Storage Takes On New Forms
When it comes to storage, everything boils down to connectivity, capacity and the ability to tier media. These days, storage covers everything from key-chain drives to large rack-mountable systems.
So it should come as no surprise that the maker of ZIP drives is competing with a supplier of IP-connectivity software in the storage category for this year's VARBusiness Technology Innovators Awards. Of course, ZIP drives are out and REV drives are in at Iomega, which has reinvented itself as a supplier of networked attached storage systems and a variety of peripherals.
Demand for Iomega's ZIP drives, which have been the mainstay of external storage for well over a decade, is falling fast. Just last year, Iomega said ZIP drives accounted for $32.3 million in revenue, or 41 percent of overall sales for the second fiscal quarter, while this year it plummeted to nearly half, $16.7 million, or 25 percent of sales, while the new removable drive format (REV), drives jumped from $7.4 million in sales to $11 million.
Iomega says its Zip drive technology had a long run, but with the availability of high-capacity flash drives that can be put on a key chain available at the local grocery market, it was time to move up the food chain. The company is pushing its line of NAS boxes, and REV drives into small and midsize external storage offerings. "We are excited about the trend with REV," said Chris Romoser, an Iomega spokesman.
Meanwhile, FalconStor has revved up its popular IPStor Enterprise Edition replication software to address a popular hot-button in business continuity: continuous data replication (CDR). The new release, IPStor CRR, combines features offered by asynchronous mirroring and periodic delta replication into one offering.
The software supports continuous journaling of a production system's write-command in the background, thereby having minimal impact on primary storage and allowing network administrators to achieve recovery point objectives. IPStor CDR also integrates with the client-based FalconStor Snapshot Agents, available for major databases, file systems and messaging stores.
Finally, Hewlett Packard's recently released Modular Smart Array 50, takes advantage of what promises to be a hot trend in 2006: the co-existence of Serial ATA and SCSI on a common backplane. Enabled by the release of new Serial Attached SCSI, or SAS drives, the MSA 50 lets solution providers offer tiered storage solutions, allowing for primary data and information where performance is critical on the SAS drives, and the staging of backup data on SATA drives.
Category Snapshots: