Storage news highlights

Last week was a little slow in the storage world, except for news from EMC, Nexsan, Isilon, HP and others. Here's a recap of what happened: 

EMC Corp. announced enhancements to EMC Avamar software that support Microsoft Windows and Macintosh clients. In addition, Avamar now also supports VMware vSphere 4 through integration of vCenter and vStorage and increased the backup capacity of Avamar by more than 60%. The Avamar Data Store now is available in 1 to 16 node configurations for a total capacity of 52.8TB of deduplicated data. In addition, Avamar is now able to export deduplicated data to tape.

Isilon Systems Inc. rolled out the Isilon IQ 7200X and 72NL NAS appliances, which support 2TB Serial ATA drives. The Isilon IQ 72000X delivers more than 10PB of capacity and over 40GBps of aggregate throughput from a single file system. The Isilon IQ 72NL has 72TB of raw storage in a 4U chassis and scales to more than 10PB in a single file system. The 72000X has a list price of US$175,000 per node, while the 72NL is listed at US$115,000 per node.

Quantum Corp. launched two new tape libraries for SMBs and distributed data centers. The Scalar i40 and i80 tape libraries start at $7,500 and include iLayer management software. The Scalar i40 can be expanded from 25 to 40 slots and the Scalar i80 scales from 50 to 80 slots. Users can turn on slot availability via a capacity on demand software license. Both libraries have Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI interfaces and also AES 256-bit encryption.

Hewlett-Packard Co. announced HP Data Protector Notebook Extension, software that backs up and recovers data stored on notebook and desktop PCs. Relying on backup policies, Notebook Extension works when users are offline – it captures data automatically every time a file is created or changed. Data is stored in a local repository temporarily for later transfer to a network data vault. In addition HP Data Protector Notebook Extension features deduplication, encryption and compression capabilities.

3x Systems announced the 3x RBA (Remote Backup Appliances) that allow SMBs to deploy disaster recovery and backup and recovery services. The RBAs are installed at the customer site, where they backup data from Windows servers, desktops and laptops. The RBAs are then relocated to a disaster-recovery site, where they continue to backup data on a scheduled basis. Each RBA also encrypts data. Users can recover their own files via a simple interface. The RBAs range in capacity from 100GB to 2TB and start at US$2,500.

Finally, ParaScale Inc. announced enhancements to its Cloud Storage software that lets IT administrators build storage clouds based on any x86 servers running Linux. PCS R2.0 lets a ParaScale cl8uster to serve as a backup platform for virtual machines, which can boot directly from the cluster. Enhancements to the software also include APIs based on SOAP and REST that allow users to integrate with third-party dashboards and workflows, synchronous replication capability that is controlled by policies, multi-tenancy support which enables chargeback and improved reporting and monitoring capabilities.

ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 is expected to be available later this month starting at US$.95 per gigabyte.