Nothing has been more exciting in storage than following the constant evolution of SATA disk drives, watching their capacity grow and prices per megabyte shrink, thus easing deployment of SATA drives in the once forbidden realm of enterprise SANs.
As do other vendors of tape storage drives and media, Sony faces the reduced market appeal of tape-based data protection. Relentless increases in the demand for storage capacity, combined with the availability of ever faster, disk-based alternatives have resulted in waning customer interest.
How to better use new technologies is one of the most debated topics in the storage world, which is not surprising because often a new technology opens doors that were previously locked and forces potential users to walk away from the familiar beaten path.
I have been working mostly in my lab lately, resisting temptations to visit more shows or vendor sites. It's not that I don't like traveling (on the contrary, I enjoy it) but a few SAN arrays waiting for review had piled up in my lab and were making me feel guilty every time I walked by.
There are some ingenious ideas that make people slap their foreheads and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” QLogic built the SANbox 5200, its new Fibre Channel (FC) switch around one such idea: applying the concept of stackable switches, quite common in the Ethernet world, to the FC world to aid in SAN management and configuration.
Investing in diagnostic tools for networked storage has several benefits. With the proper tools, you can easily shorten the time it takes to get to the root of performance problems in a complex storage infrastructure. Moreover, even when nothing is broken, a good diagnostic tool can provide a better understanding of your SAN’s inner workings, knowledge that can help you improve the performance and resilience of your storage networks over the long haul.
Sometimes I feel for my fellow reporters who follow other beats. How disappointing it must be to wait for news that comes along in a slow drip, while I get a rainstorm about storage almost every day.
Two loosely related announcements grabbed my attention this week. Each introduces a new product that is a notable first-to-market for its manufacturer, but more importantly, these products mark a significant step up in storage. One technology doubles the disk drive capacity, while the other doubles the data transfer bandwidth.
Keeping track of the number of acquisitions, mergers and alliances that occurred in the storage industry this year is no easy task. I admit to losing count a long time ago. And I'm way too lazy to figure this out, but I think this will be a record year for storage deals.
I spent one weekend this month putting my personal paper files in order. This meant spending a few hours shredding old bills and bank statements and moving payroll stubs and other IRS-sensitive documents to the tax folders. Boring? You bet. However, the predictably recurring chore helps keep my files at a manageable size, while preserving important documents such as last year's tax return.
When pressed to allocate more disk space to users, IT managers often turn to a NAS appliance. It’s easy to understand why. A single NAS box, which is easily installed and managed, can consolidate data from multiple servers and reconcile the needs of multiple client OSes with a simple, LAN-based delivery method for files and folders.
By the time you read this column, Quantum should have made available its latest, most capacious and fastest tape unit to date. Of course, I'm speaking of the SDLT (super digital linear tape) 600, named after its impressive, single reel, 600GB capacity for compressed data.
DISK drives steal the spotlight again this week as a flurry of related news comes from storage companies.
For companies in the computer business, giving support reps the tools to directly control a remote customer’s PC can go a long way toward trimming the field-service budget and keeping customers satisfied. Solutions such as WebEx Support Center, that creates an instant bridge over the Internet between your service rep and the customer’s PC, can be an invaluable complement to your customer-support applications.
You may have not noticed, but Microsoft is playing a fairly significant role in the storage market. The software supernova came out of practically nowhere to capture nearly 30 per cent of the NAS market, according to IDC, since the introduction of its WPN (Windows Powered NAS) two years ago.
