SNW, day 1

April 6, 2009 – Granted, it’s only the first day of the Storage Networking World show, and there’s a storm, and the economy’s in the tank, and the exhibits don’t open until tomorrow, but things are sloooow here in Orlando.

No waiting in line to register, no background noise (or people) in the press room, only a spattering of product announcements in my inbox, and even the bar was empty at 5:00 (a sure sign that the show isn’t what it used to be). The only outfit doing brisk business here is Starbuck’s.

The biggest product announcements today were 3PAR’s mid-range disk arrays (see “3PAR ships quad-controller array”) and FalconStor’s Backup Accelerator option for its VTLs (see “FalconStor speeds up backups”), which is only major because FalconStor is the leader in VTLs and VTLs are hot (but don’t solve all the problems associated with tape-based backup environments).

Oh, yes, and you can add yet another cloud-based storage services vendor to the rapidly growing list of players in this space (see "Zetta launches cloud storage service").

You know that a technology is hot when the Storage Industry Networking Association (SNIA, which co-sponsors SNW) forms a group dedicated to it. SNIA today announced the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group.

In other announcements today . . .

Xiotech, which a year ago at SNW launched its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology with great fanfare, today announced an energy-efficient feature -- dubbed PowerNAP – for its Emprise 5000 disk arrays. As its name implies, PowerNAP powers down drives so that they consume less than 24 watts (compared to 500 to 600 watts in power-up mode). The technology is based on Wake-On-LAN (WOL) technology, and company officials are quick to point out that it’s not massive array of idle disk (MAID) technology.

STORServer used SNW to showcase its STORServer Agent for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), which integrates VCB with IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (the engine behind STORServer’s Business Continuity Appliances). The agent provides centralized management, reporting and scheduling of virtual machine (VM) backups. STORServer also sells an appliance-based approach for integrating VCB and TSM.

I also sat down with Rob Stevenson, director of storage research at TheInfoPro, which recently completed Wave 12 of its ongoing surveys of Fortune 1000 storage professionals. Although it’s no surprise that data de-duplication (in a disk-to-disk backup context) topped the charts in TIP’s Technology Heat Index, it’s a little surprising that data de-duplication for primary storage was so high on users’ implementation plans.