New Products and Vendor News – July 2011

Condor Storage is an authorized PresSTORE Reseller. Their Backup and Sync software for Windows, MAC, Linux and Solaris is really well liked in the IT community. (Archiware is the manufacturer, and we represent them here in the US and Canada) Please contact us for superior customer service in obtaining price quotes, technical specifications and 30 day trials.

Storage Growth per IDC is at 100,000 Terabytes Per Year! Unstructured data continues to sprawl, and remains 80% of most of the online data that is stored in today’s data centers. We’ve partnered with Nasuni for a NAS Gateway to Amazon’s cloud. There are no API’s required, and we like this solution because Nasuni compensates for the shortcomings that have kept cloud providers from being able to deliver primary storage. While the cloud offers unlimited protected storage at a lower cost than businesses can provision on their own, it lacks performance, Local Area Network protocols, such as CIFS or NFS, and the ability to roll back unwanted changes. The Nasuni Filer was designed to address all of these issues with its high-performance cache, full support for CIFS and NFS, Active Directory support, and its snapshot technology. Contact Us for a download link and introductory pricing model.

• Nexsan recently released two new SAN solutions at surprisingly affordable pricepoints, the E18 and E60.  These both feature a new active drawer chassis design with field replaceable parts exchange, 3 YR Warranty/Support inclusive and SAS/SATA mixed shelf drives.  Known for ease of use, a self-install GUI Wizard and density of design-this brand is ultra-reliable. Condor Storage has clients under Year 6 warranty renewals.

KEY BENEFITS

• Over 10TB of high performance SAS in 2U OR over 54TB of high capacity SATA in 2U
• 18-disk RAID system with two active drawers
• Single or dual redundant active/active controllers
• High speed cache with both battery and flash backup
• 8Gb Fibre Channel and 1Gb iSCSI host-side ports
• Utilizes multi-path IO for Windows, Linux, VMware, Xen and Hyper-V
• No single-point-of-failure design
• Anti-Vibration Design™ maximizes disk reliability
• Nexsan’s exclusive AutoMAID® level 4 technology reduces energy consumption by 85%
• Nexsan’s Cool Drive Technology™ utilizes redundant push and pull fans
• Expand with up to 60 additional drives with Nexsan E60X
• Optional 10Gbit iSCSI replaces 8Gb Fibre Channel ports

EMC’s VNXe and VNX iSCSI SAN offers our clients CIFS/NFS, DeDupe, Unified Storage management with Snapshots, Provisioning and Replication. How affordable…many may wonder? Condor is running client promotions for under $15K incl. support.

See these exciting new products on our marketing microsite: http://www.diskvaults.com 

PROMOTION NEWS:

Q3 Promotion: BlueArc, Break the Myth Promotion. We have a bold mission, to break the myth that Enterprise, Clustered NAS  must cost at least $100K.  We are an Authorized BlueArc Reseller.  Our primary client focus is to arrange webinars, coordinate site visits and negotiate discounted prices with BlueArc sales agents. We have all the tools to solve today’s Big Data needs at prices you may thought were out of reach. Please give us a chance to cost illustrate this product before your spend money on another NAS solution.

Thank you for stopping by our website and for reading our blog!      PH 888-472-8028        email: sales@condorstorage.com 

 

Condor 2011 Update

Dec. 2010 was one of the strangest year ends I have seen in 25 years. Everyone popped up needing budget numbers in a sure fire hurry, and we had to churn out quotes 24/7 to appease.  ‘Since we custom architect for each client, this is alot of note taking…but that’s why Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!  Business ended on the plus side, PO’s were actually cut instead of a holiday dead zone. Thank you to all those clients whom trust in our services.

Now, 2011 is alive and vibrant. Renewed spending is being seen or planned in Q1, and the doom and gloom uttered by many about their budgets and freezes in 2010, is not being talked about yet. EMC is bringing out a well priced line of unified storage arrays which we will be featuring in the months ahead. I know a good allegiance when I see one, and we already have a local reference using the product. There are many manufacturers we represent with gusto and we are adding EMC’s new VNXe and VNX to our list. Look for a new website we are launching before the end of this month profiling our top storage vendors and their strongest product offerings, including why we think they rule and edited [but beefy] technical specifications. Please be sure  to watch for our launch and/or visit our newletter signup page for upcoming promotions, white papers, and technical data we send bi-monthly. Our newsletter is designed for informing our IT clients, based on seasoned industry experience. We network with hundreds of mass storage storage professionals and 50% of our time is spent on vendor selection.  Here’s to a pleasant year ahead for all. If you care to email us, you can use the form below or visit our Contact US page. http://www.condorstorage.com/contact_info.htm

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Condor Exhibits Again at PHX AZ Technology Summit

Please join us for a complimentary all day conference if you are in the Phoenix area on Wed. 9/15. An invitation can be seen here:

http://events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=ekjsp8n6&oeidk=a07e30l15ln72b9ddb8

 

This Summers Top 5 Identified IT Projects

Survey Reveals Top 5 "Front Burner" Projects among Clients

Condor Storage’s expertise is recommending solution suggestions for all of these five identified issues. We have carefully aligned with vendors that excel in each of these areas. There is always a built in layer of pricing for the most enterprise rich solution, so how does a client determine the value vs. feature formula that is the best cost, with least amount of sacrifice on features, for his/her exact project requirements? That is what a solution provider spends their time doing, we are professional match makers. 50% of our time is spent keeping a pulse on industry trends, as well as health checks among our client and colleague installations, vendor strengths and weaknesses,  in depth vendor reviews on new products, analyst viewpoints, and emergent and reoccuring themes of our clients “pain points”. Woe to today’s integrator who does not have a myriad of solutions at the ready for optimizing online data storage. It’s becoming a world of online, all the time, instant restore and failover and multiple tiers off primary arrays for cost savings under tremendous growth patterns.  Please visit our “Contact Us” page for no cost, pre-sales consultation. Thank you for reading our blog.

 

The Whole Enchilada

I’m seeing alot of technical call outs for storage solutions encompassing CIFS and NFS, SAN provisioning and replication with snapshots. Condor offers many vendor solutions that allow for above the norm design in features. We have acceleration appliances for highest IOPS , which can equal a 10 node NAS cluster in performance at an entry level cost of $35K. We have enterprise arrays, starting at under $10K for 14TB of full featured SAN with 24/7 support inclusive. If you call out your technical specs to me, we shall work with vendor engineers to architect an impressive match, feature by desired feature , with terrific price points. My promise, I shall  spare no effort on your behalf in our research phase, if you provide adequate details on what you are seeking.  -JMW

 

The Move to JBODS is Emerging

We are seeing a trend in larger data centers to move to JBODs. I wonder who invented that term? The actual definition I found when Googling is: “Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) is a term for one or more disk drives that form a single volume. However, the information on these disks is not striped in any way or protected”. While this may be true, jbods can now be enabled by fault tolerant software with failover and full file format data restoration. The IP is not residing on a raid controller which can drive up the cost for each shelf of expansion by $5-10K or more. Density is good when trying to hold down energy costs. Per end users with multiple racks, for each tier of storage in a separate cabinet with six 30-amp circuits they pay at least $1000 a month higher energy costs than if they had all three tiers in one box. It’s never been easier or more logical to explore a tiered solution that offers a solid design, all hot-swap parts, advance replacement of all parts plus three tiers enabled under one cover. We offer solid state, SAS 15K RPM and 2TB SATA all in one  4U JBOD. The software is free for proof of concept and the hardware is the easy part. I need an Apple Ipad to keep all the options in front of me as our vendor matrix is so chock full of options. Data storage is where I focused my talents back when Seagate released 20MB drives, and I still love it. I watched Oprah’s show this week on “dream jobs” from cake bakers to techno-nerds who get to test things first…and I count myself fortunate to be able to architect all kinds of storage combinations,  for all kinds of projects. The quiver has never been so powerful in the disk drive sector, in my humble opinion.   JMW

 

Moonwalk Expands Gateways to Cloud and Tiered Storage

Moonwalk Inc. has expanded their cloud storage gateway licensing. Moonwalk allows clients to purchase a gateway license for [currently] an open capacity license to several cloud platforms. Moonwalk is an effective HSM solution that allows for granular data migration with it’s policy manager API. Condor Storage is providing complete end to end solutions for incorporating Moonwalk into the enterprise, including secondary storage arrays used as an NFS based target for parking data storage. Supported platforms: Network Appliance, HDS HCAP (Hitachi Content Archive Platform), EMC Centera, CAStor and Amazon. Moonwalks’ policy engine provides native support for : Windows, Redhat Linux, SUSE Linux, OES2, and Novell. Case studies, a powerpoint overview and private cloud alternatives such as Parascale, are all offered in our integration services which we architect and price for our clients. 

 Please visit our contact us page for a Box.net link to detailed documentation on these solutions. Select: Download Moonwalk” and we shall send the link to you.

 

Great Article on Solid State from InfoWorld-Where do SSDs fit: Servers or arrays?

Condor Storage offers the full line of Texas Memory Systems solid state arrays, as well as cost affordable PCI cards. Here is a great article on this topic.

http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/3844378763/articles/infostor/volume-13/Issue_10/Features/Where_do_SSDs_fit__Servers_or_arrays_.html

 

Condor Q4 Project Push

Despite the economy, we are bustling with two hot project themes, archival and virtualization. Here’s an update on what is exciting us now and what gets us fueled up first thing Monday morning besides that new dog gone good caramel coffee from Godiva. It’s not the mundane  job duties we must endure, it’s the ability to turn on lightbulbs, show people a better way and then receive appreciation.

Archive and Storage Optimization: Cut re-occurring b/u licensing costs and get your mind blown away. I have a custom use model license with a sw manu. for unlimited capacity data to off-site or on-site tape, which looks like disk to the b/u library. It avoids b/u sw altogether and gets out of per TB/ license models for VTL or virtualized storage.  It can recover in full file format without b/u jobs having to be restored and optimize your existing disk, it can also snap oracle and dbases direct to tape at 70MB/sec. Plus, can use a UDP based file transfer product optimized for sending and receiving large files outside the LAN/WAN-Amazon S3 approved. Condor has several expert consultants whom we engage to speak with our clients on-site to showcase this, upon request, no cost.

  iSCSI for the Enterprise: We offer two unified iSCSI/NAS gateway solutions-both scale to a petabyte, one powered by a robust Broadcom chipset/switch design and the other powered by a 64 bit Linux OS and a plug ‘n play appliance. Differentiators vs. Dell/Equalogic :  Both our solutions support NFS files and can replicate over fibre or 1GB links, and both can scale independently of each other, and both support existing storage pools plus open storage out the back and both are lower priced by 22%, and both have 3 year warranty w/on-site plans.  Condor is offering these through 12/20/09 at up to 49% off MSRP. 

See these both in a webinar: first come, first served basis. Contact us online via drop down menu and request a meeting. Easy to book and no talking to a lizard scaled, slick and oily  ”sales person”.

http://www.condorstorage.com/contact_info.htm

 

 

 

 

Q4 Promotion, 14 1TB Drives for Free!

To all new Nexsan clients, or those who have not ordered within the past 24 months, please inquire how you can receive (14) 1TB. enterprise Hitachi 7200 RPM drives for FREE w/purchase of the SATAbeast award winning SAN solution. Any OS supported incl. MAC/Apple. This is 14 Terabytes for Free and comes at an economic time where every bit and byte of savings is a step toward a profitable 2010. Visit Our Contact Us page and request the details. http://www.condorstorage.com/contact_info.htm

Limited Condor Promotion