Data Center Advisors

Last May we debuted HCAP V2.0, earlier this month we updated HCAP V2.4 out. Our theme, for V2.4, was “being secure out of the box” from an administration perspective. The focus was on Role Based Access Controls, password complexity, linkages to common authentication directories (LDAP and AD), pervasive audit logging of all management transactions, and other goodies like only allowing management transactions over HTTP + TLS/SSL. These security oriented features joined other capabilities already in the product as of V2.0:

• Encryption of ingested objects over HTTPS
• Encryption of replicated objects when using object level TCP/IP based replication between to archives
• A packaging format called AOP (Archive Object Package) which can be utilized by users wanting to backup the archive via NDMP
• Finally, AES encryption of data in-flight and at-rest over the SAN fabric, with the intention of protecting sensitive data on drives finding their way out of the data center

The bottom line is that we are leaps and bounds more secure than the competition. Which brings me to the title of the post.

EMC recently announced “CentraStar (R) 4.0″ including the following somewhat vague descriptions of their feature set.

Well, I don’t know where to start. If you look at the announcement in detail you can see that wow they can now support 750GB drives and up to 25 million objects per drive. Okay HCAP can support up to 2TB LUNs (2.7x more capacity than EMC) and is future proofed for up to 16TB LUNs (nearly 22x more capacity than EMC) in the future. So in essence when I look at what EMC shows then so what. As to the number of objects per drive, I honestly don’t get it. How many per node I ask? I can make some assumptions and let you all know what I think that the number is (100 million), but again when I compare this to HCAP (400 million) again we are 4x their size, but again that’s my estimation, if EMC had provided more detail in their announcement I could be more accurate, but as it stands, Centera doesn’t scale, sorry.

The other point of EMC’s announcement is secure administration. Well wow I guess copying is the best form of flattery, then I feel very flattered. Further, it’s nice to know that a company who purchased RSA chooses to copy Hitachi rather then innovate on their own.