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Adaptec's little SAN that can Many different combinations of drives, controllers, and software are available in storage arrays for small and midsize businesses, but one example that you should not miss is the Snap Server 720i that Adaptec trotted out last week. Introducing the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies Not too long ago, open source meant starving developers; scant documentation; an ugly, outdated Web site; and software that lived in perpetual beta. Now open source software is becoming big business. “Now hiring” is a common sight on project home pages, and .org and SourceForge sites that used to point straight to source code archives are redirected to .com URLs that celebrate the commercial success of what started out as collaborations among unpaid coders of like mind.  September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Open source storage gets a virtual lift It has been a while since I last discussed Coraid, but two announcements the company made at LinuxWorld earlier this month have me thinking about AoE (ATA over Ethernet) these days. August 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT The SMB backup dilemma Every time I hear a pitch for an SMB backup solution it comes complete with a chilling statistic that suggests smaller companies are tone-deaf to data protection. July 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Fast guide to fancy SAN management No longer tied to a monolithic enterprise price tag, many of the sophisticated storage management capabilities outlined below can now be found in affordable SAN midrange systems from Compellent, iQstor, Xiotech, and other vendors. July 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Midrange SANs master high-end features SAN storage systems continue to evolve quickly, with features trickling down from market leaders such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems to midtier players. The three systems reviewed here, from Compellent, iQstor, and Xiotech, offer a surprising array of functionality including nearly every feature one might find in $250,000 enterprise-class systems except CAS (content addressed storage). Their impressive feature sets include 4Gbps FC (Fibre Channel) connectivity, iSCSI support, tiered storage, local and remote replication and snapshots, and even thin provisioning, boot from SAN, virtualization, and automatic expansion of volumes. Compellent even provides automatic migration of data from first- to second- or third-tier storage -- an ILM (information lifecycle management) tool that is usable without requiring a complex setup. Both Compellent and Xiotech offer monitoring and support services similar to those the tier-one storage vendors provide to large enterprises, allowing customers to respond proactively to projected failures. July 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Classic Storage Insider, part I Mario Apicella is on vacation, so in his absence we present two classic Storage Insider columns for your reading pleasure. This week, the spotlight is on SANs: their protocols and standards, and how they could affect you. June 22, 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 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 Betting on the future of parallel NFS Are you using or planning to use NFSv4 (Network File System version 4)? I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the answers to that question are a flat-out no or a quizzical stare, because this latest incarnation of the Linux/Unix file system is still a long way from becoming a mainstream solution. However, let me make it clear that this impasse is not for lack of merit, because NFSv4 has a lot to like. June 1, 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 Startups class of '06: Where are they now? In 2006, InfoWorld uncovered 15 startups that emerged after the nuclear winter that followed the dot-com bust with cool, useful technologies. Well, another year has brought a new crop of startup darlings, such as the companies we're profiling each day in May for our Month of Enterprise Startups (MOES) feature. But MOES got us thinking about last year's startups. In the year that has followed, how have these innovators fared? May 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Will server virtualization end the FC-iSCSI debate? Let’s take a trip to the future this week. Imagine that we travel forward in time -- say, 100 years from now. How will the technological landscape of storage change in one century? What will our descendants think of the state of our technology? May 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startup enters I/O virtualization fray Virtualization startup 3Leaf Systems today announced its flagship V-8000 Virtual I/O Server, as well as $20 million in Series B investment, led by Intel Capital. May 1, 12:33 p.m. PDT Onaro looks to bridge app-storage gap Seeking to aid enterprises in their ongoing struggle to better align storage resources with application requirements, Onaro today released an upgrade to its SANscreen Application Insight product. April 30, 3:00 a.m. PDT Another step toward 10 Gig SANs Sometimes in my work, things just seem to fall in place, as if someone were pulling the strings behind the scenes. I am not suggesting that there is any conspiracy here, but last week's column on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a new proposed standard to consolidate transport for both FC (Fibre Channel) and Ethernet, was a great segue into this week's announcement of a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch from Woven Systems. April 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Betting on top storage speed Some areas of the storage market are crowded with too many similar products. Think, for example, of clustered IP SANs -- it's something of a niche segment, but it's vibrant with competing solutions from vendors like EqualLogic, Intransa, and LeftHand Networks. March 9, 3:00 a.m. PST More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST EqualLogic's iSCSI SAN hits storage management high notes It seems that every time I configure an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array in the company of folks who’ve never seen the process, they ask the same question: “Really? You’re already done?” The answer, always, is Yes. February 26, 3:00 a.m. PST LeftHand boosts its SAN/iQ Many companies would embrace the superior performance and enhanced reliability of clustered storage were it not for the fear that adoption would cost a fortune and lock them into proprietary hardware. February 26, 3:00 a.m. PST New choices in networked storage One of the best known names in NAS and iSCSI is Network Appliance, a company that has embraced SANs as well. Aneil Balkaran, manager of Windows on Unix at Consol Energy, runs an iSCSI SAN on a pair of clustered NetApp FAS 960 C boxes. These machines provide SAN and NAS all in the same unit. (See also "iSCSI: The rising enterprise star" and "The trends that shape iSCSI's trajectory.") February 26, 3:00 a.m. PST iSCSI: The rising enterprise star Fibre Channel was definitely not top of mind when Chris Brown hit the wall on disk space and, in mid-2005, decided to go shopping for a SAN. Brown is IT manager for DeltaValve, a division of Curtiss-Wright Flow Control. “I have an IT staff of two,” he explains, “and we do not have the resources to support Fibre Channel.” February 26, 3:00 a.m. PST The trends that shape iSCSI's trajectory Where is iSCSI headed? Good question. A recent blogstorm with posts from well-known names at EMC, EqualLogic, and NetApp among others leaves the answer in doubt. True, shipments of iSCSI gear continue to climb steadily, but conventional analyst wisdom dictates that iSCSI’s slice of the SAN market may remain quite thin. (See also "iSCSI: The rising enterprise star" and "New choices in networked storage.") February 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Fujitsu Siemens targets SMBs with new recovery system For midsize businesses seeking a relatively easy, inexpensive way to keep their servers running around the clock, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has launched a fully automated backup recovery system. February 22, 6:52 a.m. PST 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 Hitachi and Archivas tie the knot The news of Hitachi Data Systems revealing its intention to buy Archivas probably did not surprise anybody because the two vendors have been partners for quite some time. February 9, 3:00 a.m. PST So long, McData Brocade's acquisition of McData has come and gone in what feels like an abrupt change, despite months of elapsed time from start to finish. February 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST FTC clears Brocade-McData deal The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has cleared the pending acquisition of McData by Brocade Communications Systems after an antitrust review, removing the last regulatory hurdle to the deal. January 24, 4:23 a.m. PST The smart business of diversity Carly Fiorina served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. After she was ousted, along with a $21 million exit package, Fiorina did what a lot of us would do if we had millions of dollars in the bank and some time on our hands: She wrote a book. In Tough Choices, published in October, Fiorina talks about rising to the top of a male-dominated culture. Fiorina spoke with InfoWorld correspondent Carmen Nobel for our upcoming feature on the issues women face in IT. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Will EMC's information gamble work? In June 2006, EMC announced that it would acquire RSA Security for $2.1 billion, only to be met with a healthy dose of analyst skepticism and a 3 percent drop in its stock price. Many on Wall Street considered the price tag too high in light of RSA’s 2005 revenues of $310 million. Moreover, industry observers were disquieted by EMC’s unrelenting buying spree: RSA was merely the most expensive purchase out of a whopping 23 acquisitions it had made since early 2003, which have crossed the spectrum from systems management to content management to BPO. January 22, 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 Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. 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 Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Fujitsu Siemens offers SAN bundle for small businesses Following a similar move by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Siemens Computers plans to announce a packaged storage area network (SAN) product on Thursday aimed at small and medium-size businesses. December 11, 4:49 a.m. PST Simplified storage for small businesses This was a rather busy week, no doubt because of the impending Storage Decisions conference. There's nothing like an industry event to fire up the marketing machines, but I was intrigued by the fact that many of the new products and announcements were going small -- as in small business. December 7, 3:00 a.m. PST EMC: Vendor cooperation key to data security The cool reception from Wall Street this summer after EMC’s announcement that it would buy RSA Security had EMC executives feeling a bit flummoxed -- like the guy who elopes, only to find out that his friends didn’t like his girlfriend to begin with. November 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Accelerating the SAN on a budget A couple of recent announcements from Cisco and Dell bring new, fast FC (Fibre Channel) and Ethernet switches to market at a price and with features that should make their competitors nervous. November 23, 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 Storage performance still matters Following last week's SNW news feed, I should probably use this week's column to discuss the implications of EMC purchasing Avamar. November 9, 3:00 a.m. PST Network Appliance takes on HP, EMC Network Appliance Inc. is introducing midrange network storage platforms Tuesday that it says pose a competitive challenge to storage devices from rivals EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. November 6, 11:18 a.m. PST Staying the course at SNW Storage Networking World Fall in Orlando is one of the never-ending storage carnival's most popular merry-go-rounds, but his time I had to pass on attending: too many things to do in my lab. November 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Storage budgets may not keep up with demand in 2007 Although demand for more storage capacity is a continuing problem for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), only about 37 percent of companies surveyed plan to increase spending on the technology in 2007 according to a forecast released Thursday by industry research firm Gartner Inc. October 19, 3:06 p.m. PDT SMEs, say farewell to DAS Not long ago I had an interesting conversation with a group of folks from a major storage vendor. They had requested a briefing to discuss how to improve their infrastructure to better support product reviews. October 18, 3:00 a.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 Financial services: High pressure, high performance When it comes to sheer IT “bling,” financial services is never outshone. High margins, deep pockets, and intense competition in investment, banking, and insurance have pushed these companies to the edge of just about any technology there is. Storage, grid technology, Web services, virtualization, VoIP -- you name it, financial services companies have bought it. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Brocade/McData: Only fools rush in? The expectation that rivals Brocade and McData would eventually beat their swords into plowshares to present a united front against Cisco’s predations was already in the cards. Nonetheless, Brocade’s pre-emptive bid last week to gobble up fellow SAN switch vendor McData for a whopping $713 million is raising eyebrows. August 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Brocade to buy McData in all-stock deal Storage area network (SAN) switch vendor Brocade said Tuesday it would by rival McData for $713 million in shares. August 8, 10:28 a.m. PDT EMC seeks “Vision Thing” with RSA Buy EMC CEO Joe Tucci likes to describe his company’s acquisition strategy as a “string of pearls” approach, focusing on small buys of top-notch technology: Documentum, VMware, Captiva. All together, those pearls add up to something that’s really valuable. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Gateway eyes enterprise storage Gateway Inc. launched three enterprise storage products for medium-size businesses on Thursday, as the Irvine, California, company struggles to rebound from posting a net loss of US$5.2 million in the first quarter. June 29, 10:31 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 InfoWorld CTO 25 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Massive storage array to fuel MIT research Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, a pioneering research facility in the digital technologies field, will tap a 1.4 petabyte IP storage array to help aid a three-year study into early-childhood development. May 15, 2:48 p.m. PDT EMC's focus still on virtualization, security EMC continued its buying spree last week by picking up Kashya, maker of data replication and protection software, for $153 million, and the Interlink Group, a professional services firm that specializes in Microsoft environments. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews EMC rolls out entry SAN and archiving software EMC introduced the EMC clariion AX150 and AX150i storage systems and the EMC Documentum Archive Services for Email and Archive Services for Reports. The AX150 systems, available with Fibre Channel or iSCSI connectivity, support as many as 10 host servers and scale from 750GB to 6TB of SATA II storage. Pricing starts at $5,600. The new Archiving Services offerings are based on a unified archiving platform for collecting, retaining, securing, and discovering all kinds of information, including e-mail, reports, documents, images, Web content, video, and transactional data. Prices vary by configuration. EMC Clariion AX150 and EMC Documentum Archive Services, EMC April 10, 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 IDC: storage software market grew 11 percent last year Enterprises are buying more replication, backup and archiving storage software, market analyst IDC found in its most recent quarterly storage software report released on Monday. March 13, 4:13 a.m. PST Midrange SANs with high-end features from Compellent, Xiotech As high-end storage systems come out with new features, those features tend to migrate down over time to systems intended for the smaller enterprise. Two midrange SANs, Compellent’s Storage Center 3.3 and Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 3000e, are taking advantage of this, offering a wealth of features that as recently as six months ago were limited to much more expensive systems. February 24, 3:00 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 Communications panel studies lessons of Katrina An independent panel to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina on communications networks, convened by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), met for the first time Monday. January 30, 2:10 p.m. PST EMC: Profit dips in Q4 due to one-time charges Profit at data-storage company EMC tumbled in the fourth quarter due to charges for, among other things, cutting jobs and repatriating income earned abroad. January 24, 6:43 a.m. PST 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 CES tech news and gossip -- from Google to Stevie Wonder Attending the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is like spending the week with 130,000 former college roommates. It's great on the first day, reliving old times and laughing about mutual acquaintances. But by the weekend, you start remembering all the times they stiffed you for beer, and the time they promised to get you a job at their company but gave it to the pretty girl down the hall. January 11, 11:15 a.m. PST 2006 Technology of the Year Awards: The winners' list See correction at end of article 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 Top technologies of the year Welcome to our first issue of the year. For those of you who took a break, re-entry into the heady universe of work may be a bit discombobulating. Fortunately, last Saturday, the world’s ever-considerate timekeepers saw fit to give us an extra sliver of time -- a leap second-- to prep for the new year. And now, with the pop of the cork (or was that the buzz of a pager?), we’re ready to herald 2006, a potential banner year for the enterprise. 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 Moving beyond the SAN Are you satisfied with the way you manage storage at your company? If you are, good for you, but according to a survey just released by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), your company is a lucky minority. November 24, 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 When mainframes make sense Not everyone sees the mainframe as a relic of the past. In 1996, motor manufacturer Baldor Electric, beguiled by promises of lower costs and the desire to move to the SAP platform for all its CRM and ERP transactions, left the mainframe in favor of a Windows environment. According to Mark Shackelford, Baldor's IS director, the company was very unhappy with the results. November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Riding a 10G gale at SNW Fall Despite some annoyances caused by Hurricane Wilma, the 2005 SNW Fall repeated the success of previous shows, albeit with perhaps just a little more spice. In fact, unexpected and off-stage news, namely HP finalizing the acquisition of AppIQ, and IBM planning -- together with other major storage vendors -- to extend open source software to the new frontier of storage management seemed to hit attendees just as much as Wilma's best efforts. November 3, 3:00 a.m. PST AppIQ Storage Authority 4.0 bridges storage and business Excitement and anticipation mount before any review, but those feelings were far more intense when it came time to evaluate SA (Storage Authority) Suite 4.0, AppIQ's flagship storage management software. After all, the suite so enticed several major vendors -- including Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, SGI, and Sun Microsystems -- that they made it part of their storage portfolios, a recognition no other product in that area has received. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT The long and winding SAN As with any SAN, building one with Xsan is a project measured in days, not hours. The easy part is installing FC (Fibre Channel) cards in the devices that will directly connect to the SAN; connecting them to an appropriate switch; setting up the back-end Ethernet network that will manage the SAN (leaving the FC network free for data); and, finally, installing Xsan on the direct-connect machines. At least one Xsan machine will serve as an MDC (Metadata Controller). This is the heart of the SAN, managing access to LUNs (logical unit numbers), and controlling the flow of data across the network. Of course, two MDCs is a minimum for any production environment, and from my experience, I’d want a third MDC. Although the documentation wasn’t initially clear on this, backup MDCs should be set to “low” priority for fail-over, leaving the “medium” setting unused. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT X marks the sweet SAN spot In the mid-1980s, Apple took its first steps into the corporate technology market and stumbled so badly that it was more than a dozen years before the wounds could heal. In the past few years, however, the company has made significant strides toward becoming a player in enterprise computing: Apple’s rack-mount Xserve server and Xserve RAID array chassis can hold their own with anything in their class. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Six iSCSI SANs unleashed We've all been hearing about the simplicity and low cost of iSCSI for years now -- and how iSCSI would topple FC (Fibre Channel) as the storage networking technology of choice for shops moving from DAS to SAN. Yet entry-level SAN systems, such as those from Dell/EMC and Hewlett-Packard, although quick to adopt low-cost SATA drives, have continued to stick with FC interfaces. Even those that have offered iSCSI typically included FC as well. Fibre Channel has remained king, even for small SAN deployments. October 3, 4:00 a.m. PDT Configuring storage on the wire There are three ways of connecting a server to an iSCSI SAN. You can use a standard gigabit NIC with a software iSCSI initiator, or an iSCSI accelerator such as the Alacritech SES2002 adapter I used with Windows, or a true iSCSI HBA such as the QLogic QLA4010 I used with Linux. The standard NIC and the Alacritech accelerator both require a software initiator, but the QLogic adapter has iSCSI smarts on the card itself, allowing it to offload iSCSI packet processing from the server’s CPU. Because a standard gigabit NIC places that load on the host CPU, periods of high I/O can put a substantial dent in the performance of the server -- not an issue with a true iSCSI HBA, which represents itself as a storage controller to the OS -- not merely a network interface -- and handles all iSCSI operations itself. October 3, 4:00 a.m. PDT How I tested I took all six arrays and ran them in the lab for several weeks, running performance tests under Linux and Windows using software initiators and iSCSI HBAs from Alacritech and QLogic. In addition, all the arrays were tested for failure situations, both at the disk and the controller level. The Linux tests were conducted on a Dell PowerEdge 2800 server with dual 3.6GHz Xeon EM64T CPUs and 4GB of RAM running Red Hat Advanced Server 4.0 using the beta channel Linux iSCSI initiator (Version 4.0.3.0-2) and the QLogic QLA4010 iSCSI HBA. The Windows tests were run on a Newisys 2100 server with dual Opteron 250 CPUs and 4GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003 and using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and the Alacritech SES2002 dual-port iSCSI accelerator. October 3, 4:00 a.m. PDT Update: HP to acquire Peregrine Systems for $425 million Hewlett-Packard is to acquire IT asset and service management software vendor Peregrine Systems in a cash deal for $425 million, the two companies announced Monday. By integrating Peregrine's products into its HP OpenView systems management suite, HP hopes to position itself as one of the market leaders in asset management software. September 19, 12:36 p.m. PDT Seven technology battlegrounds Some people enjoy a good fight; others would prefer to look the other way. One thing is certain, though: If you have a stake in that fight, you’ll watch the outcome closely. September 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI Anyone who has considered crossing the bridge from DAS to a SAN has faced a fundamental choice between two technologies: the established, but pricey FC (Fibre Channel) and the more affordable but still emerging iSCSI (Internet SCSI) transport. September 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT Synergetic SANs and blades "Synergetic (adj): Working together; used especially of groups, as subsidiaries of a corporation, cooperating for an enhanced effect." August 18, 4:00 a.m. PDT Update: EMC to buy virtualization specialist Rainfinity EMC is to acquire Rainfinity, a network file virtualization software vendor, the storage giant announced Wednesday. The move is part of EMC's ongoing strategy to reposition itself as an information infrastructure company as laid out by the company's executives earlier this month at the firm's annual analyst day in New York. The move also fleshes out EMC's storage virtualization product portfolio. August 17, 9:22 a.m. PDT EMC stresses end-to-end security NEW YORK - EMC is looking to focus on providing end-to-end security for its customers and delivering more management capabilities in its software offerings, according to executives speaking at the company's analyst day in New York on Thursday. August 4, 10:06 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 > Hardware > Network hardware > Hardware > Storage hardware > Networking > Network hardware > Storage > Storage hardware > Storage |
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