Iomega ? Consumer only ?.. pfft, Me thinks not

It would appear that the aquisition of Iomega by EMC is paying is dividends by way of cool tech being added to the Iomega Range.  So, as you may be aware Iomega released their new IX12 NAS box earlier this month (see previous post for more info) , which has many of the gubbins of “proper” NAS. What could this Sub £10k little box have that pips EMC and Netapps big enterprise boxes to the post ?  It has an Avamar agent installed in the NAS device !!…    Granted,  if you don’t know what avamar is, that previous statement may have been something of an anti-climax…   Let me elaborate:

• Typically what type of data contain the most commonalilty?
• Typically which type of data consumes the most storage ?
• Which type of data takes the longest time to backup ?

The answer to the question my pedigree chums.. is file data (in most cases, not all..  granted).  So,  Company X (The commercial division of the Xmen..  obviously), has a head office in London and a number of regional small branch offices dotted around the country. Each one of these offices is serving up user home directories and network drives from said Iomega IX12 (lets say 4TB per office)..   When it comes to backing those sites up; do they back it all up to tape or disk locally, taking up time and budget on a per site basis for their backups ? Do they back it all up to disk, replicate data to a central site for DR and try and shove how ever many terrabytes down a 100MB link wondering why it takes sooo long ?   nay..  After a the first full backup they only backup the block level changes over the link to their central site , allowing them to negate the requirement to backup to disk locally on their smaller regional offices..     bearing in mind that typically the daily rate of change on unstructured data is less than a percent..  nightly backups can be done quick sharp and are treated as full backups when it comes to restore, so you don’t have to run through all your incremental backups to ensure you’re up to date.

Not a bad bit of tin if you ask me..

Iomega/EMC’s new lovechild

Iomega first started life selling removable storage. The world marvelled at the might of the 200MB Zip drive, brought gifts of  gold , frankincense and murr as offerings to the almighty Jazz drive and sacrificed livestock in awe of the the Ditto Drive  (I exagerate..  but bear with me, I’m setting the scene). Then, as removable storage media started to give way to internet and USB drives became the standard for removable storage..  we started to see the likes of the zip and jazz drive fade away.

So..  out with the old, in with the new ? No..  Now Iomega have a massive play in the consumer space for External Hard drives and networked storage. The upper end of the networked storage range was the IX4 (now on its second generation). A nice tidy box which would hold up to 8TB of RAW capacity and fit well in a remote office environment, home office, even as a media server for your movies and music (all legitimately obtained of course). They even did a rackmount NAS device..  Brilliant !!

But what if you need a little more grunt… a bit more redundancy, scalability.. something more feature rich. Iomega/EMC are on the verge of releasing the IX12. This box fits nice and snug between the IX4-200R and EMC’s Celerra NX4; it supports up to 24TB of RAW capacity, supports all the RAID types you’d ever want to use and has 4 Gigabit ports which can support up to 256 iSCSI initiators (servers) or 256 LUN’s for block level access. All the other usual protocols still apply in the oh so familiar forms of CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, etc and there are even a few nice bells and whistles such as port aggregation, DFS, array based replication, WebDav Support for online collaboration and it also sports drive spin down (very cool if its being used for a backup to disk or archive target). 

The IX12 has also been certified by a number of other vendors; it is obviously certified and on VMwares Hardware compatibility List for shared storage (also supported by a number of other virtualization vendors). Microsoft have verified that it will support Exchange 2010 Mailstores for environments of up to 250 users.

Its being stated by Iomega that these boxes are sitting in at between $5,000 and $10,000 list,  so will help EMC break even further into the lower SMB market. Personally, I think this box will play really well in spaces such as remote office,  graphic design organisations, departmental dedicated storage, backup to disk targets (admittedly would be more compelling if it supported NDMP, but we’ll leave that to the big boys), archive storage for the likes of EMC’s SourceOne, EV, Commvault, etc…

I’ll put together a more clear and concise post after the announcements to come, but I think Iomega could be onto a winner on this one..

Microsoft pocket pc ? no.. Iomega Pocket PC

So, EMC the acquisition monster is cross pollinating tech from some of its recent acquisitions and I have to say the result (all be it, not an enterprise product as such) is very cool. It’s called IOMEGA V.Clone and its an IOMEGA/VMWare hybrid. Think VMWare ACE meets Iomega’s eGo portable hard drives. Essentially, you plug it in to your primary PC, click capture and it creates a VM image of your PC (applications and all) on the portable drive.. you plug it in to a secondary PC, it loads a VMWare player’esque application and you run the image of your primary PC on whatever computer the drive is plugged into… very neat.

When changes are made on the image, you can sync these back to your primary PC, although sync is limited only to certain key folders such as My Documents and does not do a block for block sync of the drive, so I would not necessarily advise using it for personal DR and would still backup your stuff.

You can have multiple PC clones on the one drive which is very handy.. have your work PC, home PC and laptop on the one drive.

The v.clone is windows only.. so avid Mac users, linux boffs and the likes.. not for you !! You will need to be running a supported version of windows (Vista, Wiindows 7 or XP) and you will need admin access to the PC you launch your image on (so no trying blag free internet time at the library or local internet cafe!).

I thought it was pretty cool…

See the below video for more info from Iomega: