Entries categorized under “Cloud”

So when you are shopping for a solution to your growing messaging environment, remember to make sure that the solution you pick will not turn into the retention nightmare down the road. Ask the hard questions about retention management, migration strategies and storage formats. (read more)

One can hardly have a conversation about storage management these days without the topic of archiving surfacing. Part of the reason that archiving is commanding more attention is because as companies create and keep ever greater amounts of referential data on their production storage systems, it is creating a host of new problems (read more)

One of the toughest aspects of being a storage administrator is finding reliable information that one can use to make decisions about competitive storage hardware or software products, especially when it comes to making decisions about newer technologies like Single Instance Storage (SIS). Even when data does become available, it is often too generic or not applicable to their situation so the individual is left in the position of either trusting the vendor's literature or doing some level of testing. In the case of Blessing Hospital's Technical Support Analyst II, Doug Barry, he opted for the latter. (read more)

Israel's The Marker and Globes Online are reporting this morning that IBM has made it official that it is acquiring Diligent Technologies. Though the two sources differ as to the terms of the deal (Globes Online reports $200 million while The Marker reports $168 million), my sources in Israel's IT community tell me that the $168 million number is the more accurate of the two numbers. Under the terms of the deal, IBM will pay $160 million for Diligent's intellectual property while the balance would be used to keep some of the existing employees onboard. (read more)

Xiotech made the first "earthshaking" announcements of the day at 7:00 am which mostly had those I spoke to shaking their heads trying to figure out what the announcement meant. The announcement centered on their new patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology that they acquired from Seagate last November that will, according to Xiotech, "virtually eliminate the need for service, scale from one terabyte to one petabyte and dramatically boost perfromance". (read more)

Steven: The global storage market is currently a $45 billion a year industry and it is anticipated to grow to $50 billion a year by 2010 with archived storage forecast to increase from $9 billion in 2007 to $23 billion in 2010. Of the data that is currently stored to disk, 80% of that data is fixed content data that is rarely accessed and can be preserved in archives. We offer companies a third tier of storage that looks and acts like disk, has the properties of tape, and uses policy based software to manage data retention and compliance. Companies are looking very closely at the benefits of the technology. Plasmon archive solutions with UDO meet long term retention requirements at a cost businesses need. (read more)

In analyzing InMage Scout and the backup, archiving and recovery industry in general, I'm always digging a little deeper for success stories, technology improvements and corporate histories. In early January, Rajeev Alturi and I spoke by phone on a quiet Saturday afternoon. Rajeev and I discussed the nuances of Microsoft's VSS and how InMage leverages the technology, regardless of operating system, chipset and application system versions. (read more)

Dec 21 may well serve as a point of demarcation in terms of changing how businesses can expect to restart their IT operations using AmeriVault's services should a disaster occur. The new ReStartIT-VDR and -HA services from AmeriVault make a lot of sense for many businesses. For about $25,000 a year, a business with 300 GB of production data can introduce a level of business continuity and application recovery that previously was available only to companies with DR budgets of millions of dollars and dedicated staff. (read more)