Storage

IBM has acquired Platform Solutions, a vendor of mainframes and other computer hardware, in a move that raised antitrust concerns from one IT trade group.

IBM and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology researchers are using an IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer to build intricate simulations of human bones, which could lead to earlier diagnoses of osteoporosis.

Corporate information stored on file servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices is in danger of compromise because IT governance policies and access rules in many companies are incapable of dealing with a massive growth of unstructured data, according to a Ponemon Institute report issued Tuesday.

The worldwide relational database management systems market saw a 12.6 percent growth spike in 2007 to US$18.8 billion compared to $16.7 billion in 2006, according to IDC.

Sun Microsystems on Friday announced a database and application-server package that allows unlimited deployments for a fixed annual rate, positioning the offer as a lower-cost alternative to competing vendors like Oracle.

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car completes a move from PCs to thin clients this season, as part of the rollout of a new rental transaction system, it expects to cut internal energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours.

The little USB stick on your keychain and the memory in your iPod is fueling a revolution in the enterprise storage world.

It's no exaggeration to say the '00s have been the decade when the electronic sensor left the factory floor and went, well, everywhere.

More servers, more racks, more UPSes, more users -- the reasons for expanding a datacenter are the same everywhere. Today's datacenter projects, however, have the additional component of modernisation. Rebuilding takes place for tighter integration, greener power usage, greater redundancy, and especially more control. Datacenter administrators would control individual dust motes in their racks if they could.

What are the three most important ingredients of a successful project? Planning, planning, planning. For our datacenter makeover at the University of Hawaii's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, we planned early and often, and still got bit by last-minute surprises and devilish details that cost us time and money. We'll do it a little different next time. You too can learn from our mistakes.

When it comes to flexible enterprise storage, the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine doesn't horse around. Over the last six months, the college has been putting its 7TB storage area network through its paces, using it for nearline backup and primary storage, and has this insight to share: Storage virtualization is the cat's meow.

A perusal of Internet message boards and online forums shows that fan anticipation of seeing characters from popular Japanese superhero-themed cartoons such as Gatchaman and Astro Boy make the 21st century leap to feature-length computer-generated imagery (CGI) films is reaching a fever pitch.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?"

With more than 60 branch offices connected via IP WAN, backing-up data is critical for Sydney City Council.

Like a muscle car driving 55 mph on the freeway, R.L. Polk & Co.'s new grid-based data warehouse boasts gobs of untapped power under the hood, according to Kevin Vasconi, the company's CIO.

With 20 parks and nearly US$1 billion in sales, Six Flags is the second-largest amusement park operator in the world. Since coming to Six Flags as part of a management reorganization two years ago, CIO Michael Israel has overseen a bottom-up rebuilding of the IT architecture in the parks and in the company's data center, which moved from New York to Dallas. Israel describes the amusement park business as a shopping mall with rides. "Spend per attendee is everything," he says.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in the US. Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

In an interview last month, Douglas Merrill, Google's CIO until he was hired Thursday as president of EMI's digital business division, talked about how the Internet search pioneer's IT organization is configured (not structured), how CIOs need to evolve and the most exasperating question that people ask him at cocktail parties.

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, the man behind the Samba file server and self-confessed TSP packet molester talks with Dahna McConnachie about Samba and some of his other favourite pastimes. Tridge will be speaking more about clustered Samba at the upcoming linux.conf.au.

From the start, Henry Malmgren was determined to get to the South Pole. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1998 with a degree in MIS he applied for a job in the Antarctic every year before NSF contractor Raytheon finally hired him as a network engineer in 2001. Since then he has alternated between the Denver headquarters and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, spending two summers and two winters there before finally working his way up to IT manager. Staying over is a commitment: Once the winter starts, there's no way to get in and out of the base until summer begins eight to nine months later. "I thought I would just do this for a single season, but somehow it always seemed too easy to keep coming back," he says.

As the old saying goes, "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail." For me, this means more than just seeing a storage angle everywhere I look. Lately, it also means seeing the environmental impact of every product I review.

For some datacenter operators out there, insufficient server processing power isn't driving them to adopt more and more servers. Rather, it's the lack of precious server memory, necessary to deliver results at the lightning speed users have come to expect -- nay, demand -- from search engines, social networking sites, e-commerce sites, and similar Internet-based applications. A pair of companies, Virident and Spansion, have announced a remedy to the problem: replacing (or, more accurately, supplementing) the traditional DRAM found on servers with a flavor of flash memory called EcoRAM, capable of boosting a single server's memory beyond today's 32GB limit to a capacity of 512GB -- without increasing the machine's power envelope.

Reaping the fat savings of thin provisioning may have gotten a little easier, as IBM this week announced new features for managing SVC (SAN Volume Controller). And depending on your strategy for implementing SVC's new thin-provisioning capabilities in your storage environment, the news could come with a green lining.

There aren't many products I review that I can test for traveling. In fact, most are large enough for me to hide behind, if not inside. But the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with a 64GB Samsung SSD (solid state drive) I am currently testing offered a rare opportunity to take my work with me on the road.

We've all experienced it: that sense of frustration whenever the disk drive LED on your laptop turns solid green for a seemingly interminable period. While enduring one such interruption recently, my thoughts turned longingly to solid state drives and their emergence as a force to be reckoned with both at the low end and high. Several recent news items underscore this fact.

The SilverBack folks introduced us to Servprise, a young company headed by a young CEO. But for all its youth, the Servprise WebReboot product line addresses an old sore spot in datacenters far and wide: Namely, the need to safely reboot server hardware via remote access. Typical server rebooting solutions, even from companies as experienced as APC, generally involve power cycling. That makes for messy reboots at the OS level and unsafe power outages at the hardware level. The WebReboot solution is literally like pushing the server's power button, allowing for pillow-soft power downs.

Avocent brought its industry-leading out-of-band management systems to our project, providing IP KVM for PC and Sun servers, service processor aggregation, serial terminal services, and the DSView management server. Because our new datacenter, HIG 319, functions like a multicompany colocation service, we ended up with a wide variety of equipment and at least three different flavors of service processors (Sun, Dell, HP) with three different management interfaces to juggle. Avocent's MergePoint 5224 appliance, a 24-port service processor aggregation system, gives the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology's IT group a single service processor management interface, while losing none of the functionality from individual dashboards.

One of the most important vendors behind our project's success brought no hardware to the party at all. SilverBack Migrations Solutions, based in the US, is a datacenter build-out and migration consultancy staffed entirely by large-stomached ex-corporate IT and facilities geeks. You may recall that, in the main part of this story (see "Five lessons of a datacenter overhaul"), we lamented our inadequate planning and stretched-thin human resources. Both of these are common problems for a project of this scope, and they are exactly the issues that a company like SilverBack can go a long way to mitigate.

It's funny. Sometimes the products that have the greatest impact are the most difficult to write about because they simply work. That's the case with Universal Electric's Starline Track Busway, a straightforward solution that takes an impressive leap forward in the basic task of providing electrical power to the equipment in the server room.

It may have come in the smallest box, but Lantronix's SecureLinx Spider KVM had an impact on our project that was far greater than its physical size would suggest. The Spider is a "zero U" KVM, meaning it takes the form of a USB or PS/2 KVM dongle on one end and a dual-port Cat 5e plug on the other. The whole ensemble is light enough to hang off the back of a server, saving you the rack space normally eaten by IP KVM switches and such.