Geared toward the small to medium enterprise (SME), the Storage Environment Replication Service (ERS) provides a complete business continuity/disaster recovery solution that meets changes in data availability and replication requirements.
Recognizing that backup and recovery issues cannot be ignored, Global Storage technical director, David Duncan, said there are significant challenges for organisations wishing to go it alone
"The approach behind this service is the ability to provide SMEs with a complete recovery point for their x86 environment, independent of hardware constraints," Duncan said.
"Both the data and the application environment can and will be quickly restored at our ERS data centre, as they were just before the failure/disaster took place."
The service is powered by PlateSpin PowerConvert Flexible Server Recovery as well as VMware virtualisation technology.
Global Storage uses Enterprise class SAN, server and virtualisation infrastructure making enterprise class technology available to SMEs.
The company's existing customer base will initially be offered pilots before it is available generally in 2007. Meanwhile, Texas Memory Systems has produced what it claims is the fastest storage in the world, working at more than 600 times the speed of your normal disk drive.
The RamSan solid state disk has been designed to work with InfiniBand clustering technology and provides faster access to data for those working in high-performance computing environments, the company explained.
The low latency and high speed of InfiniBand make it the fastest storage in the world, it claims, and the US government appears to agree, using RamSan for its Echelon spying system.
RamSan data can now be accessed across a 10Gbit/s Infiniband link in both pure Infiniband and mixed Infiniband /Fibre Channel environments. Clustered high performance computing (HPC) environments can now boost I/O speed by replacing hard drives with SSDs which work at near-main memory speed.
A RamSan drive has an access time of 15 microseconds, 250 times faster than a hard disk drive. A good hard disk drive provides 250-300 random I/O's per second. InfiniBand-based RamSan drives offer up to 50,000 random IOPS per single-ported controller, 200,000 random IOPS with four controllers.
It's available today in engineering sample form. Mass production is planned for next year and OEM pricing is available upon request.
This product is a reminder of how quickly flash memory drives are developing. Another is the idea of 30GB USB thumb drives carrying entire PC software stacks.
(Additional reporting by with Chris Mellor)