Intel® Xeon® processors E5-2600 series.

ABERDEEN DUAL XEON E5 SERVERS
	Aberdeen x70 Series Stirling Servers feature Intel® Xeon® processors E5-2600 series. All models feature our industry leading 5-year warranty. Please contact us to discuss any additional needs.

Stirling 170 1U Mainstream Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C602 Chipset - Eight/Six/Four-Core CPU - 4 x SATA HDD - Up to 512GB DDR3 - I350 Dual GbE LAN - 2 x PCI-E 3.0x16 Slots - 600W Single or 700W Rdt - 25.6" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 171m 1U Advanced Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C606 Chipset - 8 x 2.5" SATA/SAS HDD - Up to 768GB DDR3 - I350 Quad GbE LAN - X540 Dual 10GbE Option - 3 x PCI-E 3.0 Slots - 700W Gold Rdt PS - 26.6" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 178m 1U Mainstream Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C602 Chipset - Eight/Six/Four-Core CPU - 8 x 2.5" SATA/SAS HDD - Up to 512GB DDR3 - I350 Dual GbE LAN - 2 x PCI-E 3.0x16 Slots - 700W Gold Rdt PS - 23.5" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 179 1U Advanced Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C606 Chipset - 4 x SATA/SAS HDD - Up to 768GB DDR3 - I350 Quad GbE LAN - X540 Dual 10GbE Option - 3 x PCI-E 3.0 Slots - 700W Gold Rdt PS - 27.75" Depth View Specs / Configure Now
Stirling 270 2U Mainstream Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C602 Chipset - Eight/Six/Four-Core CPU - 8 x SAS/SATA HDD - Up to 512GB DDR3 - I350 Dual GbE LAN - 6 x PCI-E 3.0 LP Slots - 740W Platinum Rdt PS - 25.5" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 278m 2U Mainstream Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C602 Chipset - Eight/Six/Four-Core CPU - 16 x 2.5" SATA/SAS HDD - Up to 512GB DDR3 - I350 Dual GbE LAN - 4 x PCI-E 3.0 Slots - 740W Platinum Rdt PS - 24.8" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 279 2U Advanced Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C606 Chipset - 10 x SATA/SAS HDD - Up to 768GB DDR3 - I350 Quad GbE LAN - X540 Dual 10GbE Option - 3 x PCI-E 3.0 Slots - 920W Gold Rdt PS - 27.75" Depth View Specs / Configure Now	Stirling 470 4U Mainstream Dual E5 Xeon - Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 - Intel C602 Chipset - Eight/Six/Four-Core CPU - 8 x SAS/SATA HDD - Up to 512GB DDR3 - I350 Dual GbE LAN - 6 x PCI-E 3.0 LP Slots - 920W Gold Rdt PS - 25.5" Depth View Specs / Configure Now

Aberdeen moves entire operation in a single weekend.

Over the weekend of January 22, 2012, Aberdeen accomplished an amazing feat that many would have believed to be impossible; the relocation of our entire headquarters and production operation into a much larger facility, twice the size of our previous facility, in a single weekend.  It was impossible to imagine that all of this could be done so quickly.  The daunting task of moving all of the items, and relocating and installing an entire network infrastructure to be fully operational by the next business day, seemed highly ambitious.  It would seem a move of this magnitude would take at least one full week, working day and night. 

On Friday I packed up my desk into the provided moving boxes and left work wondering what chaos would ensue on Monday when I returned. Monday, January 24, 2012, when my fellow associates and I arrived for work at Aberdeen’s new facility, we were all pleasantly surprised and impressed. Aberdeen was up and running and in full operation as if we had never moved.  Not only were we able to continue working without missing a step, providing exceptional customer service and delivering quality products, but now we are in a beautiful new facility we are extremely proud of; one we will call home for years to come! Our new contact information is as follows:

10420 Pioneer Boulevard

Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670-3734

Phone:  (562)903-1500

Toll Free:  (800)552-6868
Fax:  (562)903-1544

If you haven’t already visited our new facility, please make it a priority to stop by sometime and say hello.  I guarantee you’ll be impressed!

 

Enterprise IT cloud wish list for 2012



For the past two years, enterprises have been asking themselves one of the most important questions in IT: “What role can cloud computingplay in my business?” While most enterprises believe they’ve come to better understand cloud, few can confidently answer the question of its role.

With surveys showing that enterprises have rejected more cloud installments than they’ve accepted, it seems that more IT admins can more easily explain what cloud can’t do.



It’s not that enterprises want the cloud to fail; evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. However, cloud hasn’t met expectations in several areas and enterprises still don’t have all the answers they need.



So, what are enterprises missing from the cloud? This cloud wish list outlines the top five features cloud computing needs to succeed.

"It’s not that enterprises want the cloud to fail; evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. However, cloud hasn’t met expectations in several areas and enterprises still don’t have all the answers they need"

1. Cost-effective strategy for mass storage
The high cost of hosting a core repository in the cloud has been the largest barrier to cloud adoption. On the other hand, departmental-level server deployment exploded in the past five years because of low storage costs -- $100 buys 2 GB. Though the price for enterprise-grade storage is five times that or more, cloud storage costs 10 to 30 times as much. Until cloud storageprices drop to match enterprise-grade storage, the majority of enterprises will stay away from mass storage in the cloud.

2. Seamless, holistic methods for hierarchical storage
There are already multiple technology options for storing data in the data center -- in-memory, flash drives and rotating media. Cloud adds another layer, and if we presume that cloud storage will develop price and performance tiers, it could add two more layers. To control the migration of data between layers, cloud planners want a virtual storage map for on-premises and cloud storage that’s based on policies for access efficiency, price and availability.

3. Standard set of management APIs for SaaS, PaaS and Iaas
Technologists familiar with network and device management know that each class of network device has a basic management information base (MIB) that can be extended for special devices or vendor features. They’d like the same for the cloud; basic problem determination and management standards across multiple providers and cloud models -- Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

4. Comprehensive and auditable way to manage cloud security
Most enterprises don’t name security as the primary barrier to cloud adoption; cost holds that position. But all will agree that where costs permit cloudsourcing, security issues are a major headache. Steps toward government certifications for cloud data security are helpful but not definitive, particularly in the private sector.

"A major underlying problem with cloud projects may stem from enterprises’ misconceptions and false expectations of the technology’s benefits."

Enterprises need an audit practice that would verify risk levels and validate protection methods. Some providers offer these capabilities, but enterprises are lukewarm on the state of the security-management space overall. If and when cost issues are resolved for the cloud, security will be the next major hurdle.

5. Realistic coverage of the cloud market, with accurate data on costs and benefits
A major underlying problem with cloud projects may stem from enterprises’ misconceptions and false expectations of the technology’s benefits. Senior operations management, conditioned by claims that the cloud will save money as a large-scale replacement for internal IT, have pushed cloud adoption to applications for which there are no proven benefits. IT admins expressing doubt about market claims have been ignored. It would be extremely helpful, cloud professionals say, if senior management launched cloud projects with a true sense of the benefits and downsides.

A cloud wish list isn’t as discouraging as it may seem. In fact, it’s a hopeful sign for cloud adoption. With any new technology there’s initial confusion on where, when and how to apply it to meet business return-on-investment goals. Any pilot project will create real issues; every market depends on a harmony of value between buyers and sellers. These five cloud wishes are key to achieving cloud harmony in the enterprise.

By: Tom Nolle is president of CIMI Corporation, a strategic consulting firm specializing in telecommunications and data communications since 1982.

ENTERPRISE STORAGE DESIGNED FOR VIDEO

Aberdeen has more than 20 years of experience providing integrators with quality enterprise-level custom server and storage solutions at entry-level pricing. Our customizable OEM friendly servers and IP SAN storage solutions continue to be integrated into video security infrastructures, while providing exceptional performance with the flexibility for true scalable storage-centric systems optimized for digital video surveillance.

Aberdeen's customizable AberSAN series of storage solutions deliver exceptional qualities with unified storage features such as; unlimited snapshots, deduplication, virtualization, replication, high availability, thin provisioning and scale-out storage capabilities.

One of several benefits brought to the IP SAN video storage industry via the ZFS file system, is RAID-Z. This robust RAID architecture provides a level of virtually unlimited hard disk drive parity for protecting against disk failures along with an inherent self healing disk drive RAID feature. Along with an industry leading five-year warranty, the AberSAN also is available for HA clustering and complete fault tolerance to combat points of failure.

Aberdeen AberSAN V30 3U ZFS SAN

Using Dropbox for corporate file sharing

If you’re an IT professional who has grown tired of fighting employees’ Dropbox use for corporate file sharing, there are ways to embrace the service and tailor its use to your company’s needs.

Dropbox allows users to store documents in the cloud and access them across a number of devices. Users can also share documents and specify which collaborators can access which folders. For corporate file sharing, Dropbox for Teams gives more control to IT administrators.

Both Dropbox and Dropbox for Teams have a place in the corporate world. Either way, employees benefit from the easy-to-use file-sharing capabilities they want at work.

Dropbox in corporate environments

With the consumer version of Dropbox, installation occurs on a user-by-user basis, and data security is left up to individuals as well.

To set up Dropbox, all a user has to do is sign up and download the Dropbox client onto his or her devices. The desktop client creates a folder that appears to be local but actually stores its contents in the cloud. By default, everything in the Dropbox folder is synchronized to the local computer, but users can specify which folders need to be synchronized and which don’t. This capability is great for devices with limited storage space, because if a user doesn’t need a certain file on his device, he or she can just keep it in the cloud.

Users can share entire folders in Dropbox, even with people outside of their own company’s IT infrastructure. On a typical Windows server, users can share files only with others in the same Active Directory. But with Dropbox, corporate file sharing is done through emailed links, which are not tied to corporate user identities. To share a Dropbox folder, all a user has to do is right-click it, select the option to share it and enter the email addresses of the intended collaborators.

Corporate file sharing with Dropbox for Teams

Dropbox for Teams takes the cloud service to the corporate level, adding more IT controls and making Dropbox a viable alternative to corporate file servers. With Dropbox for Teams, administrators can place users into groups that all access the same folders. Establishing a team of up to five users with 100 GB of storage space costs $795 a year.

From the corporate perspective, the most important benefit of Dropbox for Teams is that it allows for the separation of personal user information from corporate data. (Existing users can continue to utilize their personal accounts and convert them into Teams accounts, however.) IT controls access to the data in the Dropbox for Teams account, and keeping that data separate reduces the chances of a user accidentally confusing files and sharing corporate data with the wrong people.

Top 5 cloud storage trends of 2011

The top 5 cloud storage trends of 2011 reflect a young market searching for acceptance while the number of options and features continued to expand. Like many emerging technologies, hype still outpaces reality, but reality is hustling to catch up.

Cloud storage trend 1. Cloud washing is still an issue. Confusion remains about what makes up a storage cloud, mainly because of cloud washing by those vendors trying to position legacy products and services as "cloud." As a result, many data storage administrators spent the year trying to understand the differences among public, private and hybrid clouds, and why any of those are different than the storage-area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) they’ve been running for years.

Confusion caused by cloud washing was evident at a September 2011 Storage Decisions event in New York City, where several analysts tried to dissect private storage clouds. “What is [private] cloud storage?” asked Howard Marks, chief scientist at DeepStorage.Net, during his presentation on building your own private cloud or hybrid storage cloud. “Now, it’s anything the guy who has a product wants it to be.”

Cloud storage trend 2. Struggle to define a storage cloud continues. As a result of cloud washing, vendors and analysts spent the year trying to narrow down the key functions and features that make up a storage cloud.

The industry agrees on a few things. A true cloud has to have a highly scalable, elastic and virtualized infrastructure. Object storage is the main storage technology because it allows for massive scalability and elasticity of dozens of petabytes, and even exabytes, of data. In addition, analysts say clouds have to be geographically aware so that objects and files aren't location dependent. Cloud storage is accessed directly across the internet via APIs such as REST or SOAP that will be standardized as the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). Multi-tenancy for security and chargeback are also considered key cloud functions.

Cloud storage trend 3. Cloud storage gateway vendors extend capabilities. In 2010, a group of startups launched cloud storage gateway appliances to help organizations move primary storage onto the cloud. These products were refined and expanded in 2011 as vendors tried to make them more competitive with traditional storage.

This year, TwinStrata Inc. extended the capabilities of its CloudArray gateway device by adding support for on-premises SAN and NAS, direct-attached storage (DAS) services and private clouds. StorSimple Inc. bumped up its iSCSI appliances, and added fully redundant components and the ability to upgrade without disruption. Nasuni Corp. added multisite capabilities for its NAS filer appliances, allowing multiple controllers to have live access to the same volume of snapshots through cloud service providers. Nasuni also added a service-level agreement capability that guarantees close to 100% uptime for its Nasuni Filer NAS cloud gateway. “We’re a storage services company now,” Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez said.

Cloud storage trend 4. Cloud storage is still mainly for backup. So far, at least from a storage perspective, the cloud has been most useful for simplifying the backup process. Cloud storage backup can be an effective alternative to tape for protecting data in remote sites and branch offices.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) facilities division placed TwinStrata CloudArray Virtual Appliances in 15 remote locations across the district to back up 80 TB of primary storage to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud. LAUSD estimates it will save $283,000 over five years, mostly from eliminating tape and moving to low-cost commodity servers.

Psomas, a Los Angeles-based engineering consulting firm, turned to Riverbed Whitewater backup gateways, which provide local-area network (LAN)-type access to public cloud storage for data protection. Psomas replaced tape at 11 sites with one Whitewater cloud storage gateway and 10 virtual appliances. The company estimates it reduced backup costs by approximately 40% since it started rolling out cloud devices in March.

Cloud storage trend 5. Cloud archiving another use of the cloud. We’ve seen petabyte-size digital archives move to the cloud in recent months as cloud archiving has become another use of the cloud. The University of Southern California (USC) contracted with Nirvanix Inc. to establish one of the world’s largest private storage clouds -- 8.5 petabytes (PBs) of digital archive spread over two sites.

The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is using an Amplidata AmpliStor AS20 object storage system to build a 1 PB active archive of more than 5,000 classic jazz concert performances from the Montreux Jazz Festival.

By: Sonia R. Lelii, Senior News Writer

Faster, More Reliable Storage For Backup & Data Recovery

Through its backup and disaster recovery offerings, solution provider Servosity provides a very important service for managed service providers and IT resellers. The company’s backup services are deployed using cloud infrastructure, which requires servers and storage that can handle the mission-critical data collection and protection needs of multiple clients. For Servosity, reliable storage is a No. 1 concern, and the company was in need of a solution that could solve a number of difficult problems.

“We had some very tough challenges,” says Damien Stevens, founder and CEO of Servosity (www.servosity.com). “We needed 24/7/365 operations with no maintenance windows or unplanned downtime [and] unlimited growth capabilities, and we needed the speed of SAS drives and the sophistication of an Enterprise SAN—and we needed all that for far less the cost of an enterprise SAN or even SAS drives. We needed SAS performance and reliability on a SATA budget.”

Choosing The Right Solution



Servosity Boosts Its Backup Solutions With Aberdeen’s AberSAN ZXP



Servosity knew it wanted to take advantage of Nexenta’s NexentaStor NAS/SAN software platform, but it also knew it would need the right hardware to run it. That’s why Servosity opted for two of Aberdeen’s AberSAN ZXP High Availability ZFS SAN units and one 45-bay JBOD in order to handle the NexentaStor XZFS file system with 144TB of licensing. Servosity chose Aberdeen’s AberSAN solution for its versatility as well as its ability to work well with the NexentaStor platform.

“The ZFS file system is stable, scalable, and fast,” Stevens says. “On top of that, Nexenta’s NexentaStor commercial offering adds additional features as well as enterprise support, and Aberdeen is one of the few vendors that can custom-build a hardware solution designed specifically for NexentaStor. It’s the perfect marriage of hardware and software.”

Aberdeen’s AberSAN ZXP product is designed to be highly scalable and has a variety of other customizable options. For instance, the base solution is a 2U head unit, but there are options for 3U and 4U JBOD expansions, as well. There are also multiple power supply, OS, and storage options so companies can build the right model for their needs. It’s this customization that allowed Servosity to deploy these products and know they would perform as expected.

Implementation & Results

Stevens admits that Servosity had some unique needs from the start and that it would be difficult to match them, so he knew there would be challenges along the way. “With some of these technologies, we’ve been a very early adopter,” Stevens says. Because of this, Servosity went through an extensive testing phase to find the right balance of hardware and software to get the performance it needed. He says Servosity wouldn’t have been able to create the perfect solution to its problem without the constant support of Aberdeen, which included the company sending evaluation units to Servosity and providing advice and expertise that aided the company in building the perfect solution for its needs.

“With a sophisticated system spanning multiple data centers and huge amounts of storage, there’s much more to it than buying a product,” Stevens says. “The difference for us has been Aberdeen and Nexenta working together with our engineers to custom-build and then custom-tune a system that meets our needs and has exceeded our expectations.”

Once the entire system was installed, Servosity started seeing the benefits. Stevens says that traditional systems such as the one the company installed are often at risk for “silent data corruption,” which happens naturally over time with a constant flow of data. To prevent this, ZFS systems self-heal when a disk presents corrupt data, which protects against hardware failure and prevents the hardware from corrupting the data, according to Stevens. In addition to preventing data corruption, Servosity is pleased that the system can use solid-state drives to cache for SATA and SAS drives to make the system faster for a lower cost.

Using Aberdeen’s Products Now  & In The Future

Overall, Servosity is extremely happy with its decision to invest in Aberdeen’s AberSAN solution and plans on using Aberdeen’s products in the future. In fact, Stevens says that Servosity’s projections “show a need for 400% of our current infrastructure in the next 12 months.” To help meet the demand, Servosity will continue to use Aberdeen for its highly customizable and scalable Nexenta products in order to help the company continue to grow.

The AberSAN is a highly customizable and versatile storage solution that incorporates Intel^® Xeon^® 5600/5500 Series processors and is designed to be both scalable and safe. Aberdeen offers a variety of configuration options and will work with companies to fine-tune the solution to meet their specific needs. The AberSAN uses a ZFS file system to avoid traditional data corruption issues and prevent stored information from being irreparably damaged or lost.