2024-11-03

data storage device

Tips for Buying IBM Storage

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM010 mins

Tips for Buying IBM StorageIBM has been in the data storage business since before the advent of computers. Over the decades it has developed a broad storage portfolio that includes tape, disk, SAN and NAS. But more important than just the hardware is the intelligence added to easily and efficiently manage the growing storage capacity.

“Long gone are the days when storage was about ‘how much spinny stuff do you want? Clearly the media plays a role, but it is much more about the software DNA we are bringing than the hardware physicality.” said Doug Balog, IBM’s Vice President and Business Line Executive, Storage Systems.

He said that storage intelligence is increasingly important as IT departments are caught between the demand to provide faster access to larger amounts of data and the demand to keep budgets flat. This necessitates the use of deduplication and compression to reduce the amount of hardware required and automatic tiering so hardware is put to the best use.

With more than 150 storage products, it is impossible to cover IBM’s entire product line in a single article, but here are some of the highlights.

IBM Tape

    Despite regular reports of its imminent demise, tape, like the mainframe, is still here and continues to find new applications.

“Tape is still the greenest tech for long-term repository of data: It consumes no energy, and there is no carbon footprint, what we have done is extended tapes usefulness with a technology called LTFS (Linear Tape File System), which addresses one of the challenges tape has had — how do we find that critical piece of information on a tape cartridge that is now holds 5TB” said Balog.

This development makes tape not just useful for offsite archiving, but also for nearline storage of large amounts of data for media and high performance computing applications. In October 2011, IBM and Fox News Group even received an Emmy “for media workflow transformation and pioneering the development and application of LTFS in a broadcast environment enabling real-time content recording and high-speed recovery of content leading to a broadly supported multi-industry solution.”

LTFS is built on the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium5 format standard and allows users to search, read and write to IBM tape libraries with the existing OS file interface without the need for additional tape management software.

“LTFS allows some metadata to be tagged to the file at the time the data is written, the tape starts to act like a disk and looks like just another drive to the server.” said Balog.

IBM has entry, midrange, and enterprise tape libraries and drives ranging from the 1U TS2900 Tape Autoloader Express with a single drive and nine cartridges up to the TS3500 Tape Library, which has up to 192 drives per library and 2,700 drives per complex.

The Crossroads Read Verify Appliance monitors the utilization, performance and health of the tape drives to improve performance, reduce the risk of restore failures and provide an audit trail for regulatory compliance.

IBM Virtual Tape Servers

IBM also offers virtual tape servers for the entry, midrange and entry markets. The IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 is a family of mainframe virtual-tape solutions designed to optimize tape processing, with a RAID array cache up to 115TB and up to 64 tape drives.

IBM appliances and ProtecTIER deduplication gateways reduce storage needs by up to 25 to 1. The entry-level TS7610 is for weekly full backups of up to 3TB and daily backups up to 1TB. For enterprises, the TS7560G ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway provides sustained inline deduplication for backups at speeds up to 7.2TB/hr (2000 MBps). For mainframes, the TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z has two-node clustering for high availability and up to 1PB of storage capacity per system.

IBM Disk Systems

XIV is a high-end storage system with a massively parallel grid structure that is optimized for virtual and cloud storage applications. Last year, IBM released XIV Gen3, which includes InfiniBand interconnections, 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel ports and an increase in memory from 16 GB to 24 GB per module. It comes with 72 TB to 180 2 TB or 3 TB SAS drives. Administrators can monitor and manage the XIV through an iPad.

“XIV has a lot of IBM research assets in it now, which it didn’t have when we acquired it four years ago, It is a great product in terms of the intelligence it has built into it around the way it thin provisions all the LUNS and the way it distributes the data in an intelligent way to maximize the utilization and efficiency of the system.” said Balog.

While the XIV is designed for enterprise applications, IBM adapted some of its technology for the mid-market with the Storwize V7000 Unified, a 2U box that combines block and file storage in the same system. IT can use a mix of SSD, SAS or near-line SAS drives. It automatically migrates files to the appropriate drive based on policy. Maximum capacity is 36TB when using 12 3TB near-line SAS disk drives.

“The V7000 is very software-rich in its capability for virtualizing not only itself, but storage from a lot of other vendors as well, Instead of having to throw out a lot of the legacy storage they have, the V7000 virtualizes the older storage so they can get greater value out of their assets.” said Balog.

NAS and SAN

For large-scale NAS deployments, IBM released Scale Out NAS (SONAS) to deliver petascale cloud storage.

“Unstructured and semi-structured data is the fastest growing part of the storage market, and we found clients were looking at these massive NAS filer systems built up over the years, They would have dozens or hundreds of filer farms, each with little islands of unstructured data.” said Balog.

SONAS allows them to bring up to 21PB of unstructured data into a single namespace, and research is ongoing to raise the capacity to 100PB.

The IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software and the SVC Entry Edition appliance bring SAN efficiency and reliability to enterprises and SMBs. To simplify deployment, the SVC software comes preinstalled on SVC Storage Engines, which are based System x server technology. The Storage Engines are always deployed in redundant pairs to ensure availability. The SVC also uses a new graphical user interface similar to that used by the XIV Storage System.

Read More

Salmon DNA used in Data Storage Device?

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

Salmon

Scientists have created a rudimentary data storage device using salmon DNA

Salmon … they’re good to eat, provide a livelihood for fishermen, are an important part of their ecosystem, and now it seems that they can store data. More specifically, their DNA can. Scientists from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have created a "write-once-read-many-times" (WORM) memory device, that combines electrodes, silver nanoparticles, and salmon DNA. While the current device is simply a proof-of-concept model, the researchers have stated that DNA could turn out to be a less expensive alternative to traditional inorganic materials such as silicon.

The device is made up of a thin film of salmon DNA that has been impregnated with silver atoms, then sandwiched between two electrodes. When UV light is shone onto the system, the atoms cluster together into nanoparticles.

Subsequently, when no or little voltage is applied to the electrodes, only a low electrical current is able to travel through the UV-irradiated DNA. This is the equivalent of the device’s "off" state. Because the material is unable to hold a charge under a high electrical field, however, once the voltage exceeds a certain threshold, a higher current is able to travel through the DNA. This represents the "on" state.

These changes in conductivity were found to be irreversible – once the device has initially been set to either "on" or "off" it stays that way, regardless of what voltages are subsequently applied. Even after up to 30 hours, it retains its conductivity.

The scientists are now hoping that their discovery could lead to new techniques for the design of optical storage devices.

This isn’t the first time that DNA has been suggested for such applications. Researchers at Imperial College London have created logic gates using DNA and bacteria, while American scientists have genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing the solution to a classic mathematical puzzle.

A paper on the salmon DNA research was recently published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Read More

Two Recommendation Tape Drives

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM04 mins

A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data stored on a magnetic tape. It is typically used for off-line, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability.

A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a disk drive, which provides random access storage. A disk drive can move its read/write head(s) to any random part of the disk in a very short amount of time, but a tape drive must spend a considerable amount of time winding tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times. Despite the slow seek time, tape drives can stream data to and from tape very quickly. For example, modern LTO drives can reach continuous data transfer rates of up to 80 MB/s, which is as fast as most 10,000 RPM hard disks.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive

1. Seagate Replica 500 GB Complete Multi-PC Backup System with Dock ST905004BDA101-RK (Silver)

Features

  • Effortless, automatic backup for everything on your PC, including the operating system, programs and settings.
  • Simply plug in a single USB cable, click OK, and you’re backed up no tedious installation, nothing to configure.
  • Drag-and-drop from your backup copy to effortlessly retrieve accidentally deleted files.
  • Easily recover from a PC crash by restoring your entire system.
  • Password protection ensures that only you have access to your computer’s backed up files.

Technical Details

  • Drive Type: External
  • Capacity: 500 GB
  • Interface: USB 2.0
  • Spindle Speed (RPM): 5400

Price: $149.99 Price on Amazon.com: $99.99

2. Seagate Replica 250 GB USB 2.0 Complete Single PC Backup System ST902504BDA101-RK (Silver)

Seagate 250GB Tape Drive Features

  • Effortless, automatic backup for everything on your PC, including the operating system, programs and settings.
  • Simply plug in a single USB cable, click OK, and you’re backed up no tedious installation, nothing to configure.
  • Drag-and-drop from your backup copy to effortlessly retrieve accidentally deleted files.
  • Easily recover from a PC crash by restoring your entire system.
  • Password protection ensures that only you have access to your computer’s backed up files.

Technical Details

  • Drive Type: External
  • Capacity: 250 GB
  • Interface: USB 2.0
  • Spindle Speed (RPM): 5400

Price: $129.99 Price on Amazon.com: $69.99

Read More

Computer Data Storage Types And Data Storage Devices

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM110 mins

Computer Data Storage Types And Data Storage Devices With the increasing use of technology, usage of digital data has increased to no limits. In order to store this enormous amount of data, we need more powerful and secured data storage devices. Development teams all over the world are working around the clock to make better devices which would be small and inexpensive, but at the same time having more capacity and security.

These are the types of data storage used in computers. Advancing technologies these days are increasing the access rate and the capacity of these data storage devices.

Computer Data Storage Types

1. Data Storage Types – Primary Storage
Basically, primary storage is the memory part of the computer itself. Primary storage includes the Random Access Memory (RAM) and Read Only Memory (ROM).

2. Data Storage Types-Secondary Storage
Hard disks, magnetic tapes and all other data storage devices are included in the secondary storage. They are external to the processor and are used to increase the storage capacity of the computer. The secondary storage is non-volatile and can retain information even after the computer is switched off.

3. Data Storage Types – Tertiary Storage
Tertiary data storage is the third data storage out of the three types of data storage. The tertiary devices includes the storage devices that are connected to the computer in the form of removable mass storage devices. Tertiary storage is often used to store those files that are rarely accessed by the computer user.

Computer Data Storage Devices

Computer data storage devices refers to computer components which can retain the data in digital format, to be used for computing at some point of time in the future.

Disk Storage
Disk storage is a category of computer storage devices, wherein the data is recorded on a round and rotating surface, two-dimensional in nature. Disk drivers are used to record or retrieve information from these disks. Though these days, the term disk storage is mostly used to refer to a hard disk, it also refers to floppy disks and optical disks.

Floppy Disk
A floppy disk is a thin flexible medium of magnetic storage which is encased in a square plastic shell. A floppy disk is read and written by a floppy disk drive. This small storage device was invented by IBM in 1969. It comes in three sizes – 8-inch, 5¼-inch and 3½-inch. Floppy disks enjoyed wide popularity from the 70s to the 90s, but post 90s they were overshadowed by devices which had more capacity and were faster. The use of floppies has almost ceased, though limited use can be still seen in some places.

Compact Disk
Compact disk, more commonly referred to as a CD, is an optical disk used to store digital data. After its introduction in the market in 1982, this technology was followed with the launch of CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, SVCD and Enhanced CD. CD-ROM and CD-R are widely used in the field of computers. A standard CD having a diameter of 120 mm can hold up to 700 MB data. An estimated 200 billion CDs were sold all over the world by the year 2007.

Digital Versatile Disk
Digital versatile disk, more commonly referred to as DVD, is an optical storage device used for data storage in computer technology. Although they share the same dimensions as the CDs, DVDs have the capacity to store six times more data than the compact disks. DVD-video is used to store video content while DVD-audio is used to store audio content. The original DVD is more often referred to as Standard Definition DVD (SD-DVD). High-definition DVDs were discontinued after the Blu-ray optical disk was introduced into the market.

Blu-Ray Disks
Blu-ray disks, also referred to as BD, are optical disks manufactured by Sony for the storage of digital data. Its is most commonly used in gaming, high definition video storing, etc. Though it is of the same size as a CD or DVD, it can store up to 50 GB data. This technology uses a blue-violet laser to read the data, and hence is referred to as blu-ray disk. These optical disks have overshadowed other optical storage devices due to their high storage capacity.

Hard Disk Drive
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile storage device used to store digitally encoded data on rotating platters having magnetic surfaces. Being non-volatile means it can retain the data stored on it even when it is not powered. Hard disk drives were invented by an IBM team, led by Rey Johnson on 14th December, 1954. Earlier, hard disk drives were a removable form of data storage, but today it has become a sealed unit with fixed media. The first hard disk had a capacity to store 5 MB data on fifty 24 inch platters. Today, the capacity has risen to more than a 100 gigabytes, and is still increasing by the day.

Flash Memory
Flash memory is a non-volatile memory in computer technology which can be electrically programmed or erased. Flash memory devices commonly used today include USB flash drives and memory cards.

USB Flash Drive
USB flash drive is a type of memory storage device that consists of NAND-type flash memory, integrated with Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. The USB flash drives are removable as well as rewritable. Although they are smaller than a floppy disk, their storage capacity ranges from 64 MB to 128 GB. Some USB drives allow as many as 1 million erases and write cycles, while some have a 10 year data retention capacity.

Memory Cards
Flash memory cards are solid electronic flash memory devices used to store data in digital format. These cards are often used in hand-held as well as mobile computers. They are rewritable and non-volatile in nature. Though small, they have a high capacity and can store data of around 8 GB or more.

Read More