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Storage Gear Takes The Spotlight

Storage vendors from IBM and Dell to McData and Brocade on Monday showed off their newest hardware and software at Storage Networking World, the trade show and conference that runs in Orlando, Fla. through Thursday.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, for instance, used the expo to roll out revamped storage automation and virtualization technologies in its next generation IBM TotalStorage Open Software series. Among the new titles are IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller v1.2.1, virtual machine software that adds support for EMC's Symmetrix DMX Series to earlier support for HP's arrays and IBM's TotalStorage systems. San Volume Controller now also doubles the maximum cluster size to eight nodes and quadruples the number of supported virtual disks (to 4,096 virtual disks per cluster), said IBM.

"[This] extends our lead in storage virtualization and automation," said Laura Sanders, the vice president of IBM's TotalStorage Open Software group, in a statement.

IBM also updated TotalStorage SAN File System to version 2.2, added new integration features to its TotalStorage Productivity Center, and produced a major upgrade of Tivoli Storage Manager. The latter, which shifted to version 5.3, sports a new graphical interface and administrative center, and boosts backup and recovery times.

Direct dealer Dell, meanwhile, touted a $300,000 solution it's pitching to mid-sized enterprises for automatic data fail-over and recovery between data centers separated by large distances. Using systems in both Texas and Ireland, Dell's pushing Asynchronous Data Replication, a technology that relies on standard IP networks rather than pricier Fibre Channel for site-to-site mirroring, fail-over, and recovery.

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