Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

Good times or bad, all size organizations need data storage. The difference is that when times get tough as they were in 2009, we start to see those storage providers that deliver a good value for the dollar get the nod over those that deliver only so-so value. But what is notable about 3PAR, which recently received some positive comments from Barron's, is that 3PAR is making inroads in the high end of the storage market where start-ups are not supposed to succeed. (read more)

Failing to capitalize on all of the possibilities that networked storage offers is a mistake that many midsize organizations can and do make. "Disk drives" and "storage arrays" condition these organizations to think of storage as a "dumb" device so much so that they fail to realize that today's storage systems and disk drives have little in common. It is for this reason that these midsized organizations must change their mindset when they adopt and implement a network storage solution, especially those classified as a unified storage platform. (read more)

Last week's blog took a look at the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. This week I wanted to step even further back and reflect upon the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 regardless of when they were written as I find this insightful in two ways. It lets me know what information continues to hold the attention of readers on as well as what topics from the past might become new trends in 2010. So while there is definitely some overlap between the two, there are also some entries that appear on this list that knock some of the top 10 blogs from last week off the list. (read more)

Data centers face an unprecedented challenge as the next decade approaches. New storage cloud offerings not only bring the upfront cost per GB of storage down to commodity pricing levels but they make it possible for companies to outsource this critical part of their IT infrastructure. This puts new pressure on data center managers to identify and implement appropriate storage cloud solutions because they are no longer competing with internal business units or historical third party providers but new leaner, more efficient cloud providers like Amazon and Google. (read more)

This is one of my favorite blogs of the year to write. Even though this is only the second time since DCIG launched its blogging site two years ago that I have had the opportunity to write a blog in this format, I have been looking forward to looking back all year. In case you have not yet figured it out, today I take a look back at the top 10 most read blogs in 2009 on the DCIG site. However this year I am doing a two part series with today's blog examining the 10 most read blogs in 2009 that were written in 2009. (read more)

Everyone has backup problems, and educational institutions with limited budgets and IT staff may feel the pain of backup more so than most. In a previous blog, I shared some of the specific backup and disaster recovery challenges that Midland Lutherans College (MLC) in Fremont, NE, was facing and how its initial selection of a NAS device fell short of resolving those issues. However MLC's Director of Information Technology, Ken Clipperton, did not abandon his search for a disk-based backup solution and found the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d a good match for MLC's backup requirements. (read more)

I am doing my weekly recap blog a little early this week due to the upcoming Christmas weekend and wanted to share some final thoughts on what I considered the last of the three major storage trends of 2009. Over the last month I have posted a couple of blogs discussing what I considered the top two storage trends of 2009 and this week I wanted to turn my attention to what I consider third major storage trend of 2009: solid state drives (SSDs). (read more)

A few years ago when I suggested to my co-workers that our company needed to account for the continuing growth of the Apple MacIntosh in its enterprise storage design, I was met with outright guffaws and left the meeting with my tail between my legs. Fast forward to today and the Mac is no longer a laughing matter. Mac is now an emerging OS in many enterprise organizations and creating new data management issues that today's announcement between CommVault and Group Logic should help address. (read more)

As NAS providers like Iomega add more software features to their NAS appliances, they are attracting the interest of an entirely new set of organizations. One such organization, Midland Lutheran College (MLC) in Fremont, NE, was so impressed by the features on the new Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d over competing products that it went ahead and purchased the product for use in its academic environment. (read more)

The rumored closing of COPAN Systems in early December 2009 raised a few alarm bells around the storage industry. However it was not COPAN Systems' demise that was the main cause of concern as its impending doom has been rumored for some time. Rather it is question of whether of not the MAID technology that COPAN largely succeeded in making its signature feature will die along with COPAN. After all, if COPAN cannot make a go of MAID technology in this übergreen corporate environment, who can and under what circumstances? (read more)

As customers add more storage capacity in the form of disk drives to a storage system, they might also want to take advantage of the additional performance benefits that these new disk drives can deliver. The 3PAR array is architected in such a way that as resources are added to the system, the performance of all volumes improves. To achieve this, the volume needs to span as many disk drives in the storage system as possible - existing and new. While accomplishing this is simply done with its Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR saw an opportunity for policy management and multi-volume automation to further accelerate such tasks. (read more)

To say that the concept of "cloud storage" has come out of nowhere to capture the fancy of organizations and individuals is a bit of understatement. Probably nothing better illustrates the heightened interest in this topic than a Google trends report that shows how searches for "cloud storage" took off on Google in late 2007 and have only increased since. (read more)

"Efficient" is now a term that is used to by storage providers to describe their disk storage systems. But a recent internal survey conducted by Nexsan Technologies among its end users revealed that the way they view "efficient" storage is not necessarily how either providers or industry pundits define it. (read more)

Anyone wonder why storage virtualization is still growing relatively slowly while server virtualization platforms like VMware have gone on a tear? If so, a look at the licensing strategies that these two respective virtualization technologies have adopted provides some insight into why. (read more)

As I wrote previously, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) can gain some real benefits from server virtualization with the Iomega StorCenter™ ix4-200d a prime example of a storage appliance that can be used with server virtualization in these environments. But, what I didn't mention was which Ethernet TCP/IP network storage protocol should be used - iSCSI or NFS. (read more)

Deduplication contributes to expedited backups and recoveries, high backup and recovery success rates and frees up IT staff time associated with managing these tasks. Yet in the face of these benefits that deduplication offers, many midsize organizations still continue to use other technology as their backup target, citing cost and complexity as their primary reasons for not adopting deduplication. It is these specific obstacles that the new DXi6500 family from Quantum seeks to overcome. (read more)

Every Storage Networking World (SNW) show has a certain theme to it and this year's fall show in Phoenix, AZ, is no different. Presenters are still talking about technologies like data protection, deduplication and WAN optimization but solid state drive (SSD) technology was front and center on Day 1. Every session on SSD that I attended was full with standing room only in some sessions and those in attendance were definitely engaging the presenters as they sought to gain as much information at they could about SSD. (read more)

You knew it was only a matter of time before it happened. Cloud storage is on everyone's radar screen and yet Symantec had not, to date, announced any formal cloud storage initiative or strategy. That all changed yesterday with its FileStore announcement. Not only did Symantec roll out a cloud storage strategy and a new product - FileStore - but FileStore's architecture puts Symantec in a position where it more directly competes head-to-head with storage hardware providers. (read more)

September and October are the traditional months that many midsize businesses start to forecast what projects they hope to accomplish in the upcoming year and then put together budgets in support of those plans. Projects currently being given the highest priority are those that are power efficient, space efficient and cost efficient to meet organizational "Green" initiatives. (read more)

We have all heard of the pressures that the current economic downturn is having on companies. Since the beginning of the year, Wall Street Journal, Forrester Research and others have told us that spending on information-technology goods and services for this year is declining or will be declining. But these same outlets are also predicting the current bad economic times are coming to an end and that technology spending will increase again in 2010 across various categories to the degree of 7-10 percent. (read more)

It is commonly suspected that midsize organizations have the same priorities as their enterprise counterparts especially when it comes to managing their IT infrastructures. However a study released a few months ago removed whatever doubt may have existed as it revealed that the majority of midsize businesses place a premium on improving efficiency and increasing employee productivity. So today's announcement from RELDATA that it is releasing a private storage cloud offering that addresses those exact concerns for these size businesses could not be more appropriately timed. (read more)

Solid State Disk (SSD) is showing up across the technology spectrum from consumer grade laptops and PCs to enterprise storage systems. But until this week it can be argued that there really was not an SSD drive that was ready to withstand the scrutiny that some mission-critical enterprise environments are certain to put it under. This week's announcement from Pliant Technology may well be the proverbial brick that breaks this glass ceiling that has been preventing SSD from entering some enterprise environments. (read more)

At a time where vendors are positioning savings "guarantees" to draw attention to their storage offering, it is refreshing to see a storage user actually tout substantive savings just by switching to 3PAR. This was accomplished recently done by CEDAR Document Technologies who announced it saved a half a million dollars, improved performance, experienced a 5x increase in transaction volumes and avoided $250,000 in administrative costs just by switching to 3PAR's InServ storage systems. (read more)

One specific item that caught my attention was an article posted earlier this week on SearchStorage.com's site regarding Texas Memory System's acquisition of Incipient's storage virtualization intellectual property. Being fairly familiar with Incipient's technology and having talked to a few of its early customers off-the-record, I thought its technology was sound. However like every storage vendor regardless of its size, a pure network-based storage virtualization play has remained a tough sell, especially in enterprise environments where Incipient played. (read more)

Most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have limited IT budgets so when it comes to storing data and reducing costs and complexity they must do so wisely. Further, most have few or no IT personnel so they also need technology solutions that they can deploy and scale easily without requiring inordinate amounts of time to manage. Server virtualization is now increasingly viewed as a good fit for SMBs and with the new emphasis that VMware put on reaching out to SMBs at last week's VMworld, it is more important than ever for SMBs to quantify what benefits they can expect to glean from server virtualization before deploying it. (read more)