INFORTREND RESHAPES STORAGE TECHNOLOGY WITH ESVA – ENTERPRISE SCALABLE VIRTUALIZED ARCHITECTURE
Innovative Architecture Leads the New Wave of SAN Storage Solution For Enterprise Users

Taipei, Taiwan, June 16, 2009 – Infortrend®, the networked storage expert, (Public TPE: 2495) today unveiled its breakthrough range of storage solutions – ESVA™: Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture, a SAN storage system built from a revolutionary concept to reinforce storage virtualization capability, performance advancement and deliver massive scalability. Infortrend’s ESVA series enables mid-range enterprise users to achieve optimum return on investment, simplify storage infrastructure and maximize application productivity to ensure a much lower total cost of ownership. Furthermore, to underline this major achievement, the Infortrend ESVA series has been awarded ‘Best Choice: Data Storage Product’ by Computex Taipei 2009, the world’s second largest ICT exhibition.

Based on Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN protocols, the ESVA can deliver outstanding business benefits in cost, management and productivity. Features such as storage virtualization, thin provisioning, distributed load balancing, array-based snapshots and replication, energy efficiency and high availability hardware design are optimized to meet mission-critical demands for scalability, performance and availability. For complete peace of mind and assurance, Infortrend will support customers and partners through a 24×7 global service center, providing professional and timely assistance when required.  Additionally, Infortrend has invested in dedicated sales and marketing resources to help channel partners and customers understand the benefits of the new ESVA products.

The innovative architecture of a ’scale-out’ storage pool, exclusively designed by Infortrend to differentiate from conventional scale-up mechanisms enables the subsystem to scale out the virtualized foundation by simply adding additional ESVA arrays for capacity and performance expansion.

Typical “scale up” systems that require fork-lift upgrades and downtime caused by the need to migrate data or load balance, can lead to service disruption and additional overhead as well as the unknown factor of compatibility issues when systems are eventually re-enabled, causing additional, unwanted pressure. The ESVA architecture differs in that its unique and dynamic virtualized ‘scale-out’ mechanism allows on the fly scalability, increased capacity utilization and further efficiency in data read/write load balancing. For customers with budget constraints, capacity and performance can be incrementally increased as needed.

“ESVA: the Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture is undoubtedly a massive milestone in achievement that Infortrend prides itself on,” expressed Michael Schnapp, CTO of Infortrend Technology. “After many years of experience and endeavor, Infortrend has come to a turning point with an accomplishment that best represents our leading-edge technology in storage solutions development and most significantly, our commitment to our customers.”

“The innovative architecture built in to the ESVA incorporates feedback from business partners and customers as well as our leadership’s thought process and ability to respond to global market trends and application requirements,” Schnapp added.” Packaged with a comprehensive service support program, we believe the ESVA is a storage solution that will prove to be indispensable whilst being simple to manage and maintain, as well as achieving cost-effectiveness to the enterprise storage management infrastructure.”
More about ESVA Innovations

In addition to innovative concepts such as virtualization and scale-out storage pools, Infortrend’s new ESVA series features additional value add features and benefits such as thin provisioning for best return on investment, load balancing for simplifying storage scaling and array-based snapshot and replication for maximizing application productivity.

The ESVA series is designed with redundant and hot-swappable hardware components in order to achieve high fault-tolerant capability. With a commitment to energy efficient IT, the smart drive spin-down, dynamic cooling mechanisms and highly efficient 80 Plus power supplies are designed to help reduce energy consumption. Since the ESVA series is optimized for top-tier applications, it provides broad support for enterprise-level operating systems, such as Windows® Server 2008, Solaris®, Linux®, IBM-AIX and HP-UX, and support for server virtualization including VMware® and Microsoft® Hyper-V. For more information details about Infortrend’s brand new ESVA series, please visit http://esva.infortrend.com

About Infortrend

Infortrend, the networked storage expert, is a pioneer in cost-effective, high performance storage products. The company provides EonStor® storage subsystems and SANWatch® software for virtually all storage interfaces including Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, SCSI and SATA. For over a decade, Infortrend has provided reliable, fault-tolerant technology to prominent ODMs, distributors, and storage integrators worldwide. The company’s core competency includes performance optimized RAID ASICs, feature-rich firmware, and redundant, high availability RAID subsystems. Founded in 1993, Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495. For more information, visit www.infortrend.com.

Infortrend, EonStor®, SANWatch®, and EonPath® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc. Infortrend, EonStor, SANWatch, and EonPath are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact 101 Data Solutions for further Infortrend ESVA product details or Call +44(0) 845 29 36 101

Tampa, FL – May 5, 2009: NORTHERN, global providers of flexible, easy to administer storage resource management software solutions, today announces that its flagship SRM solution, Northern Storage Suite, has received the EMC Velocity² Technology and ISV Program ‘2008 EMC Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year for EMC Celerra®’..

EMC conducts an annual competition among its solution providers to determine which stand out as the “best of the best” for developing solutions built on or using EMC storage. EMC Velocity² Technology and ISV Program ‘2008 EMC Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year for EMC Celerra’ recognizes Northern’s commitment to leveraging EMC technology.

All partner offerings featured in the EMC Solution Gallery were evaluated on market presence, business impact, leads generated, and revenue contribution. Northern Storage Suite beat a strong field of competitors, providing IT administrators with comprehensive, low impact management capabilities, integrating scalable, high performance content quota functionality across environments integrating Celerra datamovers.

Shahram Moradpour, Director, Partner Development, EMC, shared “In meeting all evaluation criteria and demonstrating commitment to the EMC Celerra unified storage platform, we are happy to recognize Northern Storage Suite. Our goal is to recognize solutions that help our customers meet their business objectives and extend the information lifecycle. Congratulations to Northern for receiving this prestigious award.”

“We are all very proud that our solution is being recognized, as it validates the value Northern Storage Suite brings to EMC customers around the world who are using EMC Celerra-driven devices to manage their storage,” said Thomas.

Vernersson, CEO of Northern. “Northern Storage Suite for EMC extends our core methodology to Celerra storage: control storage growth by controlling end-user data and end-user behavior. Using the suite’s advanced content management quotas, file blocking and the end-user portal – which encourages users to be more responsible and economical in their storage management – EMC customers can more easily and far more cost-effectively manage even the most demanding, heterogeneous enterprise environments.”

As a EMC Velocity Partner and Northern Parklife Gold Partner, Northern Storage Suite is available to customers through 101 Data Solutions.

Contact 101 Data Solutions for further information.

Download Northern EMC Press Release

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Contact 101 Data Solutions for further information.

Sun’s new x64 servers and blade systems are now powered by the extraordinary Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 14, 2009 Leading the market convergence of open computing, networking, software and storage systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today launched new products and technologies in its Open Network Systems strategy that deliver huge gains in application performance, with massive efficiency and scalability to maximize the economics of computing for data centers and clouds.

Sun’s New x64 Systems Deliver Breakthrough Application Performance for Virtualization, Enterprise, Web and HPC Infrastructures

Sun’s new servers deliver maximum performance, efficiency and scale in the data center while supporting multiple operating systems like the Solaris OS, Linux and Windows and a variety of virtualization solutions including Sun xVM Ops Center, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Solaris Containers, which allows integrated virtualization with low overhead, at no cost. Sun’s new x64 servers and blade systems powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series are:

Virtualization:

• Sun Fire X4270 server- A best value for consolidation and virtualization in a dense 2RU form factor for branch office and departmental settings as well as for horizontally scaled data center consolidation needs.
• Sun Blade X6270 server module - Provides up to 2x more I/O throughput than competing blade servers and provides an all-in-one virtualization solution, including server and network, when combined with the Sun Virtual Network Express Module (NEM).

Enterprise and Web:

• Sun Fire X4170 server - Delivers the performance of a 4U system in a compact 1U form factor with savings of up to 75 percent in rack space, while consuming 60 percent less energy at half the price of competing 4 socket, 4 RU systems.
• Sun Fire X2270 server - Offers 3x the performance at 66 percent the energy consumption of current generation systems. The most compact server in its class, the Sun Fire X2270 server delivers savings of up to 50 percent in data center real estate.
• Sun Fire X4275 server - An ideal server for the most demanding streaming multimedia applications, delivering 12TB of raw storage at less than $1/GB of storage, with significant space and energy savings.
• Sun Ultra 27 workstation - The only workstation in its class to support the NVIDIA FX5800, the Ultra 27 workstation offers virtually unmatched visualization performance in its class with up to 12GB of main memory and 4GB of graphics memory.
  

High Performance Computing:

Sun Blade X6275 server module - The first blade server to support onboard quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand for extreme performance and power efficiency for HPC applications. The Sun Blade X6275 server modules push the limits of performance, providing up to nine TeraFLOPS of peak performance in a fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis. Optional Sun Flash Modules provide 24GB of high performance, efficient and reliable storage per node.

Download Sun’s Complete Line of Servers At A Glance 

Contact 101 Data Solutions for further information on this press release.

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. March 30, 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that the Solaris platform, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and OpenSolaris, has been extended to provide performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. For more information visit: http://www.sun.com/solaris/intel.

“This is a real-world game-changer in the commodity x86 marketplace. Sun’s new Solaris advancements unleash the power of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, delivering enterprise-class engineering and innovation in this market,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Sun’s systems and Solaris optimization provide record-breaking performance, scalability and huge energy efficiency to help customers maximize their business results.”

Bookmark http://www.sun.com/launch and tune in on April 14 for more details on Sun’s major systems launch and how its approach to Open Network Systems helps maximize the economics of computing by delivering maximum scale, efficiency, enterprise manageability, performance and sustainability. For a ’sneak peak’ of the event, please see the movie below. Customers are already enthusiastically embracing Sun’s new systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. Sun has already shipped Sun Blade servers based on the new processor to several HPC customer deployments.

“For two years, Sun and Intel have been working together to optimize Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris to take advantage of the intelligent performance and automated energy efficiency built into the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series,” said Doug Fisher, Intel vice president, Software and Services Group and general manager, Systems Software Division. “The result of that collaboration is a fusion of software and silicon whose tight integration delivers outstanding performance, energy efficiency and reliability to the data center.”

Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enables industry leading performance and scalability on Intel Xeon processors. Solaris ZFS provides unparalleled data integrity, capability, performance and management and DTrace dynamic tracing framework allows close observation of system behavior, without degrading performance. In addition, Solaris Containers allow integrated virtualization with low overhead, at no cost. Solaris-based systems using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series automatically leverage new Intel Quick Path Interconnect, Intel Turbo Boost and Intel Hyper-Threading technologies to further improve performance and scalability.

“With the world’s top five server vendors shipping Solaris on their x86-based systems today, and with more than 15 years of industry leading performance and experience in delivering enterprise platform support on multiple chip architectures from low-end servers to the largest multi-core systems, Sun’s Solaris OS is uniquely positioned as the best operating system to leverage the features of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series,” said Jim McHugh, vice president Datacenter Software marketing at Sun. “The combination of the Solaris OS and the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series allows customers to take advantage of scalability, performance, power efficiency and reliability found in no other x86 platform combination.”

Sun and Intel have enhanced Solaris power management capabilities to leverage the advanced power states of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Power Aware Dispatcher, unique to Solaris, automatically monitors and optimizes a company’s system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. For example, it utilizes Intel’s new Deep C-States to dramatically reduce power consumed by idle cores.

As a major contributor to OpenSolaris and an active participant in the OpenSolaris community, Intel has worked with Sun to implement PowerTop functionality for Solaris. Intel PowerTOP utilizes Solaris DTrace to let developers and administrators observe where applications may be preventing part of a system from going into a power-saving state and to monitor in real time how effectively a system is taking advantage of new processor power-management features like Intel Turbo Boost.

To improve reliability, the Solaris platform also provides predictive self-healing capabilities for systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. The Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA), which detects and automatically avoids repeated hardware faults in system components, has been extended to utilize status information from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

World Record Performance

With these updates and optimizations, Sun and Intel have achieved the following new world record benchmarks for Solaris on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark

Sun’s newest dual processor server based on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, the Sun Fire X4270 (2 processors/ 8 cores/16 threads), running SAP ERP application Release 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) with Oracle Database on top of Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, as of March 30, 2009(1). Sun has been working with Unicode versions of SAP software for the past two years and has gained significant expertise in that area. This leading benchmark result highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP software on Intel Xeon-based systems from Sun as well as seamless multilingual support available for SAP ERP applications.

1) *Sun Fire X4270 (2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads), Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) results: 3,700 SAP SD Benchmark users, 20,300 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009005.

Contact 101 Data Solutions for further information on this announcement.

*Sun Fire X4270 configuration and price guides will be available from us later in April 09 .

For existing Storevault customers NetApp recommend purchasing future upgrades now, licenses including replication, Snap Restore. 101 Data Solutions also recommends purchasing support renewals or extending support contracts now to maximise the ‘in service’ life span of the Storevault unit. Please note that support will not be possible to extend past March 2012.

101 Data Solutions currently have a good number of 750GB drives for S550’s in stock.  So if Netapp sells out of drives, it is possible to purchase these from us. These disks cannot be used in 1TB drive systems, but could format down to go in lower capacity units.

As an alternative to the Storevault S550 we highly recommend the FAS2020 or FAS2050, NetApp have released cost effective bundles similar to the value of the Storvault S550, the entry level bundle starts as low as £8,000 for 6×500Gb, single controller, iSCSI, CIFS, SnapRestore, deduplication, flexshare, Thin Provisioning, Dial Home and basic onsite installation.

For Snap Mirror users, it is possible to replicate from an S550/S500 to FAS2020 or FAS2050, both ONTAP and Mirroring software are compatible.  As a FAS2020/FAS2050 you will also be able to replicate back to the Storevault unit although this is not supported by NetApp.

See our NetApp FAS2020 and NetApp FAS2050 pages.

101 Data  Solutions have managed to get hold of the official NetApp Communique, we will post any official information from Netapp on our news section as it arrives:

Product Communiqué CPC-0901-01: End of Availability - S Family/S550 (formerly StoreVault)
January 28, 2009
For your information and planning, this notice is meant to inform you about some NetApp products that have come to the end of their availability and/or some products that are no longer available from our suppliers.

This notice announces the end of availability of S family/S550 systems. Starting with the March 2009 release of eConfigurator in CE/PE, the S family/S550 systems will no longer be available for quoting and sale. Actual last quote, order & ship date will be limited to quantity-available-on-hand for S family/S550 systems. Date subject to change without prior notice.

Suggested alternatives for S family/S550 systems:

FAS2020 series systems are the ideal alternative replacements for the S family/S550 systems.

NetApp will launch new FAS2020 product bundles to target the MSE market.  These bundles will be available through our channel partners in February 2009 and will readily address S-family customers’ requests within midsize businesses for additional product features and cost-effective price/performance.

These products are best suited for MSE customers who are looking for an enterprise-type product and a lower price point that is easy to order, support, and install. NetApp partners, who traditionally sold only S family products now, have a competitive offering for their customers and prospects with the new FAS2020 and the channel-only NetApp® Select™ Bundles. These products provide the same features as larger enterprise products, are available at different price points, and have entry-level configurations.

Highlights for FAS2000 series: high-capacity, low-cost SATA drives internal to the base controller system; increased total system storage scalability that enables better deployment flexibility for our customers. The FAS2020 is a scalable, real-estate-efficient, value-based system that can be deployed in a variety of IT environments as both SAN (iSCSI and FC) and NAS storage.

Please contact your NetApp sales or channel partner representative for details of the new FAS2020 Bundles for MSE.

Please note that although we are announcing the end of availability of these products, NetApp will continue to support them for a limited time. The effective end-of-availability, end-of-support, and last ship dates for all NetApp products are on the End of Availability page.

Contact 101 Data Solutions for more information.