EMC upgrades backup and recovery software

Network World - Only a few wisps of storage news this week from EMC, Virtual Instruments and start-ups Gridstore and Nasuni.

EMC announced last week that it upgraded its Retrospect backup and recovery software for small and midsize businesses with the addition of support for VMware Consolidated Backup, Windows 7 and a new emergency recovery CD for disaster recovery of Windows servers and PCs. Retrospect 7.7 also now supports wake-on-LAN technology and has support for 64-bit processors and operating systems. A multi-server version of Retrospect 7.7 is available for $1,409; upgrades from 7.6 cost $299.

EMC unveils new features for home, small-business NAS drive

Virtual Instruments also announced a service for enterprise businesses that diagnoses and troubleshoots Fibre Channel SAN availability and performance emergencies. The service is based on the use of Virtual Instruments' NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom monitoring and analysis software and hardware. The new SOS-4-SANs service remotely assesses the customers problem with the SAN and if necessary istalls SAN instrumentation software for data collection and analysis. The service works with EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, HP, 3PAR, Dell, Sun, Brocade, Cisco, Qlogic and Emulex SAN products.

Gridstore came out of stealth last week with the announcement of grid-based network attached storage for small and midsized businesses and managed service providers. The company introduced Gridstore NASg, which aggregates the processing of client systems to perform parallel storage processes on existing NAS arrays. NASg virtualizes NAS or NASg storage nodes into a single pool of storage. It allows for capacity growth as needed and eliminates server bottlenecks by parallelizing IO. The Gridstore NASg Storage Block is an x86-based server with 1GB of RAM and 2TB of Serial ATA drives. Gridstore NASg starts at $800; individual expansion nodes start at $300.

Finally, in stealth mode start-up Nasuni announced that it has received $8 million in Series A funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Nasuni was founded in 2009 by Andres Rodriguez and Robert Mason (formerly founders of Archivas). The company is making a gateway to cloud storage, which promises secure control for users to the cloud. They are expected to introduce products in the spring of 2010.