EMC updates SAN Advisor design tool

Previously, SAN Advisor validated SAN environments using a default set of around 150 best practice rules. With SAN Advisor 5.3, users can now customize SAN Advisor's rules engine to selectively validate specific areas of the SAN and comply with specific company policies. The new version also includes a memory feature that allows users to manually input data for devices the software doesn't recognize by default just once.

SAN Advisor 5.3's pricing is based on capacity and starts at $5,000.

HP, EMC finally settle out of court
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and EMC have signed a five-year patent cross-licensing deal that will end four years of litigation. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, HP will pay EMC a $325 million payment.

The lawsuit was originally brought by EMC against storage management company StorageApps in 2000, claiming StorageApps' products infringed EMC patents on creating mirror copies of system files; HP acquired StorageApps in 2001 and took on the dispute as well. The two went back and forth with suits, countersuits and counterclaims until last May when HP lost a jury trial and was sent to arbitration to determine damages. HP had appealed the judgment, but Monday's settlement finally ends all legal cases between the companies over the patent disputes.

IBM offers email archiving for SMBs
IBM announced a new email archiving offering aimed at small and midsized businesses (SMB), called the IBM CommonStore eMail Archiving Preload. The product comes in two flavors, for Exchange and Notes/Domino. The product is implemented on blades that are inserted into IBM's System x BladeCenter. All emails are extracted and stored in the centralized content repository using IBM Content Manager. The product is all IBM's own code, the company boasts in a press release and will be generally available in October. IBM said it will be offering other packages of essentially the same code in the future; e.g., pure software that organizations can implement themselves on hardware other than blades.

TeraCloud touts storage analytics software
TeraCloud Corp. announced the availability of TeraCloud Integrated Storage Analytics software. The product allows users in both distributed and IBM z-system mainframe environments to create performance reports and apply performance best practices to their environments without the need for additional storage, the company claims.

BakBone, Mirapoint partner on email backup
Email archive maker Mirapoint Inc. and backup software maker BakBone Software Inc. announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to offer Mirapoint customers a combination of BakBone's NetVault backup and restore software, and Mirapoint's Secure Messaging Infrastructure email archiving product.

The integration between the products comes because the Mirapoint appliance relies on NDMP backups and BakBone has completed NDMP certification. The companies said the product package is the first backup product integration with the Mirapoint box.. NetVault Backup will be bundled and sold through Mirapoint's price list with Mirapoint offering a single point of contact for customer support.

LG Electronics deploys Riverbed Steelhead appliances
Riverbed Technology Inc. announced that LG Electronics has selected and deployed its wide area data services (WDS) Steelhead appliances at several dozen sites in countries around the world to accelerate application performance over its wide area network (WAN) and control bandwidth costs.

Prior to the installation of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, LG was experiencing increased bandwidth usage across all locations and applications, and a significant increase in the number of internal applications requiring network access, including many custom applications. In addition, several internal applications, including the LG's purchase/sales/inventory application, could not be accessed by employees in remote offices because application performance was so slow. LG said it selected Riverbed's WAN optimization appliance because it produced the fastest response times in prepurchase testing. The other products evaluated by LG were not disclosed.

Crossroads releases iSCSI bridge and router
Crossroads Systems Inc. announced general availability of its iSCSI NearEdge 6220i-b storage bridge and iSCSI NearEdge 6220i storage router, which will allow users to deploy an IP SAN by bringing network-aware capabilities to their existing direct attached SCSI-based storage.

Avamar releases NDMP accelerator for NetApp filers
Avamar Technologies announced an enhanced version of its NDMP Backup Accelerator, designed specifically for Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) filers. The product, built on the Avamar Axion software, is meant to reduce the amount of time required to perform daily full filer backups by deduplicating backup data on the back end.

Postini deploys Archivas
Digital archiving software maker Archivas Inc. announced that email management service provider Postini Inc. has deployed its Archivas Cluster (ArC) in its redundant data centers to provide archive storage for its managed-services customers.

DataDirect networks debuts 560 TB storage system
DataDirect Networks Inc. unveiled the S2A9550, which it claims boasts up to 3 GBps performance, automated data protection capabilities and 560 terabytes (TB) capacity. The system is designed to support both block-level and file-system configurations, as well as compute clusters from IBM, Dell, HP, Cray, SGI, Bull and others. The S2A9550 also contains hardware-based RAID-6 and double parity protection.

Kazeon announces $21M funding
Kazeon Systems Inc. announced $21 million in its second round of venture capital (VC) funding, with investment from Menlo Ventures and Focus Ventures, bringing the total investment in the company to $44 million. This second funding round will allow Kazeon to expand U.S. and international sales, marketing and engineering, the company said.

News analysis from SearchStorage.com this week:
Hospital: Storage capacity planning 'very difficult'
City relegates EMC Clariion to secondary storage
Storage analysts: RAID is changing
EqualLogic updates storage provisioning software