With a unified SAS system supporting iSCSI and NAS, Reldata looks to compete in the midmarket with simple management and heterogeneous disk support.

It seems that nowhere is the use of clustered NAS going to be more prevalent than in the cloud. They seem tailor made for each other because cloud-based services have the need for massive scaling and moderate performance while being very cost effective. Clustered NAS solutions seem to fill that bill.

A wrap-up of announcements from SNW Fall related to storage systems, storage networking, NAS, SAN management, storage security, disaster recovery and email archiving.

As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

Mac Guff, one of France's largest digital visual effects design studios, will be installing Exanet's ExaStore Clustered NAS 2008 to ensure that its 3D animation, video effects and post-production processes are supported at the highest performance levels available.

Disaster recovery, to many people, means not much more than a hot site, but there is much more involved. What exactly is involved depends on how much money you have to put to the problem. Fully redundant hot sites cost quite a bit in hardware, software, and licensing. At best, they should be exact duplicates of your current environment; at worst, they should be able to run your most important virtual machines.

Panasas is counting on pNFS and the continuing growth of unstructured data to drive parallel clustered NAS into the enteprise.

Rackable will divest the RapidScale clustered file system it bought from Terrascale two years ago, as it prepares to enter into a new storage partnership.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices can simplify virtualization and support larger numbers of VMs with new, advanced features. NAS strategies benefit virtualized environments just as much as higher-end products, as this tip explains.

NetApp Inc. has added support for its free data deduplication utility to its V-Series gateways, which are diskless filer heads that can make another vendor's disk array look like a NetApp box. Some of the third-party disk array vendors the V-Series can front are EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, 3PAR and Fujitsu.