Infostor Archives for Month, Year

Analysts View

A balanced approach for managing storage networks

A solid SAN management strategy requires planning, staff allocation and, where possible, the use of existing tools and skill sets.

News Analysis Trends

Business Briefs

Topspin Communications, a start-up focused on the emerging enterprise data-center virtualization market, has completed a $30 million second round of venture capital funding, bringing total investment to about $47.5 million.

Carlson's data center relies on IP SAN

The drumroll for IP storage area networks (SANs) has been long and loud, but end-user adopters have been few and far between.

IBM delivers ATA NAS

This month, IBM began shipments of its first network-attached storage (NAS) server to take advantage of ATA disk drives. More and more NAS devices are being outfitted with ATA drives to cut costs while moving the file servers into the midrange and high-end markets.

IBM overhauls Shark arrays

Billing it as the most significant redesign since the product line was introduced three years ago, IBM this month enhanced its TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server ("Shark") RAID arrays with a number of performance-boosting architectural changes, including

NAS market to split into gateway, stand-alone segments

In the future, the network-attached storage (NAS) market will comprise two distinct product categories-gateways and stand-alone devices-according to a recent report from the Gartner Inc. research and consulting firm, in Stamford, CT.

Policy-based automation moves forward

Automated, policy-based management software will be in high demand, especially because it can help save a lot of time.

SNIA forms network security forum

In October, the Storage Networking Industry Association's Security Industry Forum (SSIF) hopes to unveil a best-practices document for storage networking security, an issue that end users have identified as a primary concern.

User survey shows strong surge toward SANs

According to an extensive survey of 152 Fortune 1000 IT storage professionals, the surge toward storage area networks (SANs) is much stronger than the shift to network-attached storage (see figure).

Features

Disaster recovery begins at the disk drive level

An effective data-protection strategy involves guarding against inevitabilities such as disk drive and component failure.

Global file systems will enable scalable NAS

Emerging file-system technology promises to overcome one of the drawbacks to traditional network-attached storage architectures: lack of scalability.

Outsourcing backup and recovery

Potential advantages include increased data security and lower administration costs.

Opinion

IT organizations require storage specialist

Storage and networking professionals should work together, but most companies still require dedicated storage administrators. By Steve Lefferdink

Special Report

IT's dirty little secret

Users raise concerns about backup and recovery.

Editorial

Know what your peers are doing

I have to admit that I am a sucker for surveys. None of us have the time to call hundreds of storage professionals to find out which way the wind is blowing.