7 Hot New Storage Solutions To Check Out Right Now

Not Just EMC Inside EMC World

No matter how big EMC is, the company knows that the best way for it to expand its market is to depend on partners -- both technology partners and channel partners. Therefore, its annual EMC World conference becomes a chance to not only showcase the latest EMC storage solutions, but also solutions of its partners.

CRN is bringing information on new storage offerings from a variety of vendors whose business intersects with that of EMC, including new ways to improve storage performance, and monitor and automate storage infrastructures built on EMC technology.

Turn the page to see which non-EMC vendors worked to make sure they are ready to play with the king of storage itself.

CTERA Data Services Platform

New York-based CTERA Networks used EMC World to introduce its new Enterprise Data Services Platform, designed to manage data creation, collaboration and protection across the enterprise with full governance over all methods of data access and storage.

The new platform allows enterprises to deploy data services on the public or private cloud infrastructure of their choice, and works with many of EMC’s products, including ViPR, ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage), Atmos and Isilon. Because of its deduplication and subscription capabilities, the platform can be deployed fully behind the firewall.

Data Dynamics StorageX

The new StorageX 7.6 from Teaneck, N.J.-based storage migration and management software developer Data Dynamics now provides deep API integration with EMC Isilon Isi_Vol_Copy and NetApp SnapMirror to provide the simultaneous orchestration of array-based and host-based migration methodologies.

Also new with version 7.6 is access controls within the StorageX platform to support role-based management policies, a storage resource import wizard to simplify and validate target system configurations, and a health-monitoring solution for Microsoft DFS (Distributed File System) environments.

StorageX 7.6 is currently available with a starting price of about $50,000.

Dimension Data Intelligent Storage Management Service

New York-based solution provider Dimension Data unveiled its new Intelligent Storage Management Service. This new managed service provides a single interface for managing storage technology from multiple storage vendors, as well as automated storage provisioning and orchestration for migrating data to lower-cost tiers as the data ages.

With the new Intelligent Storage Management Service, clients can maintain their current data infrastructures while Dimension Data handles day-to-day management and operations. The company said clients also can easily add storage capacity while being billed only for actual data usage. A charge-back capability allows for internal business-unit billing.

Index Engines Partners With EMC On Legacy Tape Data Management

Holmdel, N.J.-based information management and archiving solution developer Index Engines unveiled a new partnership with EMC to help businesses get an intelligent analysis of their legacy backup tape data, and help develop an information governance strategy to migrate sensitive legal and compliance data to disk to improve management and access.

The Workshop for Legacy Tape Data Access Service, delivered via EMC professional services, leverages Index Engines' Catalyst software to ingest legacy tape catalogs, do metadata analysis and reporting on the content, and develop a disposition strategy to restore data required by legal and compliance to disk.

Load DynamiX Right-Sizing EMC Deployments

San Jose, Calif.-based Load DynamiX, developer of the Load DynamiX Enterprise Platform for storage performance validation, unveiled updates to its Workload Iterator and Composite Workload utilities at EMC World.

The Load DynamiX Enterprise Composite Workload utility lets users create multiple workloads across different storage protocols, and then run them simultaneously to better emulate production environments, especially database-based applications.

The newest version of Load DynamiX Workload Iterator gives storage engineers the ability to model thousands of workload scenarios to see how they will perform on all-flash or hybrid storage systems.

PernixData

San Jose, Calif.-based PernixData, which develops software to virtualize server flash and RAM for scale-out storage performance independent of capacity, used EMC World to enhance the software's enterprise-class capabilities to include DFTM-Z adaptive compression, intelligent I/O profiling and Role Based Access Control (RBAC). PernixData said these new features make it easier than ever to decouple storage performance from capacity to optimize application performance and scale-out capacity growth while not disrupting existing IT infrastructures.

VMware Virtual SAN Health Check

VMware at EMC World introduced the general availability of its new VMware Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in, which was created to address issues related to storage hardware health and configuration. The Health Check Plug-in is a vCenter plug-in that seamlessly integrates with the rest of the vCenter user interface to provide detailed warnings and alerts, and suggest ways to solve issues.

Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in automatically checks such things as compatibility of VSAN clusters with hardware compatibility lists, whether networks are properly configured, ability of a cluster to run after a host failure, and the health status of multiple storage devices and virtual machines.