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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. 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 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 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Satinath Sarkar When Satinath Sarkar, CTO of Orion Technology talked to his friends 10 years ago about his specialty -- geographic information systems, or GIS -- he was met with quizzical looks. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Will SAS 2.0 grow greener storage? FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA ... the alphabet soup of different connectivity protocols for disk drives can be confusing. Why do we have so many? The simple answer is because new technologies like SATA and SAS pop up fast, old technologies like SCSI do not disappear as quickly. April 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT A single protocol in your SAN? This week, Storage Insider is all about efficiency: A newly proposed standard, dubbed FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), aims to bring together the efficiency of the FC (Fibre Channel) transport and the ubiquity of Ethernet. April 13, 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 12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise Technologies that push the envelope of the plausible capture our curiosity almost as quickly as the would-be crackpots who dare to concoct them become targets of our derision. February 19, 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 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 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 MySQL CEO seeks partnerships with IBM, Microsoft The companies MySQL would most like to have a relationship with are IBM and Microsoft, says Marten Mickos, chief executive officer of the open-source database company. April 20, 2:12 p.m. PDT Next-gen RFID tools expand the market Despite the hype, the truth is that RFID deployments made little headway in 2005. New standards, prohibitive costs, and the lack of upper-level business context left most companies tuned out to this much-ballyhooed technology. April 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT SNW Spring: Talking 'bout a revolution -- or two This year's spring edition of SNW will be about to close -- or will have already closed -- its doors by the time you read this column, but it's still steaming full speed ahead while I write. April 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Getting to know SAS Don't you love it when a new technology moves from the drawing board to becoming real products? This is (finally) happening for SAS (serial attached SCSI), with several products coming to market in several areas. February 23, 3:00 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 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 Why data synchronization still matters The physics of data management used to dictate that your data could be either consistent or highly available but never both at the same time. The discipline of data synchronization sits uncomfortably on the horns of this Heisenbergian dilemma. As times change, though, so do the trade-offs associated with synchronization and its uses. November 30, 3:00 a.m. PST MPEG LA moves forward on Blu-ray licensing MPEG LA, a company that offers licenses for bundles of patents related to key audio-visual technologies, has taken its first step towards the creation of a license for the Blu-ray Disc format. November 16, 4:38 a.m. PST Beyond office document formats Let’s cut to the chase in the Massachusetts/Microsoft brouhaha over office document formats. One possible outcome: Microsoft Office gains support for the OASIS OpenDocument format, either from Microsoft or from the open source community. Another outcome: Microsoft tweaks its Office XML licensing to conform to the definition of openness that governments are rightly insisting on. November 9, 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 Tracking the buzz at SNW Fall I am writing this column only hours before getting on the flight to Orlando, Fla., where Storage Networking World Fall is about to begin. October 25, 12:00 p.m. PDT Scaling the SAS learning curve Aside from the SNW Fall and the Storage Decisions conferences I mentioned last week, another major October storage show opened its doors this month: the London-based Storage Expo. For U.S-based storage mavens, it's a show worth visiting because many storage vendors rehearse demos of new products there before an official launch in the States. October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Blu-ray support hinges on disc copy, says Intel Intel, which last week expressed support for the HD-DVD format for high-definition video discs, is open to also supporting the rival Blu-ray Disc format should its backers commit to allowing the copying of content from discs onto home multimedia servers, an Intel executive said Tuesday. October 4, 8:01 a.m. PDT HD-DVD, Blu-ray prototypes square off at Ceatec Electronics companies on both sides of the high-definition video disc format battle unveiled their latest prototype players and PC drives on Tuesday as the Ceatec exhibition opened in Chiba, just outside of Tokyo in Japan. October 4, 4:27 a.m. PDT Paramount to offer movies on HD-DVD and Blu-ray Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to offer high-definition versions of its movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the company said Sunday. October 3, 4:18 a.m. PDT Microsoft and Intel throw their backing behind HD-DVD Microsoft and Intel have decided to back HD-DVD, the next-generation DVD format being developed by the DVD Forum, the companies said in a joint statement on Monday. September 27, 4:49 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 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 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 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 The new SCSI: better, faster, smaller That old standby storage standard, SCSI, is about to get a makeover. Two technology shifts, occurring in parallel and arriving this year, will change the kinds of disk drives enterprises use up and down their storage systems. May 16, 5:00 a.m. PDT Forgent sues Microsoft over JPEG patent Forgent Networks has added Microsoft to the list of companies it has sued alleging infringement of a patent for a data compression technique it claims is used in the JPEG digital image standard. April 22, 4:34 a.m. PDT Storage virtualization: talk turns to action When it comes to storage virtualization, everyone from the top vendors to enterprise users talks about it, but nobody does much about it. April 1, 5:00 a.m. PST A challenger for iSCSI You have probably heard by now that Dell is offering an iSCSI version of the AX100, their entry-level storage array for SMBs developed in cooperation with EMC. February 18, 3:00 p.m. PST Fibre Channel still rules the SAN If you were expecting breathtaking new storage technologies to appear, 2004 was probably a disappointment. But if you were looking for better storage solutions at lower prices, then it was your kind of year. December 30, 3:00 p.m. PST Storage management: It's the application, stupid Would you serve the same food to guests at your daughter’s wedding as you would at your four-year-old son’s birthday party? Unless you’re rich or a terrible money manager, your answer is probably no. So why are many of today’s budget-strapped storage managers forced to allocate the same level of high performance storage, SAN bandwidth, and services to minor tasks that they use for mission-critical applications? October 22, 3:00 p.m. PDT 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 Sun partners for high-speed Ethernet Sun Microsystems will integrate drivers for S2io's Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter into the Solaris operating system for Sparc, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon servers. In addition, S2io will partner with Sun to develop a TCP/IP offload engine with remote direct memory access functionality to enhance performance and scalability in intense computer and server environments. August 23, 12:00 p.m. PDT EMC drills into compliance As the first deadline for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley looms, storage management giant EMC is launching major extensions to its ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) software suite. June 11, 1:00 a.m. PDT SNW in a nutshell? I'm not sure it's possible to summarize the Storage Networking World show in a single column and still be accurate, but I'll try. April 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT IVDR removable hard disk drives to finally appear LONDON - A removable hard disk drive system first unveiled more than two years ago will see its commercial launch later this month. IO Data Device Inc., a Tokyo-based manufacturer of computer peripherals, will put on sale a drive and disk based on the IVDR (Information Versatile Disk for Removable usage) standard in late-April, it said Monday. April 12, 2:22 p.m. PDT > Standards > Storage |
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