Ever wonder what would happen if a truly open, standards-based, highly manageable and intelligent Storage Area Network (SAN) appeared in the market? While the idea is a wishful dream for enterprise managers, it's a nightmare for storage vendors.
Outsourcing is suddenly fashionable again as business managers, confronting lean economic times, take another hard look at what is and isn't a "core competency."
With constantly evolving standards and virtually every company's explosive growth in the size of its data, storage is more than a thorn, actually—it's a big nasty thicket of thorns.
IDE Drives For Unchanging Content
A new kind of storage recently presented to me makes it important to understand the difference between server-attached, thin server-attached and switched server-attached storage.
offers charge-back feature
The old adage, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM (or EMC or Network Appliance)" still holds sway in most IT shops. That's in part because it's so difficult to answer basic questions about storage products.
Improved storage capacity and perfomance
Storage vendors join together
In a truly creepy scene from the 1991 motion picture, "The Silence of the Lambs," newbie FBI Agent Clarice Starling visits Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a convicted serial killer so dangerous that he is incarcerated behind glass walls rather than prison bars in the basement of a hospital for the criminally insane. In the scene, Agent Starling offers Lecter a survey document used to collect information on the psychology of serial killers for the FBI's behavioral science database.
You could make the argument that living in Florida, we're among the nation's most "holiday challenged." The thermometer rarely dips below 78, and fireplace flues are rusted shut by saltwater-laden air. You could go broke trying to sell tire chains, snowboards or mittens here.
It was a dark and stormy night. At a secret conference room hidden in the jagged rock face of a remote mountaintop, members of the powerful-yet-shadowy industry consortium, the Engineers of Accelerated Total Depletion of Information Storage Components (EATDISC), formulated the next steps in their Master Plan for global domination of IT spending.
End runs can be a good thing. Sometimes they can get you around some significant problems and take you where you want to go. But the end run can also be a questionable strategy, especially when it comes to storage technology.
While network attached storage has moved into the technology mainstream today, that wasn't so in 1992. In fact until recently, conventional wisdom held that such a technology would lead to anarchy.
The economy has slowed, but data growth certainly hasn't. Our expert offers 10 tips to help you squeeze the most from your enterprise storage investment.