Notes from Storage Expo

Even though it is quite late , I thought its worthwhile to note few things from the London Storage Expo held last October . . Normally, I avoid big names like Netapp , EMC, IBM ,HP and look out for innovative small companies in any expo . In a corner a small stall caught my attention , it was Lefthand networks (http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/ ) . After a initial chat with an engineer , I could see the potential and innovation of their solutions . They have developed a software call SAN/IQ , which clusters storage nodes together, aggregating all of these resources into a single, larger storage system. The storage nodes comprise of standard X86 based systems , based on iSCSI protocol .Each SAN/iQ cluster responds to a single IP address, and every storage node in that cluster participates equally in sharing both the workload and the capacity of the whole cluster . There is a single centralised management for the entire cluster , synchronise replication for multiple location SAN implementation , remote copy asynchronous replication ,Snapshot . They have integrated quite well with Vmware . I can see potential of their solution as a cost effective solution for the SME sector . My only concern is the performance for high I/O intensive Online Transaction Processing system .
Second stall which drew my attention was of Storwize (http://www.storwize.com/) . It's of real -time data compression , which compresses data as they transmitted between a host and Storage device . What they claim is around 95% storage capacity gain for database file and 65% across other data types . I was sceptical about the performance , but I believe it will compensate the overhead related to compression with the less data to be written on disk subsystem.