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Best of open source in storage Combining “open source” and "storage” in the same sentence used to trigger a sardonic grin, but no longer. The availability of free and open software is as true today for storage as it is for operating systems and applications. Fueling faster file transfers with RocketStream The data that we send over wires travels between two-thirds and three-quarters the speed of light, depending on the medium. Within the LAN, transfers from point A to point B appear to be immediate, with less than a millisecond delay.  August 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT FTP: New tricks for an old dog Not only has the multimedia revolution increased our appetite for storage, but it has also beefed up our portions, as average file sizes just keep getting bigger every day. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Suit up your storage network with business sense No longer capable of remaining on the sidelines as a separate administrative domain, today's networked storage must be managed with a deeper awareness of business objectives. June 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Small-stature Isilon IQ 200 file server packs big features High-speed access to large files, such as those related to scientific research, doesn’t play nice with traditional NAS systems. They're usually just too limited in their throughput and file-system capacity. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun ZFS breaks all the rules It’s somewhat surprising that in the past five years, file systems haven’t changed much on any platform. There are dozens of file systems available for UNIX-like operating systems -- ext3, XFS, UFS, and ReiserFS for example -- and Microsoft’s ubiquitous NTFS, but since the journaling revolution, there’s been a dearth of innovation in mainstream file systems, until now. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startup skirts datacenter bottlenecks with cache Seeking to alleviate the bottleneck woes of I/O-intensive apps, startup Gear6 today announced CACHEfx, a scalable cache appliance that makes as much as 5TB of cached data available to applications without having to retrieve it from storage. May 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Multilingual filers shatter storage-standard barriers As does a hydra, storage and file-sharing technologies have many heads, and these days, they seem to be moving in every direction at once. iSCSI is finally in the limelight and the push toward virtualization is only heating up that market. Meanwhile, NFS and CIFS, the old warriors of file sharing, aren't going anywhere soon. Fortunately, there are ways to get to iSCSI now through single "multilingual" filer packages. April 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT EMC taps users to expedite e-discovery Seeking to improve enterprise governance of e-mail and file archiving systems, EMC today announced upgrades to its EmailXtender e-mail management and DiskXtender file archiving products. April 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAN and NAS virtualization After some years of false starts and false hopes, storage virtualization, also known as block virtualization, is finally proving its worth. All the major vendors have embraced it, most notably IBM, EMC, and HDS (Hitachi Data Systems); the solutions themselves have improved; and customers, typically large shops managing large SANs with intense data availability requirements, understand how to deploy it and where to get good ROI. No longer a technology in search of a problem, storage virtualization offers a way to address a wide range of storage management woes. February 12, 3:00 a.m. PST HP aims downmarket to pitch virtualization Hewlett-Packard (HP) is going after the virtualization market in the small-to-medium business space by offering a program to assess how an IT system might benefit from the technology. January 25, 3:46 p.m. PST Storage: Hardware takes a backseat Ask two IT managers what were the most important storage trends for 2006, and you’ll probably receive two sharply different answers. The reason is that, this year more than ever, storage events defied any simplistic, black or white, one-sided description. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Clustered storage winks at the enterprise The rationale for deploying a clustered storage system is in many ways similar to that of deploying clustered servers: You get better scalability, both for capacity and performance, and more resilience than traditional solutions can provide. October 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft releases beta of file-server backup In a continuing bid to capture some of the tape-backup market, Microsoft on Wednesday released a beta version of the upgrade to its file-and-application server recovery software, which includes support for a wider range of the company's server products. September 27, 9:05 a.m. PDT Cedars-Sinai cures storage ills with clustered NAS If your job is a daily fight against time to save lives, the vagaries of a storage system should not get in your way. This is the problem that Dr. Parag Mallick faced at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Applied Molecular Medicine in Los Angeles, where he is the director of proteomics for the research division of the hospital. The solution Cedars-Sinai chose was clustered NAS. June 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT When plain NAS beats clustering If clustered NAS is the way to go, why do traditional NAS systems still account for the majority of deployments? June 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Russell Daniels As CTO and vice president of HP’s software business, Russell Daniels has a service-oriented perspective normally associated with applications -- rather than, say, his flagship OpenView product. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Bob DeRodes Bob DeRodes used to be a long-snapping center, but he says he missed his shot at the NFL. Instead, he became executive vice president and CIO of The Home Depot. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories No matter how hard we pray, how many chickens we sacrifice, how often we chant naked by moonlight, every network is at one time or other exposed to the ultimate technology risk: users. April 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Effective long-distance data protection Protecting data properly is challenging in any circumstances but can be even more difficult to do at a remote office. It’s easy to understand why: Most data-protection tasks require both human labor and the computing power necessary to move large amounts of data, digging into two resources that are typically in short supply at a remote office. April 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Storage virtualization and iSCSI don't mix As more and more products enter the market, iSCSI is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative to FC (Fibre Channel) SAN technology. Not only is iSCSI cheaper than Fibre Channel, but the technology is less complex to implement. Because it uses the familiar IP network protocols, it simplifies the IT skill set needed to maintain the SAN. Thus, though it’s not as fast and has a lower maximum capacity than FC systems, iSCSI meets the needs of many small businesses and non-mission-critical enterprise storage applications, such as departmental file sharing and near-line data storage. January 12, 3:00 a.m. PST What isn't storage virtualization? Vendors often use the term "virtualization" to describe myriad products, including global name spaces, virtual storage area networks (VSANs), pooled NAS (network-attached storage), thin-provisioning software, virtual file systems, virtual tape libraries, RAID arrays and disk clusters, and virtualized application and file servers (such as EMC's VMWare). But although these technologies all use some sort of virtualization, they don't actually qualify as storage virtualization. January 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Virtualized storage, real rewards As senior director of enterprise technology operations at Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a prison management firm that handles more than 60 facilities, Brad Wood faces several challenges. His group manages approximately 100TB of data -- including inmate medical records, operational records, e-mail, and so forth -- across four Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) storage arrays in two datacenters. Because of federal and state rules, much of the company’s data is mirrored three or four times to keep it accessible in case of failure. Adding to the complexity, Wood buys his hardware based on current price and performance, so he has a mix of suppliers. January 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Windows 2003 Server branches out As Windows 2003 Server R2 release time draws closer, Redmond is getting more and more detailed with us on what’s really going to be included in the new release. Turns out those 120MB are going to include a whole bunch of stuff. One lesser known new feature will be a remote site management capability. Dubbed Branch on all the marketing slides, this is an installation of Windows Server that’s optimized for branch office workloads. December 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Hardware isn't enough IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Server clustering made simple Getting top performance from a storage system and making applications faster and more resilient are two critical and challenging aspects of computing. Unfortunately, many vendors’ solutions focus on just one side of the problem or require massive, costly infrastructure changes. November 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Veritas eases Exchange archiving Products such as Veritas EV (Enterprise Vault) 6.0 help companies come to grips with managing the long-term storage of e-mail, a popular cause in IT shops contending with legislative requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Fully integrated with Microsoft Exchange -- and soon IBM Lotus Domino/Notes -- and hooking into Veritas NetBackup on the back end, EV also supports any SMTP mail product, albeit with a more limited set of features. EV can even archive Microsoft NTFS file systems and SharePoint Portal Server repositories. August 22, 4:00 a.m. PDT Zetera: Storage at the speed of light Once you’ve been on the teams that invented the drive controller standards used by billions of machines, it’s a tough achievement to top. So when Bill Babbitt, Bill Frank, and Tom Ludwig of Zetera created a new network storage paradigm, they simply got rid of controllers altogether. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT NeoPath offers clear route to flexible file server management Many organizations find that file servers tend to pop up all over the place and are often hard to manage. Worse, consolidating the servers may disrupt end-users, because consolidation usually requires changing network mappings and user permissions. June 20, 5:00 a.m. PDT Windows Storage Server unleashed When it comes to simplifying storage while still offering powerful administrative tools at a reasonable price, not many solutions can compete with FalconStor’s ISS (iSCSI Storage Server). Offering a combination of block and file serving, as well as support for a wide range of hardware configurations, this amazing application has much appeal for cost-conscious customers who still want good performance and flexible management for their storage systems. June 13, 5:00 a.m. PDT HP iSCSI pack kicks DAS Migrating file servers, e-mail servers, and databases from DAS to networked storage improves resilience and performance, and it’s probably less expensive in the long term, but it requires a mastery of a variety of storage technologies — a mastery many small companies lack. No wonder they choose to stay with the old-fashioned but easier-to-manage DAS. June 13, 5:00 a.m. PDT What's Brocade up to? If I were Mr. Brocade, I would be quite satisfied with how things are going for my company. (Incidentally, there is no such gentleman, as far as I know.) May 12, 5:00 a.m. PDT Past and future meet in Novell OES Novell’s OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0 is not actually a new product, but a weaving together of existing ones. Aiming to bring old Novell customers to Linux, and Linux shops to NetWare, OES combines SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) 9.0 and NetWare 6.5, including Virtual Office Services and iPrint, Novell File Services and iFolder, identity management (nSure and eDirectory), Novell iManager Web-based admin, and clustering. No longer do these services require NetWare servers or even NetWare client software on Windows workstations, and with outstanding support for Linux workstations and servers, OES is worth investigating for any organization that uses Linux, especially for workstations. April 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT Update 2: HP taps NCR's Hurd as new CEO After reviving NCR, Mark Hurd now has another reclamation project on his hands. March 29, 9:57 a.m. PST Tacit I-shared brings welcome relief to over-the-WAN file sharing Sharing files with users at remote offices over a WAN often creates enormous headaches, due to limited bandwidth and the high latency of the connection, combined with the “chattiness” of file sharing protocols such as NFS and CIFS. September 3, 3:00 p.m. PDT EMC, FileNet blend content management, storage, BPM The role of content management in the enterprise is expanding as vendors such as EMC and FileNet build new hooks into storage and business process management technologies. July 26, 6:00 a.m. PDT Network attached storage scales up If you’re confused about NAS, you’re not alone. Under that acronym lie a wide range of products, from personal computing devices, to small and midsize business solutions, all the way up to ultrascalable, high-performance monsters. May 28, 3:00 p.m. PDT Iomega readies removable storage NAS device Iomega Corp. on Monday will unveil a new entry-level network attached storage (NAS) device designed to work with both conventional ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) drives and the Rev removable hard drives that Iomega began shipping earlier this year. May 24, 4:32 a.m. PDT > Networking > Storage |
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