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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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 EMC demystified Reporters just love EMC. After all, there’s always something new to write about, given that the company has spent the past three years on a punch-drunk buying spree, acquiring shiny new companies at a rate of roughly one every other month. January 22, 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 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 Girding up for storage grids? It went by rather quietly during the vendors' announcement fracas, but the recent changing of the guard at the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) means the group has a new board of directors and a new Chairman, Vincent Franceschini. November 16, 3:00 a.m. PST Sun strengthens storage partnerships Sun Microsystems is strengthening ties to its top 10 industry partners in a new program being presented to customers Wednesday at a Las Vegas conference. October 11, 5:04 a.m. PDT CA chief: 2007 to be year of execution Troubled systems management and security software vendor CA aims to get back on track in its current fiscal year after a series of unforeseen setbacks last year, its chief executive officer pledged to shareholders. September 18, 12:22 p.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: E-mail archiving the home-brew way Compliance is a painful reality for many IT administrators. Among the growing list of tasks, e-mail archiving is becoming a major requirement. Not only are various government audits interested in e-mail archiving data, but legal actions have begun to call on this information with increasing frequency. The demand for e-mail archive retrieval has become so great, in fact, that corporate e-mail hosting services -- Microsoft’s new Exchange Hosted Services, for example -- have begun adding high-availability archiving to their service menus. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT StorageTek takes spot in Sun's four key brands Sun Microsystems now considers StorageTek one of its major core-business brands, a company executive said Tuesday. February 21, 5:42 p.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 EMC to cut 1,000 jobs, but company will grow in size It may sound counterintuitive, but although storage giant EMC plans to cut 1,000 positions over the course of 2006, the storage giant expects to end the year with a larger total headcount. EMC plans to continue hiring staff to fuel its R&D (research and development) efforts and sales and marketing reach around the world as it cuts back on positions elsewhere in its operations, the company announced Friday. January 6, 9:39 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 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 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 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 Storage growth spins upward As demand for storage continues to increase, the storage industry is showing some signs of consolidation even as innovative new companies continue to sprout. June 10, 5:00 a.m. PDT SNIA works toward ILM standards Implementing an ILM strategy is neither simple nor straightforward for any organization. For one thing, although the point solutions offered by storage vendors today address parts of the problem, true ILM must encompass the whole datacenter. June 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT SNIA pushes for storage interoperability As storage and computing professionals, we know all too well that moving disk drives between different RAID controllers is a royal pain in the neck -- if we want to preserve our data, that is. April 7, 5:00 a.m. PDT Cisco unveils network-based storage services The discussion of where storage virtualization intelligence should reside has been going on for a while. As you may remember, three opposing theories suggested servers, network devices, or storage devices as preferred platforms for those virtualization services. March 18, 3:00 p.m. PST The best products of 2004 Hardware and Software Platforms December 30, 3:00 p.m. PST SMI-S: Order from chaos Bringing application awareness to an entire SAN of heterogeneous storage will require standards that integrate with every part of the storage stack, much like the QoS standards in the world of communications networking. To that end, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification), a vendor-neutral storage management API specification based on WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management) architecture. October 22, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM updates SAN File System software See correction below May 25, 4:53 a.m. PDT Storage vendors dismantle SAN complexity Initially conceived to reduce complexity, SANs have thus far only created more. But help is on its way, as Onaro, Sandial Systems, and AppIQ roll out products designed to address the maladies and complexities that plague SANs. April 26, 6:00 a.m. PDT > Storage |
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