting customers use CloudArray on existing storage, they can access their data from anywhere. He claims TwinStrata is enabling a Cloud SAN, with multi-tenancy and multi-site scalability along with local speed performance, data reduction, high availability, encryption, centralized disaster recovery and capacity management.

With CloudArray 3.0, TwinStrata also has automated its caching capability. TwinStrata’s appliance uses the storage on a JBOD or host RAID controller or array for cache. Previously, the cache capacity had to be manually configured.

TwinStrata also added support for Nirvanix’s Cloud Storage Network, Rackspace and OpenSpace private and public clouds.

Mike Kahn, managing director at The Clipper Group, said TwinStrata’s 3.0 release allows customers to “put a veil over existing storage so it can be used as one or more tiers of storage. And over time, they can move to a public or private cloud,” he said.

The 3U E5510 can scale  up to 1,080 TB by adding three Nexsan E60 and three E60X expansion chassis to hold a total of 360, 3 TB SATA drives. The system also can be populated with 15,000 RPM SAS or single-level cell (SLC) solid state drives (SSDs). The E5510 has two active/standby NAS controllers so if one fails, the other picks up all operations. The E60 disk arrays have dual, active/active RAID controllers. Each NAS controller has two, six-core Xeon processors and a maximum of 96 Gigabytes of RAM per controller.

The E5510 out-scales Nexsan’s E5310 that supports 720 TB with four E-Series expansion chassis that hold 240 3 TB SATA drives. That system has 48 GB of memory and two, quad-core Xeon processors per controller. “We are not moving up the market,”  Nexsan’s CTO Gary Watson said. “We have a number of customers that are doing multi-petabyte deployments.”

Nexsan also added asynchronous replication support to the E5000 to go with the platform’s synchronous replication, snapshots, thin provisioning and FASTier for high-performance SSD-based cache to boost heavy workloads in applications such as databases or VMware, Xen and Hyper-V environments.

The company also made enhancements to its E-Series block storage systems. It has added a smaller capacity E18X expansion shelf that holds up to 18 SATA, SAS or SSDs. The E-Series also now has a SAS-to-host interface option along with support for 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel and 10-Gigabit iSCSI. The Nexsan E-Series is made up of the E60 storage system, containing 60 drives in a 4U form factor, the 2U E18 system with 18 drives and the 60X expansion unit with 60 drives in a 4U.

Symantec Corp. today upgraded its FileStore N8300 clustered network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, adding deduplication for primary storage, metro-clustering and cascading replication, and cloning of VMware images.

FileStore N8300  5.7 now can be used as a storage target in virtual machine environments, where a file-level cloning feature is used to create a golden image and users can clone that image into thousands of VMDK files, said Yogesh Agrawal, Symantec’s vice president and general manager for the FileStore Product Group. Symantec also leveraged code from Veritas Cluster File System  to create a deduplication module in the FileStore appliance to reduce redundancies in the VMDK files.

The NAS device also now supports metro-clustering replication for disaster recovery that automates the process of bringing up the disaster recovery site when the primary site goes down. Previously, the disaster recovery site had to be made live manually.  Metro-clustering is based on synchronous volume mirroring and the cluster limitation is 100 kilometers. Cascading replication now allows replication to be done from a secondary to a tertiary site. “In that scenario, we can do synchronous replication,” Agrawal said.

FileStore starts with about 10 TB of capacity and can scale to 1.4 PB. A common customer configuration is a two-node, 24 TB system that has a list price of $69,796.

By Sonia Lelii, Senior News Editor

Hitachi Data Systems earlier today announced it has scooped up its OEM partner BlueArc for $600 million, and hours after the news broke, not many seemed to be taken aback by the acquisition that gives HDS its own NAS platform.

“Little surprise, big deal,” said Arun Taneja, founder, president and consulting analyst for Taneja Group. “BlueArc has one large OEM partner, and Hitachi has never had a NAS box to speak of. They had a poor NAS offering until they signed a deal with BlueArc. The company has become more and more important to HDS. Hitachi is highly dependent on these guys, and HDS is BlueArc’s lifeblood.”

SAN vendor HDS and BlueArc have had a successful five-year OEM relationship: HDS sold BlueArc’s SiliconFS file system with its storage arrays to give HDS platforms NAS capability. BlueArc was founded in 1998 and it had refiled for an IPO in June this year. The company initially filed for an IPO in September 2007 but withdrew after the housing bubble burst. The 13-year-old company has had a long stint as a startup, losing a total of $230.3 million since it began shipping storage systems in 2001. “BlueArc has had a lot of ups and down over the years,” said Taneja. “This current management team has steadied the ship and slowed down the bleeding.”

The company helps accelerate filer I/O in HPC environments with its enterprise-level Titan Series Servers and midrange Mercury Series Servers. It also offers three storage arrays, data protection software, file system software, and virtual and tiered storage products. Taneja said BlueArc’s filer products came with a high cost premium compared with market leader NetApp because the company designed and built its own NFS ASICs. “Their average cost is definitely higher than NetApp,” said Taneja. “It’s the only company I know of that does NFS in ASIC. BlueArc has a solid product.”

This deal follows several high-profile purchases of storage startups last year, including Hewlett-Packard’s $2.4 billion purchase of 3PAR, Isilon Systems’ sale to EMC for $2.25 billion and Dell’s $820 million purchase of Compellent Technologies.

DDN is preparing to launch – probably next month – a NASScaler product that DDN’s EVP of strategy and technology Jean-Luc Chatelain said will be “aimed at the NetApp market” rather than HPC.

“It has standard IT NAS-type behavior,” Chatelain said. “We realized the demand for the density, bandwidth, capacity and performance that we used to see in specialty machines has migrated toward the traditional NAS market. It’s the standard NFS behavior on top of high performance computing.”

The NASScaler will be DDN’s fourth file storage system, to go with its xStreamScaler for media and entertainment, GridScaler for cloud and HPC and ExaScaler for supercomputing.

DDN bills itself as the largest private storage vendor, an assessment that IDC agrees with. DDN executives claim the vendor generated $180 million in revenue in 2010 and grew about 40% in 2009 and 2010. The vendor’s storage sells into what EMC calls “big data” markets, which are the same ones NetApp intends to chase with LSI Engenio. Those markets include HPC, media and entertainment, digital security, and as a platform for cloud providers.

It will take awhile before DDN can provide NetApp with solid competition in mainstream NAS, but the vendors will contend for both end user customers and OEM partners in the HPC space. The Engenio 7900 Storage System competes with DDN’s products, and is sold by OEMs including Cray, Teradata and SGI.

“It will be interesting to see what happens now,” Chatelain said. “NetApp is not focused on the domain where we play. NetApp is not a brand name in the world of high performance computing or rich media. We are known as people committed to those verticals.”

High end storage systems are back in style, at least according to the latest storage revenue numbers from IDC.

IDC’s worldwide quarterly disk storage tracker research shows that storage systems with an average selling price of $250,000 and above rallied in 2010, finishing the year with 30.2% market share. That, according to senior research analyst Amita Potnis, brings the high-end back to its 2008 pre-financial crisis level.

“There were multiple drivers beyond the remarkable growth in high-end systems, including demand for storage consolidation and datacenter upgrades supported by new product push from a number of vendors,” Pontis said in the IDC release.

Hitachi Data Systems had the most significant high-end product release of 2010 with its Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). HDS revenues jumped nearly 30% in the fourth quarter over 2009 after the VSP release.

Other than the rise of the high end, the fourth quarter of 2010 looked a lot like the rest of the year for storage sales. Ethernet storage – in the form of NAS and iSCSI – continued to outpace the market by a wide margin, as did vendors NetApp and EMC.

For the fourth quarter, IDC put external storage system revenue at over $6 billion for an increase of 16.2% over 2009. The NAS market grew 41.3% with EMC owning 52.8% of the market and NetApp 23.7%. The iSCSI SAN market grew 42.1% in the quarter, led by Dell with 32.6% and HP with 14.7%.

NetApp overall revenue grew 43.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and it increased market share from 8.4% in 2009 to 10.3%. EMC remained the overall leader with 26% share, followed by IBM at 16.3% and HP at 11.6%. HDS (8.7%) and Dell (7.9%) round out the top six behind NetApp. HDS (29.7% growth), EMC (26.3%) and NetApp outpaced the overall market gain. IBM, HP and Dell lost market share in the quarter.

For the entire year, IDC put external storage revenue at $21.2 billion for an 18.3% increase over 2009. EMC led the way with 25.6% market share, followed by IBM at 13.8%, NetApp and HP with 11.1% each, and Dell with 9.1%. Only EMC and NetApp gained market share for 2010 among the top five. 

Barrall said about five to 10 of Maxiscale’s engineers will join Overland, which acquired the Snap portfolio from Adaptec in 2008 for $3.6 million in an attempt to become a storage systems vendor instead of only selling tape. The Snap line is a key piece of Overland’s turnaround plan under CEO Eric Kelley, who was Snap’s CEO when Adaptec bought it in 2004.

MaxiScale’s Flex software was developed to run with commodity hardware. Barrall said he’s hoping to release Snap clustered NAS systems by mid-2011. Overland has already brought out Snap iSCSI SAN and unified storage products.

“Adding scale-out feature to SnapServer line was definitely on the list of things we wanted to achieve,” he said. “This is a great opportunity for us.”

Overland did not disclose the purchase price, but MaxiScale had $25 million in venture funding and no paying customers. MaxiScale launched its first product in Sept. 2009 and was preparing to bring out a second-generation product when it ran out of money.

Barrall said Overland would not market MaxiScale’s existing or planned products, which were targeted at customers such as cloud providers and web companies with large amounts of small files and millions of concurrent users. He said he Overland will tailor MaxiScale’s technology intended for high-end products to the lower-end and midrange NAS markets that Snap addresses.

“They were targeting large server clusters,” he said of MaxiScale. “Their technology scales well. You really don’t have this technology in products in the price range we sell into.”

He didn’t rule out using the technology for a new product platform down the road, though. “A file system comes with the client that you can access through the NAS,” he said. “You can install the client on a server for direct access to the cluster. You can bring Exchange and SQL databases onto the NAS. There’s definitely interesting things we can do there.”

But the first priority is to make MaxiScale’s technology fit with Snap products. “Our goal is to make the technology straightforward to use,” Barrall said. “We want to make it easy for customers to scale and keep all their data in one area.”

Barrall said there were connections between the companies because several Maxiscale executives were former Snap employees before Overland bought Snap. There is another connection – Barrall and Maxiscale CEO Gianlucca Rattazzi were founders of NAS vendor BlueArc.

MaxiScale raised just under $8 million in a B funding round over the last year, but it wasn’t enough to keep it going.

“MaxiScale had a great story, but needed execution,” Server and StorageIO analyst Greg Schulz said. “In some ways it was a company with IP focused for a market that had not evolved enough to be commercially viable. In the end, great stories and strategies need execution, time, money and patience – at least two of which investors often are not comfortable with.”

The NEO 8000e scales to 3 PB of capacity with 1,000 cartridges and 24 tape drives and supports LTO-5 and LTO-4. The library will eventually replace the NEO 8000 – Overland’s previous high-end library. Besides scaling higher, the differences between the 8000e and 8000 are the 8000e has embedded connectivity with Fibre Channel, SAS and SCSI drives embedded while the 8000 requires bridge cards for each protocol, and the 8000e requires no hardware requirements for partitioning. Overland’s director of product marketing for tape products Peri Grover says the vendor will offer an upgrade kit for 8000 customers who want to go to the 8000e.

The Neo8000e will compete with enterprise drives from Quantum and the Oracle Sun StorageTek platform.

“We see a lot of interest from the legacy StorageTek-installed base,” Grover said.

Pricing starts at $47,999 for the Neo8000e.

The SnapServer N2000 is the new high end of Overland’s NAS platform, which also supports iSCSI through Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) and VDS (Virtual Disk Services). The 2U unit is available with four or six Ethernet ports and scales to 144 TB. The previous high end of the SnapServer NAS line, the 850, is a 1U model with four Ethernet ports.

“This is the top end of our NAS line,” Overland product marketing manager for network storage products Drew O’Brien said. “It’s for customers who need performance and scalability in simple IT environments. Maybe they bought NAS in the consumer space before and now need something more sophisticated.”

O’Brien says the NS2000 will compete with EMC Iomega and NetGear NAS devices. Pricing starts at $4,999 for 4 TB and $5,999 for 8 TB.

While these products are a step up from what Overland already had, they’re hardly enough to turn around a company that has suffered heavy financial losses for years. Considering Overland CEO Eric Kelly has put together a distinguished team including VP of engineering Geoff Barrall and VP of sales and marketing Julian Mansolf, we can expect more product rollouts soon.