Stories by: Bruce Hoard

Green IT is something of a chameleon that appeals to different users on different levels. From a 10,000-foot perspective, it's hard to knock the benefits of energy efficiency, recycling and vendors working side by side with users to promote the green agenda. However, many users are finding it difficult to adopt a technology that is not characterized by a wide selection of physical products that they can buy and implement in their IT infrastructures today.

Bacteria-based storage systems can save data for thousands of years while protecting it against nuclear explosions. Atoms can hold 250 terabits of data per square inch of surface area. There are organic thin-film structures with more than 20,000 write-read-rewrite cycles.

Solid state disk (SSD) has grabbed a lot of attention lately, but analysts say it's still a niche technology that is specialized, high-priced and far from ready to supplant the bedrock that is hard disk drives. But with the promise of rocket I/O performance, some users are ignoring the cost and plopping down the big bucks anyways.

Users stand to benefit greatly from storage resource management (SRM) software, which allows administrators to see which applications are using what storage. By being able to map applications with back-end systems, IT managers can create better cost-to-value matrixes and develop accurate, functional chargeback models.

At a time when external hacks are grabbing headlines, frequently unreported internal security breaches involving low-level administrators accessing high-level executive e-mail and other systems are driving efforts to limit access to only the most highly trusted personnel.

USB flash memory drives are experiencing an increase in product failures as a result of quality-control problems, and the wildly popular replacements for floppy disks could be facing other problems related to fragmentation, according to industry experts.

Storage analyst John Webster recalls telling attendees at a conference three years ago that there are users who make multivendor storage-area networks (SAN) work but that most shy away from heterogeneity because the prospect is too scary. Users in the audience at the time agreed that multivendor SANs can work, but many said they preferred to stay with a single vendor because it is easier.