Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 27. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega is well into its second coming as EMC’s entry-level storage division. First, they applied EMC’s compact and full-featured LifeLine home storage software to existing gear, giving birth to the Home Media Network Hard Drive, StorCenter ix2, and StorCenter Pro ix4-100. Then they wooed the small-business community with the rack-mount StorCenter ix4-200r, adding iSCSI target [...]
Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 16. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega’s StorCenter Pro ix4-200r sports iSCSI and NAS plus VMware ESX support – it’s a small business or lab monster!
Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the [...]
EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 05. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the [...]
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a [...]
Of Emulated Fibre Channel, Virtualization, And The Right Tool For The Job
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 12. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
EMC’s Chuck Hollis is one smart guy, and a very verbose blogger. As usual, he sparked a bit of a storm recently when comparing unified storage on EMC’s Celerra NX4 to NetApp’s multiprotocol FAS2020 filer. But it was one phrase in particular that got the attention of Alex McDonald and Kostadis Russos of NetApp, Martin/Storagebod, and Tony [...]
Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 15. Nov, 2008 | View Comments
Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world?
On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was shaped [...]
EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 10. Nov, 2008 | View Comments
As I guessed on Friday, EMC has officially announced their Maui Atmos software layer today, calling it the “industry’s first COS (cloud-optimized storage) offering”, “a new era for IT”, and “a new category of storage.” So the new era for IT is a cloud with globally-distributed object stores with policy management?
Great! But I thought the [...]
Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 05. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Many storage challenges focus on the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.
QLogic and Emulex Deliver 8 Gb Fibre Channel For VMware ESX
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 30. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
As I mentioned on Monday, VMware’s Update 2 for ESX 3.5 includes support for 8 Gb Fibre Channel HBAs. This is an important development, so I went looking through the official ESX I/O Compatibility Guide to see which HBAs in particular were supported, but none were listed.
This was pretty puzzling, but Rich from VM /ETC and [...]
Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 28. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note:
Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests. This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a clone [...]






