Bulk CD Copying

CD Copying is a great way to back-up data or create mass-marketing material such as catalogues. Bulk CD copying  is performed on industrial CD copying equipment. This may consist of a tower of CD recorders which receive data from a master-computer. Some CD copying equipment is loaded manually but newer machine have a robotic CD transfer arm which can add blank CDRs to the CD tray and remove the burned CDs, adding them to a stack. The automated process is much more reliable and ensures that large orders can be fulfilled on time.

Labelling of CDs has come a long way also. No longer are you left hunting around for a half-working permanent marker to write illegibly on the disc. Some CD burners will use a system known as LightScribe, which uses the  the writing laser to burn your image design into the top-surface of the CD.

A quicker alternative is use a sticky paper label which is stuck on the CD. This has the advantage of being easy to print using conventional printing techniques, cheap and fast. For the highest-quality printing, full-colour CD labels can be silk screen printed on large orders but is expensive and best used on large batches of CDs or those that are required to last for more than seven years.

IBM finds glitch in its firmware

IBM has detected glitch in its firmware which can lead to complete failure of some of its Seagate SATA drives in BladeCentre and xSeries servers. Read more

Nexsan launches new version of archiving system, Assureon 6.0

Storage company Nexsan has added a new version Assureon 6.0 to its archiving system with extra security features and scalability.

The updated software includes AutoMaid green technology which helps in reducing energy consumption in a hosted data-centre. The Assureon 6.0 consists of archiving software, servers and disk storage in a single rack.

Nexsan applies its own data storage method, Maid (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks) exploiting the fact that disk arrays could be using energy on account of its continuous rotation. Maid deploys more of smaller disks so that at any one occasion many of the discs remain idle. This helped in reducing overall energy consumption.

According to Gregg Pugmire who is executive vice president of Nexsan’s business development, all companies were focussing on saving money and energy, whilst trying to increase efficiency by using new outsourced subscription models for their storage applications and software. He remarked that these features were useful for SaaS applications.

Assureon 6.0 also features CAS (content-addressable storage) capability, enabling virtualisation of a system into physically secure unlimited number of archives.

While Nexsan has yet to announce price for Assureon 6.0 system, it has thrown a challenge to iSCSI storage area network packages of LeftHand Networks and EqualLogic PS 5000.

UK’s Honda F1 Racing Team finds new back-up capabilities

The UK-based Formula One racing team has succeeded in finding new data storage and back-up capabilities. The heterogeneous product will back-up its multi-platform storage environment. This will enhance data protection and make the system cost effective.

100 TB data of this Northamptonshire-based team is stored on virtualised storage area network (SAN). The SAN provides information to 80 file servers, 700 clients and a number of Microsoft Windows, Unix and Linux systems. According to Matt Harris, the team’s technical infrastructure manager, existing EMC NetWorker backup software was not able to protect its varied storage environment. The team was in search of a solution with the flexibility to suit its backup needs.

Team was assisted by its IT supplier and BackBone NetVaultBackup in the installation of new backup facility. The interesting feature of the facility was that it had zero impact on users during the installation. Features like server-less backups, direct backups across SAN and use of the server client backup, facilitated the process.

The team has moved 30 TB of its data across 40 servers onto the system. The process of data migration to NetVault Backup is currently on and will soon be completed.The Honda F1 Racing Team can now freely backup its enormous data within no time.

CIOs should walk their talk on virtualised storage

A survey of delegates, who attended Gartner’ IT Expo by ONStor, revealed that 56 per cent of them considered virtualisation as worth deploying. But the truth is only 27 had actually implemented it in their companies. About 40 per cent of them acknowledged traditional storage methods would not work for long.
IT managers see many benefits in its implementation as regards flexibility, data accessibility and overall savings in costs. According to Marcos Burnett, UK country manager at ONStor, their research has highlighted the obsession of CIOs with the virtualisation. The unfortunate part is that very few are walking the talk on virtualisation. It is not being taken up as quickly and as earnestly as many would have thought.

The ONStor research showed that 90 per cent of IT managers expect perfect compatibility of their storage systems with virtualisation market leader VMware and such other vendors.  Marcos reports that companies would be more interested in seeking a high value price for performance ratio from the virtualised storage. Vendors who would demonstrate competitive advantage will only be able to survive in the expanding market, as per the conclusions of the research.

Security vendors not enthusiastic about government’s super data base

Vendors are sceptical to news that UK government is planning to set up a super data base. They cite governments track record in failing to protect several public data in past. The data base will be logging telephone call, email website visit and SMS made by 60 million UK citizens. Home office is incorporating this in the data communication bill to be announced in November. The large ISPs, which would keep the records for 12 months, and  hand them over for inspection with court’s permission.

The information stored would exclude content of emails and calls. It will only store location and time. Police would be able to use it to analyse communications by and between the suspects.
Jamie Cowper of PGP Corporation, remarks that it is absurd on the part of government to bring in ‘super-data base’ when public has lost confidence in security of data. Instead government should focus on fixing and testing security of existing data base. He has apprehensions that US companies might not trust the governments standards of security.

Chief security architect Chris Mayers of  Citrix UK, also opines that single data base would neither uphold national security nor protect the public.  Centralised data base is not required even as per The Data Retention Directive of the European Union. Public is not likely to benefit any way.  Security experts agree that public has no confidence in the security of data after the loss of 25 million records by HMRC.  But Richard Archdeacon of Symantec sees a sea change in attitudes at the highest levels of government regarding security, and assures that necessary measures are going to be firmly in place.

Solix Joins Sun MECA Program

Solix Technologies Ltd has joined hands with Sun Microsystems MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance partner program with the intention of bringing Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite to MySQL databases. Sun’s MySQL technology is used by some of the emerging organizations all across the world. They utilize it to save time and money to power their high-volume websites, commercial software and business-critical systems. It is extremely useful and customer friendly.

Data archiving is a proven strategy that is used to manage growth in applications and custom databases by modifying data out of production systems into secondary, lower cost storage systems. Simultaneously it manages to maintain flawless data access through the native application or Bl layer.

Nicolas Pujol, who is the senior manager, MySQL WW Alliances & Channels of Sun Microsystems, admitted that Solix provided their customers additional choice in terms of managing their database assets for the best business case. They do it either by building MySQL databases for tailored applications or transfering data from enterprise applications into a more reasonably priced MySOL data store. Sun, Sun Microsystems, MySQL along with MySQL Enterprise are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems in the United States and various other countries.

HP Releases Storage System For SMEs

HP has relesed its StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array, that is targeted at providing enterprise-class storage to small and medium-sized companies having small budgets. It has various features that are usually related with high-end systems like dual-redundant hardware architecture and support for remote replication software. The EVA 4400 has a 99.999 percent uptime for up to 96TB of data.

HP is happy with the success it has received from selling its systems and storage products in entire Europe. As per the company’s SAN marketing director, Kyle Fitze, HP has experienced a 15 percent growth in the storage products last year in Africa, Europe as well as the Middle East. It had shipped 40,000 of the past models in the mid-range EVA line-up. EMC, IBM and Sun all have mid-range storage systems to balance their high-end and mainframe systems.

HP also said that the EVA 4400 would be obtainable with an 8Gb Simple SAN Connection, which will be suitable for companies that are planning for huge growth of their Storage Area Network environments. This will be suitable for Fibre Channel networks. It will also include software that targets to simplify connections. HP also claims that the mid range systems are basically smaller versions of the storage arrays.

EMC Released Thin-Provisioning Solution For Storage Systems

EMC has recently launched thin provisioning for the Symmetrix DMX-4 series, its conventional storage systems. The company hopes that this will simplify and speed up both the virtual as well as physical provisioning. The company calls the thin-provisioning solution “Virtual Provisioning”. It is supposed to work across all Symmetrix storage, as well as the latest flash storage and storage drives mounted internally and externally.

Thin provisioning is already accessible from a number of companies like Hitachi Data Systems, HP, 3PAR and others. When organizations introduce new applications to the network, the system will assign resources like memory to the new application. However for the sake of safety most managers apportion more than required. In thin provisioning spare resources are utilized which results in systems that are less prone to any kind waste. Companies have realized that by using thin provisioning, they will be able to save at least fifty percent of the disk space.

With the help of thin provisioning, systems managers can allocate space in “just in time” basis. They can use only as much disk space that they need to use. EMC Virtual Provisioning has the ability to support distant as well as local replication operations. EMC did not announce a set price for thin provisioning. It will depend on the storage space used.