Stories about: StorServer

I find it ironic that Seagate chose Earth Day to celebrate the shipment of its billionth disk drive. After all, increased drive dependency in the datacenter is fast transforming into an unsustainable energy demand.

At Storage Networking World this week in the US, vendors are unveiling a number of products that make it easier for users to manage and protect their storage environments.

Jason Hamlett was caught by surprise last December when an oil refinery explosion destroyed his company's new office space in Hemel Hempstead, England, and caused its existing offices and data center to go offline for 48 hours. The ferocious Buncefield fire burned for several days and was the largest to hit Europe in peacetime.

Like many IT executives, Eric Eriksen, chief technology officer at New York-based Deloitte Consulting, would like tape to just go away. The added cost of managing tape backup systems, slow and unreliable restoration, cartridge inventorying and off-site storage headaches have him hoping that cheap disk drives may someday replace 50-year-old tape technology in the data center.

An interesting phenomenon is hitting the storage industry, one that scarcely has anything to do with technology. The buzzwords this time are solutions and services.

There's a little storage industry group out there called the Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative (EBSI) that knows what really bugs storage network administrators about their backup routines. Whereas similar groups such as Storage Networking Industry Association point to technical issues including the reluctance of vendors to share product APIs as reasons for end-user woes, the EBSI comes right out and says it.