2024-04-23

Storage Solution

WD Will Offer a New Storage Solution for Small Business Owners

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

Storage SolutionWestern Digital announced it will be offering a small-office storage server product and has signed an OEM software agreement with Microsoft Corporation to include the Windows® Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system software. WD® will combine its leading storage technologies with Microsoft’s operating system to deliver a complete storage solution for the small business market. The result will be a product that simplifies connection, protection and collaboration online for small businesses and the information technology services organizations that support them.

Fast, dependable and secure access to data, along with complete backup and recovery capability are becoming as crucial for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as it is for large enterprises. According to Forrester Research, SMBs will outpace the projected IT market growth rate of 7.1%. In terms of infrastructure spending increases, storage and servers top SMBs’ hardware budget plans. Fifty-three percent of SMBs indicate that they will increase their storage spend.1 To serve this market, WD joined with Microsoft to incorporate the most advanced online features so businesses can easily and securely share information with clients, consultants or satellite offices located anywhere in the world.

“Small businesses will find great value in the combination of WD’s hardware solutions and the recently released Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials solution from Microsoft. I am excited about the opportunity we have with WD and their solutions for helping small businesses run more efficiently,” said Nick Parker, VP of Worldwide Marketing for the OEM Division at Microsoft.

“By combining Microsoft’s platform with WD’s strength in the storage market, the two organizations bring extraordinary synergies that boost productivity and efficiency for small business. With this, WD will offer storage solutions for small business that provides centralized, online shared storage capable of meeting the storage requirements of the small business owners in today’s fast paced business environment,” said Thomas Gallivan, WD’s vice president of marketing for SMB branded products.

To receive future sales and product information regarding WD’s upcoming SMB products, you can email smbstorage@wdc.com.

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The New Media for Small and Medium Sized Storage Solutions

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM06 mins

When small to medium-sized users need more storage capacity and faster backups than they can achieve with 8mm or DDS backups, there are two new formats to choose from.

Digital Linear Tape (DLT) systems have been available since 1985, but recent increases in both speed and capacity have given the technology a new lease on life. In fact, for small to medium-sized systems they have been the leading technology for the last several years. DDS or DAT tapes were the only competitors for DLT in that market, but the tape heads had a tendency to ‘drift’ which meant technicians had to monitor them to ensure storage. DLT reliability is based on a ‘straight up and down’ recording mode.

Earlier this year, the introduction of Super DLT brought a tremendous boost in performance. Super DLT can store as much as 110 gigabytes on one cartridge, at a speed of 10 megabytes per second. With the speed of backup doubled, and capacity more than doubled, the technology can now reach ‘up’ to systems and networks that DLT previously couldn’t handle.

Competing technologies can offer very fast backups, but the tapes themselves contain very little data – hundreds of megabytes as opposed to hundreds of gigabytes that DLT offers.

Another technology has recently emerged that is comparable to DLT. That is LTO or Linear Tape Open, a consortium product from Seagate, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. LTO can put 100 gigabytes on a cartridge at up to 15 megabytes per second.

For cautious system administrators who don’t wish to try LTO, one technician said DLT is a more than acceptable choice: “Thirty million cartridges and a million tape drives can’t be wrong.”

Of course, Super DLT incorporates a good deal of new technology as well, so even though LTO is completely new technology, it “has a nice road map in front of it.” Super DLT uses a new recording format, but it does maintain a limited form of backwards compatibility with previous iterations of DLT. It incorporates the ability to read older tapes, although it cannot write to them, which means it would probably be most useful in allowing organizations to maintain their present archives in a useable form. Where users have thousands of tapes in their libraries, there can be a considerable saving in time and money if older tapes don’t have to be re-recorded on to newer ones. For those users who are moving from 8mm or DDS format systems, and committed to re-recording all their data, then there may be little to choose between LTO and Super DLT systems.

Today’s demands for storage capacity are increasing, and if anything there is going to be more pressure on our ability to back up, store, protect and retrieve data. Low to medium size users now have a choice: Super DLT, based on generations of iterative development and refinement, or LTO, new technology from a high-powered and stable group of technology companies.

Present archives in a useable form. Where users have thousands of tapes in their libraries, there can be a considerable saving in time and money if older tapes don’t have to be re-recorded on to newer ones. For those users who are moving from 8mm or DDS format systems, and committed to re-recording all their data, then there may be little to choose between LTO and Super DLT systems.

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