Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

For a while i’ve been tracking the development of FujistuSiemens’ CentricStor Virtual Tape solution. For what I’ve seen so far is that it is an outstanding solution for enterprise datacenters. What I do ask myself is; If their product works as fine as I think it does, why isn’t there a storageblogger out there that does as much as mention it?

While all well-known enterprise (virtual) tape vendors do their best to offer consolidation, virtualization,  dedupe and all that, FujistuSiemens(FS) remains unmentioned in the blogs I follow (I might be missing the blogs that do mention the CentricStor).

• They do offer consolidation by enabling almost all open platforms to connect, and also perform very well in the z/OS arena, combined in one installation. Not many vendors attempt to consolidate open and z/OS in one solution. There must be a reason for this.
• They virtualize tape, like most other vendors do. They transparently allow about any tape library and drive to connect to the back-end and do a form of inline virtualization of physical tape.
• They can write data to multiple tapes (even of different brands/sizes/types) simultaneously and thereby automatically enabling an instant remote copy.
• What they still can’t (or do not want to) do is dedup. FS states they still have no faith in currently used techniques to dedupe, especially when considering the need to recover vast amounts of data in case of a disaster. To some extent I can relate to this reasoning.
• Although  many (virtual tape)  vendors try to convince you that physical tape is dead, I personally think tape will not be dead for a long tim, as does FS.

I imagine they have a small install base and are missing marketing presence, but that has never stopped you guys from noticing interesting players before, so please comment to this post and enlighten me.