Looks can be deceiving. Take Hitachi GST's recent additions to its Travelstar line. The 2.5-inch drives may not look that much different than other small form factor drives, but one glance at their specs is enough to see the beginning of a storage revolution away from 3.5-inch drives.
To paraphrase a sentence often attributed to Mark Twain, everybody talks about the cost of managing storage, but nobody does anything about it.
Cutting through the sales-pitch hype of Tier 1 vendor presentations often means checking in with their suppliers. After all, conversations with suppliers tend to reflect what Tier 1 vendors ask of them. Less sales-oriented, these talks can be refreshing in that they are less likely to be sugarcoated with hype and more likely to be built on facts.
Is there a worse time to start thinking of what to put in next year's storage budget than just before the holidays? Probably not <grin>, but setting aside the nuts and bolts of storage now so that you can focus on the legal implications of next year's purchases will be the best present you can give yourself before the new year.
In IT, change is the only constant, as hardware and software is updated almost continuously. Companies that take business continuity seriously protect themselves by creating a recovery site to run vital business processes during an emergency.
I have two suggestions in regards to keeping your data safe: First, start encrypting your backups, at least those that you know will travel. No ifs, no buts, just do it. The second suggestion? See suggestion No. 1.
When it comes to talking about performance, speed turns people's heads. Bring up racing cars in a room full of folks discussing sedans and pickup trucks, and you'll see what I mean.
Storage vendors often brag that their systems "phone home" in the event of malfunction, often before something breaks. "We call you before you realize there's a problem, telling you a component is about to fail and that the replacement part has already been shipped," goes the refrain.
If you read Greg Nawrocki's Grid Meter, you're likely already in the loop about 3Tera, the hard-to-pin-down software company that doesn't develop business applications, doesn't create games, and is not making another OS.
Current data growth rates suggest we will someday hit a limit beyond which we will no longer be able to store data reliably. A large part of this problem is infoglut. How we use disk drives is also partially to blame.
Storage Networking World came and went with me neck-deep in my lab testing products for review. Yet even at a distance, some of what was announced in Dallas this week caught my attention as harbingers of advances to come.
Now that the capacities of small form-factor drives have hit hundreds of gigabytes, just about any corporate database can easily fit on a laptop. That affordable capacity gives users the opportunity to work outside the office on projects with large data footprints. But it also can expose your company to liability if a storage device holding classified data falls into the wrong hands.
I've been watching and waiting for years for a vendor to proclaim the demise of disk storage, and this week it finally happened. The vendor who made the bold statement is Sun, specifically CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, as the old proverb goes, but who can be flattered by imitation that may violate one's intellectual property?
The proliferation of VMs in today's datacenter has many IT professionals scratching their heads as to the true extent of virtualization's hold on day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, the complexity of virtualized environments, if left unchecked, could very well overwhelm those operations, hindering the enterprise's ability to make good on the promise of virtualization.
