Buffalo this week launched its latest storage device, aiming itself at the small and medium business (SMB).

It still packs a punch with the choice of two, four, six or eight bays and the HDDs come fully populated within the device.

The TeraStation 5 is a network attached storage (NAS) solution, based on the iSCSI network standard.

It contains the more traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) rather than the still pricey, but beginning to fall, solid state drives (SSDs). However, it still packs a punch with the choice of two, four, six or eight bays and the HDDs come fully populated within the device.

The TeraStation 5 runs on Intel's Atom dual-core processor which, whilst not as weighty as others Intel has on the market, is designed with powering the smaller product in mind.

"At Buffalo we continually pride ourselves on providing IT solutions that are easy to deploy, run and manage for the SMB [and] the SME market," Paul Hudson, sales director for Northern Europe at Buffalo, told IT Pro.

"The TeraStation 5 is no exception, it includes important features from the rest of the TeraStation range as well as new and improved ones, offering enterprise class performance."

One of its key new functions is the ability to fail-over to a second device, which it calls its hot-spare function. This update adds more security from losing your data if things go wrong at the storage level. However, for those not wanting to stump up for two boxes, it also continues to have hot-swap functionality as well, meaning if just one drive fails within the TeraStation 5, it can be removed and replaced without losing any data.

Buffalo has also added mobile capabilities to the new solution under the title of WebAccess. This enables up to 10 users to access the TeraStation 5 remotely, using either a PC, laptop, iPhone or Android-based smartphone, and gives them mobile backup through the inclusion of NOVABackup, taking away some of the fears of working on the move and losing your device.

By building in a power scheduler to device to decide when it is off or on, Buffalo claims SMBs can cut down on CO2 wastage by switching it off when not needed and cut down on energy bills.

The Terastation 5 contains 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a choice of two or four 10, 100 or 1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to five USB ports. It is available now with a three year warranty.

Scientists at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science have built what they claim to be the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit.

According to the scientists, their technology enables storage more than 100 times denser than current hard disks and solid-state drives, and could lead to significantly smaller drives for mobile data in future devices.

As components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom.

The scientists said they had successfully stored one bit of data in only 12 magnetic atoms, and claimed the ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components atom by atom could be vital as conventional miniaturisation becomes unsustainable.

"The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom," said Andreas Heinrich, lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research.

"We're taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit - single atoms - to build computing devices one atom at a time."

IBM said nanostructures built to exploit an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism could allow people and businesses to store 100 times more information in the same space.

The team engineered 12 antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that were able to store information for "a few hours" by taking advantage of their inherent alternating magnetic spin directions.

This property, the scientists said, enabled them to pack adjacent magnetic bits much closer together than was previously possible without disrupting the state of neighbouring bits.

The European Commission has approved Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's hard disk drive business.

The approval, under the European Union (EU) merger regulation and subject to conditions, clears US-based Western Digital to buy rival Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST), a subsidiary of Hitachi of Singapore recently renamed Viviti Technologies.

The approval is conditional upon the divestment of Western's production assets for 3.5in hard disk drives (HDD), including a production plant and the transfer of personnel and supply of HDD components.

The EC also said it cannot complete the Viviti acquisition until it has found a suitable purchaser for the divestment that must also be approved by the Commission.

Joaqun Almunia, European Commission vice president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement that the proposed divestiture would ensure that competition in the industry is fully restored before the merger is implemented.

"Hard disk drives are a key component of computers and other sophisticated electronic devices as they are used to store a growing bulk of data in the digital economy," he stated.

The commission said its decision was based on findings that there are separate worldwide markets for HDDs based on their form factor (3.5in or 2.5in) and different end uses, including in desktops, mobile and consumer electronics devices and enterprise business and mission-critical applications.

Without the divestment, it found the merged entity would only face competition in markets for 3.5in desktop HDDs and consumer electronics HDDs from the recently merged Seagate and Samsung, preventing customers from multi-source HDD purchases.

The transaction will reduce the number of competitors to three and in some markets to two, including the merged Western Digital/Viviti and Seagate/Samsung entities and Toshiba.

It also noted that Toshiba only recently entered the market for 3.5in business critical HDDs, but was uncertain whether it could replace competitive pressure presently exerted by Viviti.

Today's approval comes seven months after Western Digital announced its intention to buy HGST. The commission said it also took the Seagate/Samsung merger in the same sector into account, as it received its notification one day earlier than the HGST deal and approved it on 19 October.

Tech giants Dell, Intel, EMC, Fujitsu and IBM have come together to establish a working group to push standardisation of storage drives based on the PCIe standard.

The Solid State Drive (SSD) Form Factor Working Group includes 12 other members and they will work with the five founding companies on producing standards with the aim of improving products.

In particular, the group will look at establishing a connector specification to promote interoperability of various storage protocols specifically SAS 3.0, SATA 3.0 and PCIe 3.

Secondly, standardisation will be sought in form factor, building on the current 2.5in standard to allow for "enclosure flexibility."

"By enabling PCIe standards, Dell is delivering breakthrough storage performance to a mainstream audience," said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager for Dell Server Platforms.

"We're taking a leadership position in PCIe storage technology and standardisation which will help our customers achieve greater interoperability, scalability and choice."

Bill DePatie, vice president for hardware engineering at EMC, added: "In addition to other high speed protocols, PCIe will be a key interconnect for SSD technology moving forward. EMC is committed to driving standards in this space."

Intel is hoping to help "collectively define the essential building blocks for future generations of non-volatile memory storage solutions," added Tom Macdonald, vice president of Intel architecture group and general Manager of platform components group at the chip manufacturer.

The formation of the SSD Form Factor Working Group comes just days after Apple's introduction of its new MacBook Air laptop which uses RAM DIMM-style SSDs that communicate with the motherboard using the SanDisk-developed mSATA connector. Whether the Working Group can outmaneuver manufacturers with their own ideas about the future of SSDs, such as Apple, remains to be seen.

IBM has released a new enterprise-level disk storage array as part of its DS8000 product line.

The System Storage DS8700 features IBM's dual Power6 processors along with device adapters that claim to deliver 150 per cent better performance.

It also incorporates solid state drives (SSDs), which IBM introduced to its DS8000 line earlier this year, as well as smart data placement promoting regularly accessed data onto high performance drives.

The company also claims that the new system is more energy efficient, with a 50 per cent increase in IOPS per watt than the previous model.

The systems are compatible with previous model's hard drives, drive enclosures, tools, scripts and copy services.

Prices for the system will start at $290,000 and shipping begins tomorrow.

We are all aware how important security is for our data, especially when we take it with us on the move. There are often reports about how employees have lost laptops, USB sticks or external hard drives containing valuable data and have not made any attempt to encrypt it.

To this end, DigiSafe has released its latest product, the DiskCrypt Mobile, claiming to offer simple, safe encryption and mobility for your hard disk. But does it live up to this declaration?

The premise of the device is like a cash machine, offering you a credit card and PIN to encrypt a hard drive within a solid casing to keep it safe.

At first glance the device looks a bit cheap, with an admittedly tactile black rubber outside but an unimpressive keypad. Unfortunately, the cheapness stops there as the best price we could find was 212.75. Admittedly this does include a 160GB 2.5in SATA hard drive, but even for just the enclosure the price came in at a hefty 151.80.

It comes with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/800 connections and should be powered by your PC or laptop. It does provide an AV adapter connection in case this fails but not the actual adapter itself, which considering the price is a bit of a let down.

The usage and security is a lot more impressive though. The user starts with an eight digit default PIN and after putting one of the chip and PIN smart cards into the device you get two in case one gets lost the number is typed in.

We appreciated the attention to security here with not just one but two secure steps to get access to the drive, whilst still retaining simplicity and usability that other options may lack.

The number pad did not always register our finger's instructions, which was frustrating at times. The worst scenario was when we were trying to change the PIN. The result? A relatively short process turned into an arduous task.

The security focus deepened even further when you get to the inside of the device. Rather than software encryption, it encrypts the data as it is written to the hard drive. So, should anyone steal it, remove the drive and try to use it in another machine, the drive is rendered useless.

Despite this hardware advancement, the set up on the computer is pretty non-existent, unless you need to format the drive. It appears as a mass storage USB device and from there using it to save files or applications to was no different than any other external hard drive. It's compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Linux, and Mac OS X and even Mac OS 9, should you be feeling retro.

Overall, we appreciated the idea and loved the extra mile the company seems to have gone to ensure heightened security. However, even with the sweet black leather pouch, what you get for your money doesn't add up for us. And there's further outlay thanks to the lack of AV adapter and the prospect that should you lose your smartcards you would have to purchase more.

If you have the money to spend and want, or positively need, to feel extra safe go for the DiskCrypt. That said, we'd have to first recommend the Lenovo ThinkPad USB portable drive, as it offers similar benefits for rather less cash.

Verdict

An extra secure way to transport your hard drive but a little on the pricey side for the quality of the casing and included accessories. A good choice, but we suggest you shop around before shelling out more than 200.

Model: DiskCrypt Mobile 128bits (also available in 256bits) Enclosure type: 2.5in external USB enclosure Bus Interface: USB 2.0 – Firewire 400/800 Compatible drives: 2.5in SATA-I/II Dimensions: 130mm x 78mm x 22mm (LxWxH)

HP has today launched 6Gb per second Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives, 3Gb faster than traditional storage systems.

The new line up includes 2.5 inch 7.2K Midline drives, as well as 10K and 15K Enterprise drives offering capacities ranging from 72GB to 500GB.

It also features HP Smart Array controllers for customers to deploy their choice of RAID.

HP said: "When used with an HP ProLiant G6 server with a 6Gb/s SAS-enabled backplane and 6Gb/s SAS drives, customers will achieve improved system throughput that allows for faster access to business data and reduced I/O bottlenecks in multi-device systems."

The doubling of system bandwidth with 6Gb makes it useful for applications such as server virtualisation, server backup and video streaming.

The new drives are available now and can be used with HP's ProLiant DL380, DL370, DL360, DL180 and DL160 rack-optimized servers, ProLiant BL460c server blade, and the HP ProLiant ML370, ML350 tower servers.

HP has also announced the release of its StorageWorks D2000 Family of 6Gb/s SAS Disk Enclosures in Autumn this year. These are designed for SMBs, providing direct attach, external storage expansion. For larger enterprise customers, the system can also be used as back-up storage or for large databases.

Visit IT PRO's sister title Channel Pro for news, in-depth analysis and industry comment aimed at distributors, resellers and anyone else working in the IT channel.

Buffalo has announced an external hard drive based on solid-state disk technology (SSD).

The Buffalo MicroStation is available in three capacities, 32GB, 64GB and 100GB at suggest retail prices (SRPs) of 98.25, 195.31, and 292.38 respectively, excluding VAT. These drives are contained in a chassis measuring 57 x 14 x 89mm and weighing between 56 and 60g.

As the drive has no moving parts it is less susceptible to damage through drops and other shocks, according to the manufacture of computer peripherals who also claims that speeds of 35MB/sec are achievable using its proprietary Turbo USB technology.

"Increased performance, reliability and power savings are all key demands in the portable storage market," said Paul Hudson, Northern European sales director at Buffalo. "SSD technology is able to meet these requirements."

Other features include a wrap around cable for neater storage and Memeo AutoBackup software with password protection. Windows users can also make use of Secure Lock Ware Encryption software.

The company says that it is the first to bring an external SSD drive to market in the UK. Other companies, such as Crucial, have enclosures designed for use with SSDs, but Buffalo is the first to offer a ready-made, all-in-one portable SSD solution.

For many of the latest SAN solutions a number of storage vendors have decided to combine both FC and IP capabilities in the same unit. HP's latest StorageWorks products take the opposite tack as the new 2000 Modular Storage Arrays (MSAs) are offered with either fibre channel or iSCSI RAID controllers. The twelve bay disk cabinets are the same you just choose which SAN you want to go with.

These are aimed squarely at SMBs with limited budgets and a glance at the price tags shows that HP looks to have hit the mark for value although the prices we've listed don't include any hard disks. We take an exclusive look at both products as on review we have the 2012i and 2212fc arrays.

The 2U chassis accepts high performance SAS and high-capacity SATA drives and you can mix and match them in the same chassis as required. There's plenty of fault tolerance on tap as the chassis supports two RAID controllers along with dual combined fan and power supply units.

HP offers a range of controller options with base FC and iSCSI models coming with a single controller. A pair of standard controllers provides active-active failover, whilst the enhanced model such as the 2212fc on review has two controllers and a faster processor. Expansion options look good as the single SAS port on the RAID controllers supports up to three disk shelves enaqbling capacity to be boosted to a theoretical maximum of 36TB using SATA drives.

Instead of using a battery backup pack to protect the cache contents the RAID controllers use a combination of a 512MB CompactFlash card and capacitor. If there's a power failure the cache contents are written to the card and the main advantage here is the capacitor takes far less time to charge than a battery and can provide full protection much quicker. The two controllers are also joined with a high-speed, direct link. Data written to one controller is synchronously mirrored to the other with the aim of improving general performance by reducing internal system traffic between the controllers.

We kicked off with the iSCSI array and had no problems with basic installation as you simply point a web browser at the controller's dedicated management port. The tidy web interface opens with a basic status display for the array cabinet, virtual disks and controllers with options to drill down to individual components. The enclosure view shows which bays in the array and any attached expansion units have drives in and hovering the pointer over them reveals the drive type and model lurking inside.

We began by creating virtual disks, or vdisks, where you select physical drives, pick from a choice selection of RAID array types and assign hot-spares. Some on-line array expansion options are provided, as although you can't migrate from one RAID type to another it is possible to add more drives to existing arrays and expand into them although this doesn't include mirrors.

An automatic vdisk creation option is provided where you just answer a few simple questions but we opted for manual control where we could select the array type, the preferred controller and the number of volumes it should have. If you wish you can allow the controller to create equal sized volumes and then you name them and decide if they should be available to all hosts.

Before hosts can have access to volumes the iSCSI host ports on the controllers need to be configured. Here, you can provide an IP address for each one, add the location of any iSNS servers and activate CHAP authentication as well. You then need to map volumes to specific host data ports and you can hard set read and write access as well.

Snapshots for point-in-time volume copies are supported and these are stored in a snapshot pool on the appliance. An eight snapshot license costs around 369, whilst 64 will set you back 1,005. Full support for Microsoft's MPIO (multi-path I/O) comes as standard. This uses multiple hardware components to create redundant paths from hosts to storage volumes and HP includes its DSM (device specific module) as standard.

For testing we started with a Boston Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 server running Microsoft's iSCSI initiator. IP SAN performance initially looks good as with one host attached to a volume created on a quad-drive stripe using SAS drives we saw the Iometer utility report a raw sequential read throughput of 113MB/sec pretty much tops for Gigabit Ethernet.

We then added a Dell PowerEdge 1950 equipped with dual quad-core 1.86GHz Xeons and logged this on to a separate volume through the second host port. With Iometer running on both systems we saw a cumulative throughput of only 151MB/sec showing clearly that there was some contention for resources even with the two hosts assigned to different ports and both RAID controllers installed.

Moving over the 2212fc we found nearly every procedure is exactly the same as for the iSCSI version. Vdisks define physical drives and RAID arrays, they contain multiple volumes and controls can be used to restrict host access using WWNs instead of IQNs all very simple indeed.

To test performance we introduced the 2212fc to the lab's 4Gbps FC SAN. Our two test servers were also equipped with LSI 4Gbps 7204 FC HBAs and we had no problems accessing the virtual volumes. Performance on one host was impressive with Iometer reporting a speedy 375MB/sec. We assigned a second volume to the Dell server and ran Iometer on both systems. This test returned a cumulative raw read speed of 515MB/sec showing clearly, as with the iSCSI appliance, that contention for resources was occurring.

HP clearly lay down the gauntlet to vendors such as NetApp and EMC who will find it nigh on impossible to compete on price with these new FC and IP SAN solutions. We have some concerns over performance under load but the 2000 series of appliances offer a good range of features, are particularly easy to install and manage and have plenty of expansion potential.

Verdict

HP’s latest network storage appliances are competitively priced making them an affordable option for SMBs looking for an FC or iSCSI solution with fault tolerance on tap. Installation is very streamlined and expansion potential looks good but although performance is reasonable our tests do show they won’t cope well with a heavy demand.

Model: 2012i MSA Chassis: 2U rack Disk bays: 12 hot-swap SAS or SATA (not included in price) Base Controller: 566MHz Celeron; 1GB cache memory, 512MB CompactFlash card, capacitor, LSI 1064 SAS controller, supports RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 50. Network: 2 x Gigabit data ports, 10/100 management port Other: Web browser management, Windows MPIO DSM bundled. Model: 2212fc MSA Chassis: 2U rack Disk bays: 12 hot-swap SAS or SATA (not included in price) Enhanced Controller: 700MHz Pentium; 1GB cache memory, 512MB CompactFlash card, capacitor, LSI 1064 SAS controller, supports RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 50. Network: 2 x 4Gbps FC SFP ports, 10/100 management port Other: Web browser management, Windows MPIO DSM bundled.

Battle was joined in 2007 between HP and IBM for a slice of the burgeoning SMB blade server market and IBM struck first by announcing its BladeCenter S back in June. However, HP countered strongly by delivering its BladeSystem c3000, or 'Shorty', first to market in October, which we took an exclusive look at in the Business section of our sister title PC Pro. We now have the much-vaunted BladeCenter S and in another exclusive review we take a closer look to see what it has over HP's c3000.

With the BladeCenter S, IBM is primarily targeting the high growth small to medium business market and particularly those looking to consolidate and centralize their IT services. It also has its eye on large enterprises with geographically distributed locations such as branch offices and users where blade server technology has traditionally been too expensive or impractical due to size of the enclosures and operational noise levels.

Standing at 7U high the BladeCenter S is slightly taller than HP's c3000, which is a more compact 6U. Features that make this unique in the BladeCenter family are the dedicated areas for two storage blades and up to six server blades. The c3000 initially looks better on paper as it accepts four full-height or eight half-height blades or a mixture of both but the BladeCenter's storage facilities look a lot more versatile.

In the S chassis you have two dedicated blade slots at each end that accept IBM's storage modules. These each hold up to six 3.5in SAS or SATA hot-swap hard disks and connect directly into the chassis' midplane where they are placed in zones, enabling you to dish out storage to selected server blades. There are plenty of zone options and the review system came with a default configuration, which handed three drives in each storage module to the server blades in slots one and four. Other predefined zones are available or you can create custom ones and the server's embedded LSI Logic RAID controllers see their allotted storage as local.

Although storage blades for the smaller SFF hard disks aren't currently available IBM advised us it expects to support them later this year. Note also that the modules are not offering a shared storage solution as each drive can be mapped only to one server. The storage blades don't limit expansion potential as IBM's SAS Connectivity Modules can increase this massively. These slot into the rear expansion bays and offer four SAS ports to which you can direct attach IBM's external SAS disk arrays and external tape drives.

IBM definitely wins for storage options as its SAS I/O modules make the BladeCenter S quite unique. HP's SB40c storage blade supports six hot-swap SAS or SATA SFF drives and has it own integral Smart Array RAID controller but it only connects to the server blade it is installed next to, effectively becoming a simple DAS solution.

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The high operational noise levels of enterprise blade servers makes them totally unsuited to the office but for the c3000 we found general noise levels with a half-populated chassis to be surprisingly low mainly due to the fact that it uses the same turbine style fans as the c-Class. We found that the BladeCenter S was far too noisy in the lab even with only two server blades up and running but IBM offers its office enablement kit to remedy this.

It comprises a rack chassis mounted on wheels that has an acoustic baffle at the back. The cabinet is 11U high enabling it to accommodate other systems up to 4U high and keep them quiet as well. If you want peace and harmony and a BladeCenter S in your office all at the same time then this kit is a must.

The BladeCenter S is designed to be easy to install and we can heartily agree. Network the AMM (advanced management module), point a browser at its default address and a wizard takes you through key functions such as setting up and securing remote management access, entering IP addresses for the switch blades and storage modules, adding email notification addresses and configuring storage zones.

The home page provides a complete overview of the chassis and installed blades and although it's not as well designed as HP's Onboard Administrator interface it does provide easy access to the chassis and installed blades. The system status page keeps you posted on the condition of all server blades, I/O interconnect modules and drives in the expansion modules and power settings for each blade can be accessed directly.

For power management AMM keeps you posted on consumption, the total available and what's left in the tank. An acoustic mode attempts to throttle a blade's processors back to keep the cooling fans within accepted noise levels. IBM's Director is its answer to HP's Systems Insight Manager and provides tools for managing IBM servers, workstations, laptops and blade servers.

Along with a wide range of features including enhanced inventory, system monitoring and software distribution Director also offers power management. Renamed from Power Executive to Active Entergy Manager, this component offers real time power monitoring of entire BladeCenter chassis and individual blades and provides power capping, which enables CPU clock speeds to be modified to reduce power consumption.

Businesses looking to implement blade server technology in the office have two straight choices - HP's BladeSystem c3000 or IBM's BladeCenter S. The c3000 is more compact and quieter and has superior server and power management facilities. The BladeCenter S offers an equally extensive range of blades and I/O interconnect options plus superior storage options but if it's going into an office then the enablement kit will be a mandatory requirement.

Verdict

A very well specified blade server that'll give HP's BladeSystem c3000 a good run for its money. Remote management and monitoring capabilities come second to HP but for storage features and expansion the BladeCenter S offers some unique options.

Chassis: 7U rack enclosure with six server blade slots and two storage module slots Power: Four hot-swap supplies Fans: Four hot-swap modules Expansion: Four I/O module bays Management: One advanced management module Other: Office enablement kit, serial pass-thru module, media tray with DVD-RW, 2 x USB Blade 1: 2 x Intel Xeon E5320 1.86GHz, 2GB 667MHz FB-DIMM memory Blade 4: 2 x Intel Xeon E5320 1.86GHz, 2GB 667MHz FB-DIMM memory Storage Expansion Modules: Each with 6 x 73GB IBM 3.5in SAS hard disks in hot-swap carriers

Fujitsu Siemens is something of a pioneer in the blade server market having been in this particular game almost as long as HP. We were impressed with its Primergy BX600 S2 when we reviewed it in 2006 as part of our blade server group test and the latest BX600 S3 builds on these successes and delivers more than a few interesting new features.

Originally introduced in 2004, the sturdy chassis still stands at 7U and has room for up to ten server blades but its internals see a significant redesign. The dual mid-plane of the S2 has now been uprated in the S3 to cater for a greater number of network connectivity options and the demands of the new 10-Gigabit Ethernet end-to-end options. The new BX620 S4 Intel server blade has six Gigabit Ethernet ports whilst the AMD-based BX630 S2 offers a total of four. Essentially, each blade can have half its network ports routed to one mid-plane with the rest going to the second mid-plane.

To facilitate these extra connections the older 16-port Gigabit switch blades have been replaced with a new model that has thirty internal ports presented as twelve external ports. To use all the network ports on each blade you'll need to install two switch blades, which will each link to separate mid-planes. The lower switch blade slots have a dual purpose as they can be populated with fibre channel blades manufactured by Brocade with each offering six 4Gbps FC ports. To use these you will also need to fit a mezzanine card on each server blade.

Fujitsu Siemens is also amongst the first to support AMD's new quad-core Opteron processors but its implementation here makes it quite unique. The BX630 S2 server blade offers two sockets and can accommodate either Opteron DP or MP processors. The latter brings some interesting scalability options into play. Take a pair of these Opteron MP blades and you can bolt them together and, using the slots in the casings, insert two bridge boards that link the blade's HyperTransport buses together.

Another sideband connector links the blades system boards together so all I/O can be routed through them both. It'll take up two chassis slots but you now have a 16-core Opteron server blade, enabling the system to deliver up to 480 cores in an industry standard 42U rack cabinet.

Storage issues have also been resolved as on the older AMD blades two drive bays had to be removed to enable them to be joined together. This is no longer the case so both of the 2.5in SFF hot-swap bays on each blade can still be used.

Remote management gets a boost with the new iRMC (integrated remote management controller) and although only currently available on the AMD server blades, support on Intel blades will follow shortly. The iRMC overcomes issues with earlier blade servers as previously you needed the management blade with KVM support for full console redirect services and this limited you to one session on one blade at a time.

The IBP (intelligent blade panel) is another newcomer, which enables multiple Gigabit ports to be consolidated into single high-speed trunks. Server blades can be assigned to these trunks and failover is supported where it will switch over to a standby trunk in the event of a failure. Essentially, the IBP is Fujitsu Siemens' answer to HP's virtual connect modules.

The chassis supports up to four 2100W hot-swap power supplies with the base model equipped with two preinstalled. General cooling is handled by two mighty radial fans, while connectivity options can be spread across four expansion slots. Along with the new switch blades, the S3 is also 10-Gigabit ready as a dual-port expansion module is present. This requires a mezzanine card installed on each server blade but this does also include a hardware iSCSI initiator and a TOE (TCP offload engine) making it well suited to high performance storage applications.

Unlike Dell, which only includes one management blade with its solution, Fujitsu Siemens supplies both as standard. Each come with a Fast Ethernet port, providing remote web browser management for the chassis, switch blades and server blades. Fujitsu Siemens has also improved its remote management features as the blades provide high levels of access to the chassis, whilst the switch blades offer separate web browser interfaces.

The management blade interface opens with a complete status report on all installed components and environmental values such as fan speeds and temperature. It has a useful Explorer style menu tree to the side making it easy to select and view the status of all individual components and control power to the chassis and individual server blades.

The ServerView S2 Java utility handles all general chassis and blade management and can access any system running the appropriate SNMP agent. There's plenty of information on tap so you can keep a close eye on areas such as processors, temperatures, voltages and fans and tie in alarms or errors to notifications by email, network messages or pagers. The ASR (automatic server restart) tool could prove handy as it enables you to set thresholds on temperatures and force a server shutdown if these reach critical values.

CSS (customer self service) is a new feature, enabling you to highlight a failed component, while ServerView S2 will advise whether you can replace it yourself or if you need to call an engineer in.

As one of the big four blade server vendors Fujitsu Siemens has kept up the pressure by updating its blade server with a range of new and innovative features. HP's c-Class BladeSystem is still our favourite for a number of good reasons but the PRIMERGY BX600 S3 is moving up to a close second and scores particularly well on value.

Verdict

Fujitsu Siemens has been busy with its blade server as the BX600 S3 delivers plenty of new features including some unique quad-core Opteron server blade configurations and all offered at a very competitive price.

(As reviewed) Chassis: 7U enclosure chassis with ten blade slots CPU: 1 x BX620 server blade with E5310 Xeon Switch: 1 x 30/12 port Gigabit switch blade; Memory: 4GB 667MHz FB-DIMM memory; Hard disk: 36GB 2.5in. SAS hard disk PSUs: 2x 2100W power supplies, 2x hot-plug fan modules Ports: Advanced KVM switch port with KVM and 10/100BaseTX ports, 2x hot-plug management blades with 10/100BaseTX and 9-pin serial port Bays: 4x interconnect bays Software: ServerStart, ServerView and RemoteView

A storage company has launched a new hard drive enclosure that automatically formats new drives and moves data around them.

Billed as the world's first storage robot, the Drobo from Data Robotics can automatically detect and format up to four 3.5-inch Sata drives of any capacity. Intelligent software looks after all the data management, disk swapping, redundancy and data corruption repair.

"Drobo is the world's first storage robot, providing fully automated, infinitely expandable storage that safeguards against drive failure and data corruption," according to a statement from the company. "Drobo is self-healing; when a hard drive fails, it reconfigures data to ensure it is once again protected - all without any human intervention."

When the "robot" is connected to a PC or Mac via a USB 2.0 connection, the computer sees the unit as one drive (The appliance will automatically partition drives at 2TB). LED lights of different colours tell the user the status of each drive: green is ok, yellow indicates a drive low on space, while a red flashing light warns of disk failure. Lights at the bottom tell the user how much overall storage is left in the enclosure.

According to the website's configuration page installing four 1TB disk drives will give users 3.6TB of usable storage. The enclosure (without any hard drives) is set to retail at $699 (350).

In the busy world of the IT operator, two tasks take precedence over all - backup and restore. Given the amount of data that now resides on servers, desktops and laptops and the increased hours of operation, the backup window is getting ever smaller. Despite increases in tape speed and capacity, many organisations struggle to backup their data without impacting the working day.

One solution that has become popular is Disk to Disk to Tape (D2D2T) appliances. These use a rule based approach to site data on different tiers of storage. The more important the data, the faster it is to access. Eventually, data is migrated off to tape. Not all organisations or departments need several tiers of disk. Simply being able to dump backups to a hard disk which is allied to the tape device is sufficient.

Enter the BizGuardian from Breece Hill.

The BizGuardian comes in a large box with everything already installed into the appliance. There is an accessories box with quick start installation and configuration guides, three power leads, network cables, four LTO 3 tapes capable of storing up to 800GB each, drivers for the various hardware components and the Windows Server 2003 disks and manual. Mounting brackets for installing the BizGuardian into the rack are also supplied although the mounting rails are already attached to the chassis.

Missing from the CD and documentation sets were the EMC manuals and software for Retrospect although there is a section in the Configuration Guide on how to install EMC Retrospect clients. A separate CD included as part of the quick installation guide has a number of general documents and the EMC Retrospect clients but not the Retrospect manuals.

Open the chassis and you find a server with a built in tape system complete with autoloader. An Intel motherboard with a Pentium 4 processor, dual core, 3GHz processor, 2GB RAM which can be extended to 16GB, two built in network ports - 1 x 10/100 and 1 x 10/100/1000, video, keyboard, mouse ports and 3 USB ports. This is a good specification for a server and you could configure it as a Disaster Recovery server to run virtual machines.

Storage is via eight SATA drives and in the model reviewed, these were 250GB. Breece Hill has qualified 500GB drives and is in the process of qualifying even higher capacity drives. The drives are managed by a Broadcom RAIDCORE PCI-X 64-bit card. As the primary purpose of this device is backup, the disk drives are installed at the rear of the chassis.

There is a CD drive for software installation and this is also access from the rear of the BizGuardian.

The tape device is a 10-slot LTO 3 drive with autoloader. This is driven by an Adaptec AIC-7901 SCSI card. While the card is a 64-bit PCI-X card it came installed in a 32-bit slot.

The BizGuardian comes fully assembled with the exception of the tape cartridges. This makes it an extremely cumbersome box to manoeuvre and install. Storage appliances are generally heavy today and this is the first I've seen for some time where everything is already installed. The documentation did not recommend removing the hard disks and power supplies during the installation which would significantly lower the weight of the device.

The mounting rails are affixed to the side of the BizGuardian box when it is shipped. All you need to do is fix a couple of brackets into the rack and then install the appliance. When installing, you will need to take careful note of the need for three power supplies and two network cables. If you are installing into a location where you have limited rear access, this could be a problem. All access to the hard disks and optical drive is via the rear of the enclosure.

Once installed into the rack, setup and configuration is straightforward. You need to remove two shipping screws from inside the tape enclosure, these are easily located and removed. When moving the BizGuardian, these screws need to be reinstalled. Turning on the power at the front was interesting. The documentation says to use a pencil to push the power button. They are not joking. Unless you possess claw like nails, you will need something to poke the power button. An advantage of this is that it removes the risk of the power button being depressed by accident when working on other devices in the rack, however unlikely this is.

The operating system for the BizGuardian is Windows Server 2003 and it ships with a five user licence. This should be adequate as you will be using the appliance to connect to other machines not having users connecting directly to the BizGuardian. The only instance where this might change is if you have to use it as a Disaster Recovery server where you have multiple applications and virtual machines installed.

Breece Hill do offer a pre-installed Windows Server 2003 build, leaving it in a sys-prep mode ready for the user to simply add into the domain, IP details and passwords.

The backup software is EMC Retrospect and this is also preinstalled onto the BizGuardian. This is a basic, five machine licence and does not include the MS Exchange Server, MS SQL Server and User Initiated Restore options. The user needs to purchase all of these separately either through Breece Hill when ordering the BizGuardian or through their own supplier.

The last job is to install the cartridges into the tape drive and the easiest way is to simply open the front of the BizGuardian and insert the LTO cartridges into the empty slots. It will take as many as 10 and Breece Hill supply 20 bar code labels for affixing to your tapes.

Once the BizGuardian has been commissioned the next thing to do is to deploy the EMC Retrospect agents to the servers and configure backup jobs inside Retrospect.

Breece Hill configure the EMC Retrospect install and supply a small number of scripts to ensure that you can get started very quickly. At the very least, this would allow an administrator to do an initial backup of critical servers the first day that they install the BizGuardian.

The front panel of the BizGuardian support two different sets of controls. On the left is a set of lights showing device status and housing the on/off and reset switches. In the centre is an LED display with a control button that allows you to carry out simple management without needing a keyboard, mouse or screen.

This is probably the easiest D2D2T device that I've reviewed. Once installed into the rack, we were backing up data within 30 minutes and if installing multiple BizGuardian appliances, could probably reduce that time even further.

The decision by Breece Hill to base this on their tried and proven iStoRA platform is a good one. Including the EMC Retrospect software and then adding a small number of scripts to get the user started is equally good. Whether you are working in a large organisation or just a small business this is a solid product.

Breece Hill have wisely stayed away from the Windows Storage System program and based BizGuardian on Windows Server 2003 standard edition. This gives administrators the ability to absorb it into their standard management process for patches and upgrades. As Breece Hill are not adding any bespoke software to the BizGuardian, there are no worries about what to do when a rebuild is necessary.

The ability of the appliance to operate as a standard server in an emergency is easy to prove. We installed and configured Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2005 and Project Server 2007. This is a very typical server configuration and we used several virtual machines. We also added memory to ensure that things would work perfectly. There was no real difference in performance to a standard alone server with comparable processor and memory. Given that most backup operations will be performed at night, this suggests that for organisations looking to deploy an appliance out to remote offices, BizGuardian, as an all-in-one solution, is a good fit.

If there are any criticisms of the BizGuardian it would be that it only comes with EMC Retrospect. This is a Windows Server 2003 appliance so providing the SQL Server, Exchange Server and UIR options as standard would be a more inclusive option.

In addition, given how complex data centre environments are becoming, I would have like to see EMC RepliStor supplied either as standard or an option. It would allow for a more dynamic gathering of changed data from around the network. This, in turn, would lead to a more efficient backup process as the time taken to gather changed files overnight would be further reduced. The only issue would be network bandwidth but in tests we have done previously with RepliStor this is not a big problem for most networks.

Verdict

It is not often that I find a device that is clearly a requirement for my own data centre and it's fair to say that the BizGuardian is now on my wish list. If there are any criticisms of the BizGuardian it would be that it only comes with EMC Retrospect. Providing the SQL Server, Exchange Server and UIR options as standard would be a more inclusive option.

Server Motherboard: Intel Network interface: Auto-sensing GigE Memory: 2GB Operating system: Windows 2003 Server 32-bit Standard Disk Native capacity: 2 - 4TB (drive dependent) Number of drives: 8 SATA disk drives Disk size options: 250GB or 500GB Logical disk setup: RAID 5 Tape Drive Type: HP full-height LTO 3 Number of drives: 1 Number of cartridges: 10 Media: LTO 3 or LTO 3 WORM Native storage capacity: 4TB Compressed storage capacity: 8TB Native tape cartridge capacity: 400GB Compressed tape cartridge capacity: 800GB Dimensions Height: 7 in (17.8 cm); 4U, rackmount only Depth: 30 in (76.2 cm) Width: 17.5 in (44.5 cm) Weight: 75 lbs (34 kg)