Stories about: NetApp

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.

Storage startup Ocarina Networks has upgraded its data de-duplication appliance to further reduce wasted disk space, and is now targeting the product at a wider number of industries, including Hollywood studios.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

I've had a Comcast cable Internet connection for years. Last year I got a shiny new fiber connection from Mstar. But rather than uninstall the cable connection, I asked FatPipe Networks if they'd be willing to let me perform an extended test of the company's flagship route clustering product, WARP.

Storage and data management solutions provider NetApp is claiming a new record for the adoption rate of NetApp deduplication.

WAN optimization in a large enterprise is a nascent and headline-grabbing market. Still, IT managers are faced with the burning question: Is it really worth the investment?

Of the assortment of technologies swarming around the storage and data protection space these days, one that can be counted on to garner both lots of interest and lots of questions among users is deduplication. The interest is understandable since the potential value proposition, in terms of reduction of required storage capacity, is at least conceptually on a par with the ROI of server virtualization. The win-win proposition of providing better services (e.g. disk-based recovery) while reducing costs is undeniably attractive.

EMC Tuesday will ship a new generation of its Clariion midrange storage-area network disk array, which makes support for iSCSI a standard feature, offers new energy-saving software tools and gives customers the option to use flash memory.

NetApp customers can now de-duplicate primary storage from other vendors such as EMC, Hitachi and HP, NetApp is announcing Wednesday.

Being an optimist, I like to think that storage management is or will be getting better. It's hard, however, to ignore the fact that many admins don't know much about what's going on in the storage boxes they are sitting on. And it's not their fault, as management has been the Cinderella of storage apps for many years, and she hasn't found a prince to rescue her quite yet.

Network-attached storage vendor OnStor is releasing Cougar, the third generation of its clustered NAS gateway that connects to storage devices from multiple vendors and uses a VMware-like virtualization technology that improves flexibility.