Uri Unplugged

We at RADirect get pretty excited when one of the products we sell wins an industry award. Sure, we can rave all day long to customers about how great a product is, but it means a heck of a lot more when that product has the industry accolades to back up our claims.

So naturally, I was thrilled to learn today that one of our enterprise network security products, the PineApp Mail-SeCure anti-spam appliance, is currently in the running for a title in Info Security Products Guide’s “2008 Product Excellence Awards” competition. It's nominated in two categories:

1. Best Anti-Spam Solution
2. Best Email Security Solution

Of course, we're already privy to the Mail-SeCure's award-worthiness. Not only do we rely on it for our own email security, but we've also seen it drastically reduce spam for many of our customers. In fact, one of our PineApp customers, a large ISP that trusts PineApp to handle their 65 million monthly mails, just bought their 4th Mail-SeCure unit (a 5080 model - the 'big dog'!).

Wanna See PineApp Win?

We do, and we've already cast our votes (yup, this one lets real users have a say!). You can vote, too. Just visit the online voting booth to vote for the PineApp Mail-SeCure as your pick for the best anti-spam solution and best email security solution.

Remember to cast your vote in both categories, and invite your spam-hating colleagues to vote too! All votes must be submitted by October 8th.

UPDATE - 10/17/07: The PineApp Mail-Secure has achieved "finalist" status in both categories! Winners will be honored at the Technosium 2008 event in Santa Clara, CA on January 30, 2008.

Good Luck, PineApp!

Posted by Lisa Cibellis at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Seems like everywhere I turn lately, there’s commentary on the critical need for data centers to “go green”. In fact, internetnews.com published two articles on the topic (“Greening Your Data Center...” and “Green is Hot for Storage Managers”) in less than two weeks.

So why all the buzz? Soaring energy costs (including the cost of cooling). Environmental responsibility. Emerging regulations that govern power consumption levels. In short, companies are challenged to find more energy efficient ways to store higher volumes of data and retrieve it faster.

Analysts and experts have released all kinds of statistics and predictions that are extremely frightening, such as:

• IT organizations are now spending 25% of every hardware dollar on power (IDC)
• IT departments can expect to spend half of their total budget on energy (EPA draft report on server and data center efficiencies)
• By 2008, half of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high density equipment (Gartner)
• By 2009, energy costs will emerge as the 2nd highest operating cost in 70% of worldwide data center facilities (Gartner)

Well then, I guess it’s no surprise that energy efficient products have increased as a buying priority.

Fortunately, a few storage vendors are ahead of the game. For example, Nexsan Technologies, a veteran green machine which has installed more than 50 petabytes of “green storage” since 2001, incorporates their proprietary AutoMAID™ (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology into their SATABeast and SATABoy SATA storage arrays.

This technology transparently places disk drives in an idle state to conserve energy yet still allows for near-instantaneous access to data, resulting in reduced power consumption and operational costs.

According to a recent Nexsan press release, the SATABeast SATA RAID array (at Level 3 AutoMAID), consumes up to 25 times less power than conventional storage arrays. If the requirement for greener storage continues to grow as I predict it will, this is the kind of stuff buyers will be looking for.

By the way, I noticed that the SATABeast was selected as a finalist for “Green Product of the Year” at this year's Techworld Awards in the UK. Nice!

Posted by Stephen Insdorf at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)