Storage: Interviews

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

Ted Kummert, corporate vice president for the data and storage platform at Microsoft, came over nine months ago from Microsoft's security, access and solutions division to lead the SQL Server effort and usher the 2008 version into general release. Kummert says performance and scalability improvements will continue to put pressure on rivals like IBM and Oracle. In an interview with Network World senior editor John Fontana, he also discusses goals around a new release timetable, prescribed upgrade paths for users, a services element and virtualization.

Iron Mountain CEO Richard Reese, whose company manages more than 11 petabytes of data for corporate clients, says his biggest challenge is helping customers merge physical and data storage environments. In a recent interview with Computerworld at Iron Mountain's headquarters in Boston, Reese addressed what he called inaccurate reports that the company has lost client tapes from its trucks and facilities, the effect of regulatory compliance on retention practices, and the progress of Iron Mountain's fledgling Digital Business Unit.

In the final part of an in-depth interview with ARN's Brian Corrigan, local EMC president, David Webster, predicts the demise of security software.

Small and midsize businesses would rather chew tin foil, an industry pundit says, than spend money on enterprise backup software that is little suited to their needs. Senior Editor Deni Connor recently talked to George Symons, CEO of Yosemite Technologies, about what SMBs really need in backup software. This is an edited transcript.

Diligent Technologies is among the pioneers of data deduplication technology, which helps enterprises reduce redundant copies of data and, in turn, shrink storage requirements and shorten backup times. Neville Yates, Diligent's CTO, talked with Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor about the varying deduplication technologies used with today's virtual tape libraries (VTL).

Online dating site eHarmony.com continues to amass scores of data to fuel its online relationship service for 15 million registered users. The company 18 months ago deployed clustered storage systems to handle the photos, images, logs and other content types it has added to the online profiles it stores for its users. In an interview this week at the Computerworld Storage Networking World conference in San Diego, Mark Douglas, vice-president of technology at eHarmony, talked about the company's use of storage clusters, how he chooses storage vendors, why the company is phasing out tape backup, and about new projects planned to keep online dating rolling along.

Feeling the heat to cool down your datacentre? Going green can deliver massive cost savings to the business and ROI in less than 12 months by stemming power consumption and using smart heating and cooling methods. Factor-in consolidation through virtualization and your IT shop will rein-in serious savings even faster. Hitachi Data Systems Australia and New Zealand managing director Mark Kay talks about the benefits of making your datacentre green and offers some pointers on best practise.

Standardization is the last line of defence for many enterprise firms in the battle against vendor lock-in; however, the time taken to formulate product standards, for the early adopters, is risky. We asked Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Australian and New Zealand vice chairman Clive Gold about how standards, and standard-based products, free enterprise firms from being locked into using proprietary technologies for years to come.

Bob Davis, senior vice president and general manager for CA's Storage Business Unit, has his hands full as the company integrates its latest batch of acquisitions and shifts its focus from infrastructure management to information management. Deni Connor gets the latest from Davis here:

At its annual Technology Day in New York next week, Dell is expected to talk about its storage and server roadmaps and make what it says is a significant storage announcement. Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor this week caught up with Praveen Asthana, director of Dell storage to talk about the company's storage strategy. Although Asthana discussed where Dell is going in storage, he declined to comment on next week's storage news and the company's pending OEM relationships with Overland Storage for low-end tape library products and with Engenio for low-end disk, which will compete with the Dell/EMC AX100 storage array.