Replies to post #6481 on UnifiedOnline Inc fka UOIP

[Southern Gal]

IceWEB Highlighted in IDC Technology Spotlight Report
Paper Discusses IceWEB's Role in the Important Market for Efficient Storage Solutions

Sponsored by IceWEB

Appears IWEB paid for the "report" as well as the cost to issue yet another seemingly empty press release.


STERLING, VA--(Marketwire - 03/02/11) - IceWEB™, Inc. (OTC.BB:IWEB - News), www.iceweb.com, a leading provider of Unified Data Storage and building blocks for cloud storage networks, announced today that IDC's recently issued industry report titled 'Data Efficiency and the Value of Unified Data Storage' http://idcdocserv.com/1096 describes how IceWEB's storage solutions are meeting the current and emerging storage needs of mid-size organizations. The three-page document discusses the rapid changes in storage solutions and how the need for more efficient data storage is on the rise. It goes on to list the reasons why IceWEB's Unified Storage Systems offerings should be considered by Information Technology (IT) professionals.

The report also mentions the economic realities business owners and IT decision makers are constantly facing and how they want to improve IT operational efficiency while at the same time keeping costs down by not buying excess IT capacity. In addition, companies in data-intensive industries are challenged by physical storage system space and power limitations. To solve these issues IDC suggests providing IT teams in midsize organizations with storage systems like those provided by IceWEB that are optimized for usability in virtual and rapid data growth environments.

The paper describes IceWEB's unified storage platform which handles both file and block data. Built-in storage management features include inline deduplication, inline compression, linked clones, and thin provisioning for storage efficiency... all without any major performance penalties.

John R. Signorello, Chairman and CEO, stated, "This IDC report confirms what our customers are telling us... that VMware compatible IceWEB storage solutions are ideal for their virtualized environments of today and in the future."

I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T
Data Efficiency and the Value of Unified Data
Storage
February 2011
Adapted from Understanding the File-Based Storage Landscape by Noemi Greyzdorf and Richard L. Villars,
IDC #224755 and Worldwide Storage Networking Infrastructure 2010?2014 Forecast: Converged IT
Infrastructure Changes the Game and Ushers in 10GbE Solutions by Richard L. Villars, IDC #225899
Sponsored by IceWEB
Many organizations across all industries are experiencing tremendous growth in data volume. This
growth in turn is driving increased investments in storage technologies. Between 2007 and 2010,
annual spending on file-based storage solutions increased from $12.1 billion to $15.6 billion. For
many organizations, the efficient storage, organization, long-term retention, and timely retrieval of
files are at the core of the business and are driving high demand for file-based solutions. However,
organizations cannot simply obtain more and more storage capacity to handle their data storage
volumes because this approach would be both expensive and difficult to manage. To effectively
handle increasing data volumes, organizations have to more efficiently manage existing storage
capacity through such technologies as thin provisioning, data deduplication, and inline compression.
This Technology Spotlight examines the need for more efficient data storage approaches and
discusses how efficient storage technologies can enable organizations to improve capacity utilization
and reduce costs. This paper also discusses the role that IceWEB plays in the important market for
efficient storage solutions.
Economic Realities, Data Growth, and the Transformed Datacenter
Business owners and IT decision makers are increasingly careful about IT investment decisions
in the context of uncertain business cycles and tighter IT budgets. Business owners and IT decision
makers want every spending decision to boost asset utilization, enhance responsiveness to
business changes, and improve IT operational efficiency. They don’t want to tie up scarce capital
to buy excess IT capacity (servers, storage, switches, etc.) as a hedge against future growth. Instead,
they want to procure any and all IT hardware and software as needed.
Virtualization, where resources are pooled and shared as consumed, is playing a critical role in
helping IT organizations better address business requirements and current economic realities.
Companies leveraging server virtualization (hypervisor) are already apportioning compute resources
into logical subpools. Today, however, IT organizations want to go beyond using only server
virtualization to deal with server sprawl and wasted server compute cycles. They want to deploy and
manage a fully virtualized datacenter. These efforts require much more intelligent and usable storage
solutions that complement and extend the value of other virtualized IT assets.
Concurrently, organizations and individuals are witnessing unprecedented growth in the need for
storage. Whether we are talking about individual consumers, small businesses, or the largest
enterprises, people want to retain digital information for longer periods. In addition, unstructured data
(think MRI results or video surveillance records) is growing quickly and consuming datacenter storage
space at an alarming rate. Companies in data-intensive industries are challenged by storage system
floor space and power limitations. These organizations need file-based storage systems that can
quickly scale to meet unpredictable data growth.
2 ©2011 IDC
Most important, organizations have also become impatient with the care and feeding of their IT
infrastructure. In virtually all organizations, IT generalists and application specialists greatly
outnumber storage specialists. These application specialists don’t want to perform mundane storage
device provisioning and management tasks or deal with multiple, incompatible storage platforms.
They just want to set up, protect, and expand storage capacity.
One of the most important consequences of all this development is a dramatic increase in the
demand for universal (block and file) storage solutions that also support robust storage virtualization.
Organizations looking to improve storage capacity should look for storage solutions that increase
storage efficiency by reducing the overall volume of data that organizations need to store.
Benefits of Storage Efficiency Technologies
As organizations contend with ever-increasing volumes of data, they need storage solutions that will
make their storage initiatives more efficient and deliver the following benefits:
! Reduced physical footprint required for storage infrastructure
! Increased capacity/utilization of storage assets
! Improved application performance
! Reduced costs related to storage operations and acquisition of storage-related hardware
Customers in small and midsize enterprises as well as IT teams in larger enterprises are demanding
major improvements in the usability of all IT products, and they are demanding improved usability for
storage products in particular. For these companies, "usability" in storage solutions must provide:
! Interconnect flexibility. The system seamlessly supports both block-based (e.g., iSCSI) and
file-based (e.g., NFS/CIFS) storage network protocols so that IT organizations can use a single
system while still using the best option for different applications (e.g., email, database,
hypervisors, file/print).
! Embedded data efficiency. The system includes support for a range of advanced storage
virtualization and data management services (e.g., thin provisioning, compression, deduplication)
that ensure maximum effective use of the physical storage capacity actually deployed.
! Simple capacity provisioning and data protection. The system provides automated
provisioning, reallocation, and data replication through a simple and intuitive management
interface.
IDC believes that information efficiency should happen earlier in the storage process, perhaps even
at the point of content creation for maximum potency, rather than postprocess, or on secondary
storage. The ability to provide primary inline compression is an increasingly attractive strategy among
some storage vendors, and they are offering products and/or making acquisitions accordingly.
Considering IceWEB
IceWEB Inc. is a provider of data storage products based in Sterling, Virginia. Founded in 1994, the
company offers universal storage systems (file and block), custom-built appliances, and cloud-based
software and services.
The IceWEB Storage System is a unified storage platform for file and block data of all kinds that is
designed to be easy to install. The system’s OS provides built-in storage management features
including inline deduplication, inline compression, linked clones, and thin provisioning for storage
efficiency rates without major performance penalties. In addition, the IceWEB OS includes VMware
©2011 IDC 3
integration. According to the company, the features available within IceWEB’s OS provide the following
benefits:
! Thin provisioning provides the ability to increase utilization of storage arrays by storing only
data that is actually written to file systems.
! Linked clones provide capacity savings of up to 90% without performance degradation,
especially for virtual server and virtual desktop deployments.
! Inline compression accommodates compression and uncompression when data is written and
read to arrays without adding significant overhead to I/O operations.
! Inline block deduplication eliminates duplicate blocks within the storage system, even across
different servers and applications, for significant capacity savings and performance improvements.
The IceWEB Storage System is designed to provide customers with end-to-end data integrity, along
with multiple interconnects and drive types. The system is designed to provide scalability up to 400TB
with significant performance and availability.
Challenges
Initially, IceWEB was founded to provide storage products and services to a targeted market (federal
computing). The company is now also targeting the commercial midmarket space. As data growth
becomes a pressing issue for companies of all sizes, a wider range of storage solutions suppliers are
developing or acquiring their own unified storage management products. IceWEB needs to clearly
communicate its current storage efficiency and ease-of-use propositions to both reseller partners and
customers. This messaging includes clearly detailing the spending and operational efficiencies that
customers can achieve by taking advantage of the capabilities built into the IceWEB solutions.
Conclusion
The virtualization of servers, storage, and datacenter infrastructure is ramping up very quickly as
companies seek to dramatically boost IT asset utilization and reduce IT operational complexity.
Providing IT teams in midsize organizations with storage systems that are optimized for usability in
virtual and rapid data growth environments is a critical factor that requires storage vendors and their
reseller partners to continually innovate.
Equally important, however, is the need to ensure that the resellers and business partners that have
primary responsibility for recommending and deploying these storage solutions are well qualified. The
resellers and partners will play a key role in addressing related challenges in the areas of data security,
data protection, and data archiving that companies will face as they move to this new IT model.

A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N

This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein
are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor
sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by
various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee.