Storage Takes Spotlight At LinuxWorld

Storage is playing a big role at LinuxWorld this week, as several vendors use the San Francisco show to unveil new initiatives and products.

San Diego-based BakBone Software, for example, introduced on Monday a new integrated video surveillance and data recovery solution put together by one of its channel partners. The solution includes BakBone's NetVault Virtual Disk Library software, which allows data to be backed up to disk or tape and restored instantly from disk, said Anindya Mukherjee, senior manager of the vendor's Strategic Alliances Group.

The solution also includes BroadWare Technologies' BroadWare Media Platform, a server-based software suite for the management, distribution and storage of video surveillance data across a network. The solution runs on IBM servers.

Created by rs-unix, a San Francisco-based IBM solution provider, the solution was originally built for an unnamed transit system operator that needed a video surveillance system comprising up to 2,200 cameras spread over 44 stations, said Bob Kusche, eServer solutions architect at rs-unix.

Also at LinuxWorld, Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., will unveil updates to its recently acquired Veritas products. These include version 4.1 of Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System, Veritas Storage Foundation for Databases, Veritas Volume Replicator and Veritas Cluster server. The base on which most of Veritas' software depends, Storage Foundation groups physical disks into logical volumes to improve disk usage and cut storage-related downtime. With it, storage administrators can move data between operating systems and storage arrays.

The new releases now offer 64-bit support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating systems on Intel's Itanium and Xeon EM64T and AMD's Opteron platforms.

Yosemite Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based vendor of backup software, used LinuxWorld to unveil Yosemite Backup 8.1., offering full support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Logical Volume Manager.

Yosemite Backup 8.1 provides bare metal disaster recovery -- the ability to recover lost data, operating system and applications without having to reinstall and reconfigure the operating system. Company officials said the application is the first to offer bare metal disaster recovery in the Linux environment.

Finally, LSI Logic, Milpitas, Calif., introduced its new iMegaRAID storage technology. With iMegaRAID, system builders and OEMs can construct iSCSI storage appliances using x86 Linux platforms and iMegaRAID SATA storage adapters over the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating systems.