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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. 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 EMC strikes first partnership with Indian outsourcer EMC Corp. will train more than 1,000 Wipro Ltd. staff in the use of its storage technologies as part of an alliance announced by the companies on Wednesday. June 13, 4:09 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 In search of the best geek vacations June marks the beginning of vacation season, when offices empty out, traffic lessens, and the daily pace grows languid. The classic vacation mentality is all about getting away -- or at least that's what I've been told. Personally, I start getting crazy without access to my phone, favorite Web sites, blogs, and the like. On my last vacation to Yosemite, after several days of relative isolation, a fellow camper told me about a nearby lodge with an Internet-enabled public terminal. Much to my wife's chagrin, I visited every day for the rest of the trip. June 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Former Hitachi Data Systems chief to head up HP storage In its quest to re-energize its storage business, Hewlett-Packard has recruited the former president and CEO of storage rival Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). May 25, 2:22 p.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 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 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 2006 Year in Reviews: Storage In EMC’s march on the enterprise NAS market, two big feet fell this year in the form of the company’s Rainfinity (global file system) and Infoscape (file classification) releases, which we took for early spins in EMC’s labs. The year also brought a smooth rev of Windows Storage Server, a swell mid-range SAN from Compellent, and a slick tape library from Spectra Logic. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Networking After most of the vendors declined our invitation to a WAN shootout last year, we settled for a series of standalone reviews of WAN accelerators this year. As usual, Riverbed’s Steelhead shined -- so did products from Silver Peak, Blue Coat, and Cisco Systems, though they still swam in Steelhead’s wake. Perhaps competition will be stiff enough for a comparative test in 2007. Stay tuned. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco opens R&D center in west of Ireland Cisco Systems Inc. will open a research center in Ireland to develop unified communications products. November 22, 8:21 a.m. PST EMC refreshes storage line EMC Corp. is adding new features to some of its storage products, with claims of improved performance, energy efficiency and ease of use, to remain competitive with rivals' offerings. October 23, 12:23 p.m. PDT Cisco banking on collaboration tools Triple plays are rare in baseball. But Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers plans to do one better Wednesday by promising to pull off a "quadruple play" in the networking business: incorporating data, voice, video, and mobile capabilities across its product lines. September 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT EMC-HP storage race heats up Number two storage systems maker Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has closed the gap between it and number one EMC Corp. to what research company IDC calls "a statistical tie." September 1, 4:55 a.m. PDT EMC buys BPM provider ProActivity EMC Corp. has opened up its pocketbook yet again, this time to acquire ProActivity Software Solutions Ltd., a small, privately held provider of content-management software for BPM (business process management), the company said Monday. June 19, 9:48 a.m. PDT The new NAS: Fast, cheap, and scalable There are many reasons to complain about storage, but lack of variety is not one. June 15, 3:00 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 Hack Tales: Network auditing on a shoestring What do you do when the auditors are breathing down your neck, wanting to see an exhaustive report on the Windows network security of a 2,000-user network across eight sites? That’s easy. Break out a text editor and start writing some Perl. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT PCI standard to require application scans Baseball is a tough game. It would be even tougher if the umpires decided to, say, change the distance between the bases. Consider, then, how IT and compliance folks at online merchants are feeling after a MasterCard International official last week said that his company and Visa are updating their PCI (Payment Card Industry) security standard to cover a new range of security risks. May 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun's NAS appliance enters crowded market Just weeks after moving former CEO Scott McNealy into a new role and installing Jonathan Schwartz as its new CEO, Sun made a major announcement in an area many analysts agree is key to its future survival: storage. May 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun rolls out storage products, strategy Sun Microsystems continued Tuesday to integrate technologies gained from its $4.1 billion purchase of StorageTek last year and sought to clarify its overall strategy for storing, managing and securing data throughout the enterprise. May 2, 11:43 a.m. PDT Storge sales drive EMC revenue up EMC Corp. said Thursday that strong sales of its Symmetrix storage and content management and virtualization software boosted first-quarter revenue by 14 percent from the same period in 2005, but that profits were hit by stock-option expenses. April 20, 10:17 a.m. PDT Top six steps toward disaster-recovery I recently got to write a fun piece for InfoWorld called "Stupid user tricks" about protecting your network from human error. Researching the article revealed to me how many variables folks tend to miss when running a network, as well as when planning to protect and recover that network. (By the way, if you were one of the folks who submitted anecdotes for this article, check out the SMB IT blog to see whether you’re on the list for a free InfoWorld backpack.) 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 EMC rolls out new NAS devices, software EMC rolled out on Monday two new network-attached storage (NAS) devices and extended its Smarts IP root-cause diagnosis software to NAS systems. March 6, 11:16 a.m. PST Entuity improves Eye of the Storm's network vision Entuity on Tuesday unfurled Version 4.5 of its Eye of the Storm network management suite, equipping administrators with greater visibility and control over the network. February 28, 8:30 a.m. PST Adaptec adds Opteron-based NAS Even as it continues to search for a buyer for its Snap Server NAS (network-attached storage) business, Adaptec Inc. Tuesday rolled out the latest additions to its Linux-based NAS hardware line. February 21, 11:47 a.m. PST Product Previews Fast Revs Up Its Enterprise Search Platform Fast Search & Transfer this week released Version 5 of its ESP (Enterprise Search Platform), adding contextual analysis, a workflow-based user interface, and boosted scalability. Fast ESP 5’s Contextual Insight technology combines information-retrieval and data-analysis features to generate more accurate search results. The new user interface, dubbed Search Business Center, offers a workflow-based display with centralized search management, tuning, monitoring, and configuration. Enhanced SOA tools for plugging the search platform into other applications and environments are also new in ESP 5. Fast ESP 5 Fast Search & Transfer February 6, 3:00 a.m. PST Cisco appoints ex-MCI chief Capellas to board Cisco Systems Inc. has appointed Michael Capellas, former president and chief executive officer of MCI Inc., to its board of directors, the computer networking company said Tuesday. February 1, 4:42 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 Cisco delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet to the closet Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop isn't for every infrastructure, but it's become a popular push both by switching vendors and network admins. And no wonder: Servers are generally using bonded gigabit links to the network, the cost of Gigabit Ethernet closet switches are dropping, and many corporate desktops are now shipping with Gigabit Ethernet NICs by default. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Storage vendors move beyond blocks and LUNs No single storage technology stole the spotlight in 2005, but the year was nonetheless an exciting one that featured new products in areas such as data protection and virtualization as well as important developments in disks, tapes, and switches. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Juniper sues over message-board posts Juniper Networks Inc. is suing 10 unnamed defendants over comments posted to a networking news message board that Juniper charges are libelous. December 22, 4:27 a.m. PST No. 15: Profiling to maximize performance Be proactive in preventing performance bottlenecks by including a mandatory profiling step in the latter part of development, specifically during the software lifecycle. Profiling your applications and Web services will uncover whether your code is efficient. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST IBM releases second set of NAS arrays IBM Tuesday announced a line of midrange storage arrays -- its second such release in the past three months -- that not only offers network-attached storage capabilities but can transfer data via Fibre Channel and the IP-based iSCSI protocol. November 8, 10:53 a.m. PST Competing network-management rivals unfurl faster, smarter wares Network management rivals Network General and Network Instruments on Monday separately announced significant enhancements to their respective Sniffer and Observer product lines. November 7, 12:01 a.m. PST 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 SMI-S standard promotes storage interoperability The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) was formed with the aim of developing standards for storage hardware and software. One of its most prominent efforts to date has been SMI-S, the Storage Management Interface Specification. SNIA ratified SMI-S 1.0 in July 2003 and it was approved as an ANSI standard in October 2004 (and should soon be approved by ISO). July 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT Vanasse Hangen Brustlin restores order with SRM You don’t have to be a large enterprise to take advantage of storage-management technologies. Vanasse Hangen Brustlin (VHB), a 700-person engineering consulting firm specializing in transportation, environmental, and land-development services, has up to 3,000 projects in development at any given time. The records for these projects represent a few months to several years of work and are stored on servers in the firm’s 17 offices located throughout the Northeast. For Greg Bosworth, director of IT at VHB, data management for these projects involved a series of manual processes that had become increasingly complex and labor-intensive as the volumes of stored records reached approximately 10 terabytes. July 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT Making sense of storage management Storage spawns where it’s needed, from sensibly architected SANs serving transaction-intensive systems to storage appliances bought impulsively to fill a departmental need. That leaves IT to manage many islands of storage strewn across the enterprise at a time when the need for centralized storage management has never been greater. Compliance requirements, multimedia-rich applications, and a proliferation of databases are pushing IT departments to increase the size and complexity of storage networks across the enterprise. July 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT From Oracle, with love Whatever your opinion of Lawrence Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, you’ll probably agree on one thing: The gentleman has a keen eye for storage. June 16, 5:00 a.m. PDT NetApp CEO talks IBM, virtualization If you think Network Appliance's (NetApp) recent partnership with IBM was about getting the storage server vendor into the enterprise, Dan Warmenhoven wants you to think again. The Sunnyvale, California, company is already there, and enterprise customers are helping to fuel the company's extraordinary sales growth says NetApp's chief executive officer. June 15, 10:50 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 BlueArc teaches Titan new tricks I'm sure you've heard of storage vendor BlueArc and its Titan line of ultrafast storage systems. In case the name escapes you, here's a refresher. May 26, 5:00 a.m. PDT OnStor unleashes one cool NAS cat See correction below April 25, 5:00 a.m. PDT Rainfinity's NAS virtualization courts ILM The last time I spoke about Rainfinity was almost three years ago when the company first launched its NAS virtualization product, RainStorage. March 24, 6:00 a.m. PST Vendors store all things great and small HANOVER, GERMANY - Storage products announced at the Cebit trade show here spanned the range from a Cisco Systems storage switch ready for multiterabyte arrays of data, down to a new half-height tape drive from Tandberg Data GmbH. March 15, 10:09 a.m. PST Measuring change management initiatives takes initiative Cynics may say that the field of change management is so vast that the term is practically useless. Yet, if the sun is always shining behind the clouds, one can credit effective change management with improved operational efficiencies and higher customer satisfaction — at least that’s the boardroom consensus. November 5, 3:00 p.m. PST EMC revenue and income rise over 30 percent EMC Corp. revenue for the third quarter grew 34 percent year-on-year, driven by software and services sales, the company reported Tuesday. October 19, 8:55 a.m. PDT EMC packages Centera with software, services EMC Corp. Monday plans to announce three technology bundles that combine its Centera fixed-data disk array with software and technical services for storing e-mail and documents to support regulatory compliance initiatives. June 7, 12:22 p.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 Parting words on SNW I know, I know. You're wondering how I could possibly write another column on Storage Networking World. But I just can’t keep all this good stuff to myself. April 23, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Networking > Network attached storage - NAS > Networking > Storage > Network attached storage - NAS > Storage |
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