Storage » Opinions »

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    EMC gets Data Domain, now what?

    NetApp Inc. said "uncle" yesterday after EMC Corp. outbid it for a second time in its quest to acquire Data Domain Inc, but some industry observers believe EMC, in its zeal to acquire the deduplication vendor, may have overpaid for the prize and could have a difficult time realizing a return on its investment.

    Written by Lucas Mearian • 10 July 09 07:18

  • Data deduplication for SMEs: What to look out for

    Data redundancy is a primary contributor to the explosive growth in data. Initially deduplication focused on eliminating data redundancy in specific cases like full backups, e-mail attachments, and VMware images. Over time, however, customers have noticed the pervasiveness of duplicated data.

    Written by Paul McClure • 22 April 09 14:40

  • Trends coming together make a plan for small business

    George Peppard said as his character Hannibal Smith on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Several trends, if not a plan, are coming together in interesting ways in technology for small businesses. Mix equal parts of online applications, netbooks, and constant wireless networking together, and you get new ways to do more work in more places for less money.

    Written by James E. Gaskin • 20 Feb. 09 09:36

  • How a flash drive could be the solution to laptop security

    Why is Sony bothering with entertainment when it could be using flash drives to dramatically improve laptop data security?

    Written by Mike Elgan • 12 Dec. 08 12:38
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    Big savings with MAID 2.0 storage technology

    For years companies have been deploying Massive Arrays of Idle Disks technologies to reduce data-storage energy costs. The on/off or spin/no spin approaches reduce energy consumption by putting power-hungry disk drives to sleep when they are not being used.

    Written by Bob Woolery • 26 Nov. 08 10:22

  • Reinventing storage virtualization

    The initial approach to storage virtualization, which has been around for years, was to address it in the storage-area network because the SAN sat between the storage and servers, and would cause the least disruption to these systems. However, after nearly a decade, this approach has not taken off while server virtualization has become widely accepted. What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization?

    Written by Hu Yoshida • 02 Oct. 08 10:26

  • The other guy's job -- disaster recovery

    Mother Nature has wrought havoc in the Gulf and many of us were once again faced personally with worries over friends and family in harm's way and professionally with concerns about organizations facing uncertainty over their ability to continue or even recover their businesses. In a timely coincidence, I happened to be attending a disaster recovery (DR) conference on the west coast, and, appropriately, Hurricane Ike occupied center stage for much of the discussion. A number of would-be participants never made it to the conference as they were attending to more pressing matters back home.

    Written by Jim Damoulakis • 23 Sept. 08 09:17

  • Disaster-recovery planning: You can't live without it

    In our daily lives we try to protect ourselves from the worst. We buy insurance for our cars, homes and health and we safeguard personal information. Shouldn't business owners and IT managers treat their networks and critical infrastructure the same way?

    Written by Jeff Godlewski • 22 Sept. 08 09:32

  • Disaster Recovery: a C-level issue?

    In August Symantec released the results of its 2008 IT Disaster Recovery survey, reporting global business trends around disaster recovery planning (DR) and preparedness. Perhaps the most compelling (and certainly the most reported) finding in the report was the apparent decline in C-level executive involvement in DR planning.

    Written by Simon Durkin • 22 Sept. 08 08:00

  • Growing cynicism around going green

    Evidence is mounting of a growing cynicism regarding green initiatives within the IT infrastructure space. We may be reaching a point where vendor hype has hit a saturation point and beginning to meet with customer resistance. While there is a genuine concern about data center power consumption, particularly with regard to accommodating increasingly dense technology footprints, the larger concern for most, particularly in the current climate, is controlling costs.

    Written by Jim Damoulakis • 01 Sept. 08 11:30

  • VMotion and FCoE: A match made in admin heaven

    In a recent review, I consolidated FC and Ethernet networks using FCoE (fibre channel over Ethernet) and Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch. As the review showed, the combination merged the two transport protocols easily, allowing FC frames to channel through a 10G connection without giving up features or performance.

    Written by Mario Apicella • 14 Aug. 08 10:54
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    Demystifying deduplication

    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.

    Written by Jim Damoulakis • 08 Aug. 08 11:52

  • Debating the merits of SSDs, part two

    Healthy debate is often necessary to get a balanced view of an emerging technology. Somewhere between endorsements and detractions, a realistic understanding of the long-term outlook for a technology arrives. As such, I have decided to turn to a guest once again for the second installment in what I hope to be an ongoing debate over the merits of flash SSDs (solid-state drives).

    Written by Mario Apicella • 04 Aug. 08 10:41

  • Managing storage from your mobile phone

    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.

    Written by Mario Apicella • 21 July 08 11:06

  • Focus on restore, not backup

    Everyone always worries about backup, backup, backup. Guess what? None of your users, or managers for that matter, care one bit about backup. All they want is restore, and they want it immediately. So shift your focus from backup to restore.

    Written by James E. Gaskin • 18 July 08 08:59

  • Debating the merits of SSDs

    Would you pay several times more for a technology that yields only dubious performance advantage? How about if that technology is experiencing a high rate of product returns from early adopters?

    Written by Mario Apicella • 14 July 08 10:15

  • Can ITIL save storage?

    I have a nightmare vision of storage administrators becoming clones of the mail carrier Newman from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, who once bemoaned the endless pressures of his job, crying, "The mail! It just keeps on coming and coming!"

    Written by Jim Damoulakis • 14 July 08 08:20

  • Ironclad Windows backup on a budget

    Creating an effective backup for Windows is a challenge -- largely because the OS lacks a powerful, simple tool like Linux's dd, for example. However, there are many options for establishing a worthwhile backup system for Windows, some of which are free or rather inexpensive.

    Written by Mario Apicella • 08 July 08 12:52

  • Dell delivers eco-friendly SAS server for SMBs

    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.

    Written by Mario Apicella • 30 June 08 10:28

  • Good-bye DRAM, hello flash?

    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.

    Written by Ted Samson • 27 June 08 11:05
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