Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the storage industry:
Hitachi powers Hollywood visual effects. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced that Toronto-based visual effects post-production studio Soho VFX leverages Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) to store and manage its most complex visual effects. Soho VFX uses the Hitachi platform to efficiently store and manage the massive image data and make it secure and instantly accessible. These capabilities lower the total cost of ownership, migrate data more quickly, and enable more reiterations of shots because renders are completed more quickly. Soho VFX does visual effects for films such as "The Chronicles of Narnia", "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 and Part 2", and new release "Jack the Giant Slayer". "Hitachi NAS Platform continues to evolve with us, which is imperative due to increased work demands and diminished timelines,” said Allan Magled, co-founder, Soho VFX. “Things are constantly changing and thanks to Hitachi Data Systems technology, we are able to handle it every time.”
EMC launches Xtrem Family of Flash products. EMC announced the Xtrem Family of Flash-optimized server and storage products and introduced a new line of EMC XtremSF PCIe-based Flash cards. The new XtremSF server flash hardware can be deployed as either direct attached storage (DAS) that sits within the server, or it can be deployed in combination with EMC XtremSW Cache server caching software to turbocharge network storage array performance. EMC also announced the release of XtremIO to select customers, to deliver higher levels of "functional IOPS" to applications that require high levels of random I/O performance. XtremSF 550 GB and 2.2 TB eMLC capacities are currently available, with 700GB and 1.4TB capacities available in the second quarter of 2013. “Flash technology is enabling new levels of application performance and is the single biggest consideration to how customers are architecting their data centers today," said Zahid Hussain, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Flash Products Division. "Today, we are delivering a market-leading and comprehensive portfolio of Flash solutions across a variety of customer use cases and requirements. Going forward, we are dedicated to providing increased value through flash-optimized software and systems to break the barriers of today's infrastructure silos.”
nScaled supports NetApp storage systems. Online backup and disaster recovery provider nScaled announced that its enterprise-class recovery as a service (RaaS) solution now supports NetApp (NTAP) storage systems. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP API the nScaled platform is directly integrated with NetApp storage systems. The new offering aims to provide certified backup, disaster recovery and remote storage for businesses that have or plan to use a NetApp storage infrastructure. “Tight integration between NetApp storage systems and the nScaled recovery service keep data fully protected and make it possible to meet recovery time objectives, without having to make tradeoffs between cost-efficiency, speed or security,” said Gary Hocking, technology director, service providers, NetApp. “nScaled helps NetApp customers considering cloud based backup and disaster recovery to have consistent and uninterrupted access to data, even in the event of an unforeseen catastrophe.”
