Entries categorized under “Storage Management”

Who is Omneon, Inc., and why should you care? Do not worry if you have not heard of them as I said the same thing to myself when the name was first mentioned to me because if you are not from the video and digital broadcasting industry, it's unlikely you have heard of them. So, I was interested to hear what its Senior Vice President of Products and Markets, Geoff Stedman, had to say about its product and why Omneon is making a push outside of its traditional storage niche. (read more)

In an effort to provide the highest level of support and performance to end users, corporate IT has often acquired and deployed software and hardware solutions that, over time, are unable to meet the increasing demands for application performance and scalability. Issues such as vendor lock-in and high administrative overhead continue to increase costs and reduce ROI. For this reason IT departments have realized and embraced the advantages of commodity hardware and open source solutions. (read more)

Years ago when I first got involved in storage, I couldn't figure out why storage management was so difficult. In fact, I initially had a hard time even keeping myself busy in my job as a storage administrator. While I was on a storage management team that was extremely knowledgeable, all of my co-workers worked on mainframe storage. As a result, they were of a little or no help in helping me prioritize what tasks I needed to accomplish. In fact, about the only thing we shared in common was that we were responsible for managing storage systems that had round, brown and spinning disks in them. (read more)

Backup is about more than just deduplication ratios and faster backups. While these are important, companies also want assurance that the solution that they deploy in-house is continually developing, will help them manage their existing backup infrastructure and will scale as they grow. Today's announcements from Quantum indicate that it is committed to making these ongoing, continual and incremental changes to its product lines (hardware and software) in order to meet current and future customer demands. (read more)

Having once worked at a Fortune 500 company and watched it live the consolidation dream, I knew the reality was not necessarily the dreamy experience that vendors so earnestly promised. Yes, my company reduced its storage footprint, realized a return on investment (ROI), improved storage utilization and increased system availability - all critical components for it to justify a storage consolidation initiative. However my company only began to see some of the hidden intangible costs of consolidation once the process was under way. (read more)

Every year at every trade show, it always seems some vendor comes up with some gimmick or give-away that captures every one's fancy. A couple of years ago, flashing blue pens were all the rage - as I recall it was 3PAR who started that craze. Click a button, it flashed blue; click it again, it flashed faster; click it a third time and it thinly provisioned blue ink (I'm kidding about the thinly provisioned part). At another conference, another vendor made it a point to give away the most offensive orange colored T-shirts that I have ever seen to everyone at the conference in the hopes that everyone would remember their company. Well, I remember the T-shirt but obviously their strategy backfired because both the company and the T-shirt shared the same fate. (read more)

Deduplication is currently one of the hottest topics in data protection but it takes more than one form. The CommVault® Simpana® software suite implements deduplication as a Single Instance Store (SIS). In this iteration, SIS deduplicates archived and backed up files at the file level and then only stores one occurrence of the file. In part 2 of this interview series with CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, Simon Taylor, elaborates on how Simpana leverages SIS for information search and data mobility as well as how this approach complements block-based deduplication approaches found on certain disk-based storage solutions. (read more)

Ms. DeNovio tells me that it is not uncommon for enterprise companies to have one or more Oracle DBAs dedicated to creating and managing RMAN scripts. Part of the reason this turns into a time consuming task is that as Oracle releases new versions of its database, the RMAN scripts need to be modified to include the new and improved RMAN features. (read more)

CommVault took an important step in differentiating how CommVault Simpana protects Oracle databases from other backup and software products. Though the Simpana suite also supports multiplexing, the underlying Simpana architecture works more efficiently to handle data and avoid the need to multiplex at all - and still keep the tape devices spinning as fast as possible. (read more)

Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation Suite has come a long way from its humble beginnings virtualizing disk storage devices. The multitude of factors that it needs to account for and manage in today's complex data centers is staggering: clustering, multipathing, multiple operating systems and storage systems, and SCSI-3 persistent reservation bits are just some of the base line features it needs to manage. The question is, does Symantec's latest 5.1 release of Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows still merit consideration in today's data centers? (read more)

The point is that to succeed in the SRM space as an independent software vendor that does not tie the software purchase to the hardware, you need to deliver three things: (1) a great product; (2) great value, and (3) a genuine commitment to develop and evolve the product to meet customer's needs. One would think those points would be obvious but I believe a major reason that many SRM products failed on their first go-round was it seemed vendors were more interested in selling half-baked software and getting bought out by larger vendors than they were in providing products that worked, provided value out of the box and then delivered value to customers on a long term basis. (read more)

The challenge that APTARE faces, however, is the same challenge that every other SRM vendor faces. Keep SRM software relevant in the face of declining storage capacity prices. This factor alone often makes it far too easy for companies to throw more storage capacity at the problem as opposed to trying to monitor and proactively manage it. Regardless of whether or not APTARE has the right architecture, they need to help break users of their storage consumption habit (read more)

Randy: I hope the first thing that customers will appreciate is that CommVault® Systems and Microsoft are speaking the same language, one that enhances and embraces the Microsoft operating system and applications. After that, I hope they realize our development teams are in close communication which is a key reason why CommVault is so often a launch partner for major Microsoft releases - like Windows 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008, 64-bit computing, Exchange 2000, 2003 and Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint, and so forth. We get involved with their early adopters and often it is their early adopters who give us suggestions for our solutions. (read more)

Can APTARE's StorageConsole remain relevant in 2008 and beyond? That was a question that weighed on my mind as I met with Rick Clark, APTARE's President and CEO, a couple of weeks ago. The purpose of the briefing: receive an update on what steps APTARE is taking to keep its StorageConsole 6.5 product alive and growing as the data protection space evolves. Of course, the particular challenge that StorageConsole needs to address now and in the coming years is managing the growing use of disk in data protection and start to wean itself off of managing tape-based backup. (read more)