Stories about: LeftHand Networks

There's an age-old choice in IT -- whether to adopt a "best of breed" strategy for the power and flexibility it can bring, or go with a single vendor for accountability and simplicity. J. Craig Venter Institute Inc. (JCVI) believes in best of breed. The genomic research company runs Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS in its data center. For storage, it draws on technology from EMC, NetApp, Isilon, DataDomain and Symantec.

The US financial crisis is taking a toll on mergers and acquisitions and share prices in the technology sector, causing the tech-heavy Nasdaq to slump to a new 52-week low Thursday, but industry watchers have an underlying confidence in the midterm scenario for IT vendor revenue.

A university data centre may not seem the place to adopt leading edge technology, given that publicly-funded institutes are chronically short of money.

Whether it's to hold a table at a favorite restaurant, book a dream vacation or rent a car, making reservations usually pays off. But for storage and IT administrators feeling the squeeze of shrinking data center floor space and power constraints, the practice of departments "reserving" excess storage they may never actually need is becoming a major problem.

Pillar Data Systems, the storage vendor funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is getting ready to bolster its line of features with technology that helps businesses avoid wasting storage space known as thin provisioning.

The convergence of server and storage management is slowly taking place as enterprises look for more automated ways of managing their data center assets. Spurring the trend toward convergence -- which remains somewhat hampered by a lack of available tools -- is virtualization technology.

iSCSI technology is entering the mainstream as growing numbers of enterprises consider the storage alternative for its lower costs and management simplicity, analysts say.

Jeff Pieper's marketing design business runs on data, and he doesn't mind swapping out a server or fiddling with cabling here and there.

Fibre Channel was definitely not top of mind when Chris Brown hit the wall on disk space and, in mid-2005, decided to go shopping for a SAN. Brown is IT manager for DeltaValve, a division of Curtiss-Wright Flow Control. "I have an IT staff of two," he explains, "and we do not have the resources to support Fibre Channel."

Many companies would embrace the superior performance and enhanced reliability of clustered storage were it not for the fear that adoption would cost a fortune and lock them into proprietary hardware.

It seems that every time I configure an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array in the company of folks who've never seen the process, they ask the same question: "Really? You're already done?" The answer, always, is Yes.