Storage: Features

Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green. A recent report issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlights the need for data center efficiency and demonstrates the increased pressure that IT departments are under.

Managing disk storage was once simple: If we needed more space, we got a bigger disk drive. But data storage needs grew, so we started adding multiple disk drives. Finding and managing these became harder and took more time, so we developed RAID, network-attached storage and storage-area networks. Still, managing and maintaining thousands of disk drives became an ever more onerous task.

Companies are finding themselves embroiled in a power crisis as they struggle to find ways to rein in soaring energy costs -- as well as do their part to address global climate change. However, how can you be certain that the power-saving strategies your company has adopted are, in fact, the best ones? After all, there are plenty of myths out there about saving energy that are patently false. In this report, we examine 10 such myths and bring the truth to light.

NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center wasn't shooting for the stars when it turned to virtualization to meet its storage needs. IPAC's cash-strapped effort to record images of our universe -- up to 30 million objects captured each night and 42 billion records over the life of the project -- required big storage capabilities, and the engineers needed them fast and at a low cost.

As companies are diving deeper into virtualized storage projects, IT managers are getting a better understanding of the staff skills they need to make those projects succeed. The exact talents required depend on the type of storage implementation, but most employers say they're in the market for two kinds of IT worker: technicians with vendor-specific SAN or NAS knowledge, and systems administrators and IT architects who understand the complexities and interdependencies among applications, operating systems and I/O, all of which affect storage requirements.

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.

Oracle's powerful new HP Oracle Database Machine comes with 168TB of storage, a new method of retrieving data more quickly and intelligently, and -- wait for it -- a US$2.33 million price tag.

A data storage crash is the last thing a collision-repair shop needs to worry about. So when John Sweigart realized that the software he was using to manage his business was no longer compatible with the way he was backing up data, he knew it was time for a different option.

Oracle's annual OpenWorld show is usually a showcase for its enterprise software. This year, however, it was all about hardware, as CEO Larry Ellison introduced a new family of database/storage products last week that it had been working on with partner Hewlett-Packard for three years.

You've done the hard work of optimizing your Wi-Fi network, and it reliably beams high-speed data to every nook and cranny of your home or office. Now, it's time to take it to the next level by connecting more than just computers.

A lot of solid-state disk (SSD) drive reviews and features have been circulating around the Internet lately, and I've noticed that the speeds of those products are increasing remarkably, even as manufacturers use more multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash memory in their products, which is innately slower than single-level cell (SLC) NAND.