Storage vendors polish their wares at SNW

EMC's software announcements cover a laundry list of products, all within its backup and recovery portfolio, and all part of what it says is a strategy to trim the fat across its product offerings in the wake of many acquisitions.

Most notable among the announcements is Backup Manager for SharePoint, the fruits of EMC's acquisition of Internosis. Backup Manager for SharePoint will use backup and recovery software layered over a SQL database to make disk-based backups of collaborative data created using Microsoft SharePoint. Previously, EMC had the ability to back up the SQL database only, "which was fine for disaster recovery (DR) and can still be used for offsite vaulting, but it didn't offer recovery at the file level," according to Rob Emsley, director of marketing at EMC.

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NetWorker will now be able to manage Celerra's PowerSnap snapshot capabilities, which have existed for some time without being integrated with EMC's backup software, according to Emsley. NetWorker will also be grabbing at the burgeoning healthcare storage market with a new module specifically designed to integrate with Meditech, a popular healthcare IT systems administration application. Finally, NetWorker will get a new brushed-up dashboard. Backup Manager for SharePoint, however, will not be integrated under the Legato umbrella until mid-to-late 2007, Emsley said.

EMC Backup Manager for SharePoint will be available in November priced at $2,500. The NetWorker module for Meditech 1.0 is available now at $4,950. Replication Manager 5.0 software will be available in December 2006 and is priced starting at $4,000 per managed host. The NetWorker PowerSnap Module for Celerra 2.3 will be available in November and is priced at $4,995. And the new NetWorker dashboard, also available in November, starts at $2,000.

EMC clarified its integration plans for Invista and RecoverPoint, its heterogeneous replication product based on the Kashya Inc. acquisition. In November, RecoverPoint will be qualified to work with Invista, allowing users with both products [Ed note: all three of them], to remotely replicate to a virtual or physical environment. True integration of remote replication features of RecoverPoint within Invista will come at a later, undisclosed date.

IBM boosts tapes, sweetens DS8000 warranty

IBM announced that the DS8000 Turbo will be available with a new flexible Enterprise Choice warranty, which allows users to choose 24/7 warranty options in one-year increments from one year to four years, rather than the previous four-year warranty. IBM is also debuting the 3599, a 700 GB tape cartridge. Finally, Big Blue is introducing a HyperPAV (Parallel Access Volume) feature for z/OS environments, and the DS8300 Turbo four-way model 932 will now support up to four expansion frames, for up to 512 terabyte (TB) capacity.

Meanwhile, HP will unveil the SB40c, a storage blade containing 876 GB of serial attached SCSI (SAS) capacity for its C-class BladeSystem. The product is pretty limited at this point, providing a single storage blade per server blade, and the two must reside next to each other. But it's good news for small businesses or remote offices looking for a simple, blade system with direct attached storage (DAS).

HP is also announcing a new competitor to the EMC Clariion Disk Library that will come in the form of VTL software from Sepaton Inc., which will run on a gateway device in front of its Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). "This will benefit existing EVA customers who are looking to add VTL services to EVA, as we already allow with clustered NAS [network attached storage] or iSCSI," Fitze said.

Finally, HP will be introducing a storage area network (SAN) starter kit based on software from Emulex Corp., which will take setup out of users' hands through wizards. Once the wizards guide a user through provisioning logical unit numbers (LUN), the starter kit software automatically kicks off CommandView, HP's EVA management software.

The HP StorageWorks SB40c storage blade will be available in mid-November, with list prices starting at $1,599. The HP StorageWorks VLS300 EVA Gateway will ship Nov. 20 with a list price of approximately $57,750 for the base unit, which includes two nodes plus switches with 25 LUN base license/node; a node expansion kit that includes a single node with 10 LUN base license (20 TB) is approximately $27,500. Finally, the EVA4000 SAN starter kit is available today for $33,100.

In the yellow corner, Symantec Corp. will launch Backup Exec 11, which is expected to include encryption and more granular recovery features for Microsoft applications and a new version of its desktop backup software, Ghost.

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