Storage - Infoworld

Researchers claim 100-fold increase in data storage speed

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:17:39 +0000

European researchers may have found a way to speed up data storage 100-fold, breaking one barrier holding back how fast data can be transferred.

If successfully translated to a storage product, the new technology alone would theoretically cut the time to store a bit of data on a hard disk drive from a nanosecond -- a billionth of a second -- to a hundred-billionth of a second.

The hidden costs of the data explosion

Matt Prigge — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Rampant data growth makes slaves of us all. The effects are well known: massive growth in storage infrastructure, prematurely obsolete storage resources, the endless scramble to stay on top of it all.

Storage vendors have reacted to the onslaught with cheaper, more capable primary storage hardware to sate the data addiction. But as primary storage resources are continuously upgraded in response to growth, disaster recovery and business continuity architectures are often pushed beyond their original design limits -- leaving organizations at significant risk.

Hands on with Amazon Storage Gateway

Matt Prigge — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Last week, Amazon announced the most recent addition to its AWS product portfolio: The Amazon Storage Gateway, a simple, powerful way to back up on-premise data to Amazon's S3 storage infrastructure.

But the Storage Gateway is not just a cloud-based backup solution. It also opens the door to using Amazon EC2 instances as a means to provide disaster recovery.

Second life: Revive your old workstation with SSDs

Matt Prigge — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

I've written on a number of occasions about the capabilities of enterprise-class SLC solid-state drives (SSDs) when leveraged in demanding primary storage environments. Their ability to both provide impressive sequential read/write performance and shoulder enormous OLTP loads has made them an almost indispensable component of high-end database and large VDI infrastructures.

NetApp's Tom Georgens: How we got big, stayed nimble, and view storage today

Pete Babb — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:32:20 +0000

Those of us with a bit of institutional memory recall a brash upstart named Network Appliance that burst onto the storage scene to challenge EMC -- itself once a brash newcomer -- and other storage royalty like IBM. But that was 20 years ago, as difficult as that seems to believe, and the company, now named NetApp, is $5 billion-plus storage leader in its own right.

The year's best hardware, software, and cloud services

Doug Dineley — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Was it the philosopher George Santayana who said, "Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it?" Did he offer any hints for those of us who want to repeat the past, especially the successes? We're beyond the teary elegies of 2011 and deep into making resolutions for 2012. If we're going to stand half a chance of creating something great this year, it only makes sense to pause and celebrate what went right in 2011.

Getting out of jail free

Matt Prigge — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

It's 1:30 in the morning. By some miracle, you were able to get approval for a four-hour downtime window to complete a long list of overdue patching and network maintenance. Even better, you're done a half-hour early. Life is good!

Picking the top technologies in a wild year

Eric Knorr — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Whenever someone asks me how InfoWorld differs from other IT publications, I cite two facts off the bat: Most of our articles are written by experienced, working IT people -- and we're one of the few publications that still does real enterprise product reviews.

Architectural rule No. 1: Segregate everything

Matt Prigge — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Enterprise IT infrastructures now face such an explosion of applications, devices, and data that just running in place is hard enough. Nobody seems to have the time or resources to design new systems that actually improve operations. Nonetheless, there's one step you can take to make life easier and your infrastructure stronger as you deal with rampant growth: introduce logical separation wherever you can.

IBM demonstrates first Racetrack Memory chip

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:44:31 +0000

IBM on Monday announced at the IEEE conference that it has produced a working Racetrack Memory circuit , which could lead to chips with the capacity of hard drives, but the durability and performance of flash drives.

The new non-volatile, solid-state memory could someday replace NAND flash, which is currently at the 20nm (nanometer) node size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

Texas Memory Systems unveils high availability flash array

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:46:12 +0000

Flash array vendor Texas Memory Systems (TMS) Tuesday released its first high-availability NAND flash array. The RamSan-720 array is targeted at hosting the highest performance, mission critical data.

The new array has no single point of failure at both the hardware and management software level. The storage system includes redundant power supplies, dual RAID controllers, dual internal flash card interfaces, and memory battery backup.

Stop being your own worst enemy

Matt Prigge — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

I've spent a great deal of the past 15 years doing two things: building new server, storage, and network infrastructures -- and fixing them when they fall flat on their face for one reason or another. Over that time, I've seen one common theme emerge: There are very easy, seemingly unimportant things you can do when you build and maintain infrastructure that will save your bacon later when things go pear shaped.

Most of them involve writing stuff down -- you know, documentation.

IDC: Storage growth slowing to normal

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:19:27 +0000

Growth in sales of enterprise disk storage slowed in the third quarter as the industry returned to normal patterns after recovering from the recession, according to research company IDC.

Big data strains small-business bandwidth

Matt Prigge — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Sooner or later, small businesses encounter many of the same challenges big businesses face -- and it's happening now, big time, with rampant data growth. You'd think the burden of the data explosion would fall primarily on storage infrastructure. In fact, for many small businesses, WAN bandwidth is proving to be the biggest bottleneck.

InfoWorld's top 10 emerging enterprise technologies

Eric Knorr — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Everyone is a trend watcher. But at a certain point, to determine which trends will actually weave their way into the fabric of business computing, you need to first take a hard look at the technologies that gave life to the latest buzz phrases.

VDI: Not just for big business

Matt Prigge — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Time is the scarcest commodity for any IT pro. There's never enough to get everything done, whether you spend it fighting fires, rolling out new applications, or supporting the user base. And this scarcity affects IT shops of any size -- from the armies supporting Fortune 100 companies to the one beleagured employee supporting a small business.

4 incredibly useful steps to better backups

Matt Prigge — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

In all my years in IT, I can't think of an everyday task that is more universally loathed than maintaining good backups. Depending upon what size environment you're running, setting them up in the first place can be a massive investment in capital and manpower, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Daily monitoring and troubleshooting often end up making the initial deployment look like a walk in the park.

DataDirect Network releases array with 40GBps performance

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:32:27 +0000

While the product's name may need a little work, DataDirect Network's new SFA12K series storage array represents a new high-water mark for networked storage performance, according to analysts.

With up to 160 6Gbps SAS (serial-attached SCSI) parallel I/O lanes attached to either SAS, SATA, or SSDs (solid-state drives), the appliance can offer up to 40GBps performance, or 1.4 million IOPS (I/Os per second).

The law of unintended storage consequences

Matt Prigge — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

The increasing complexity of modern storage arrays seems to know no bounds. While all of us are understandably excited when hot, new storage features arrive on the scene, it's important to remember that all of them come at a price. Their complexity tends to make these systems harder to troubleshoot -- and harder for storage vendors to test fully before they hit the market.

Hard drive prices skyrocket

InfoWorld Tech Watch — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:50:15 +0000

In the past few days, the price of big-name hard drives -- Seagate, Western Digital Hitachi, Samsung -- at major online retailers has shot up 40 to 90 percent or more.