To a greater degree than most companies, the business success of Reston, Va.-based AdvanceMed is directly linked to the smooth operation of its storage infrastructure.
A lot of confusion persists in the user community about the meaning of the Compaq-HP merger and what impact it will have on its existing investments in storage technology.
In keeping with the theme of this issue of Enterprise Systems, I proudly present my selections for the best (and worst) storage products of 2001-2002.
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.
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.
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."
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.
In moving from direct-attached to network-attached storage, Continental Airlines has found high availability, a flexible storage infrastructure and backup times that have been reduced from days to hours.
We're trying to preserve vast amounts of digital data reliably for 100 years—but the storage media themselves haven't been proven to last that long.
No one likes to dwell on it, but the dependence of business on electronic information—both its integrity and its availability—creates huge vulnerabilities for organizations counting on that information. IT and business managers everywhere need to be concerned about threats to data stored electronically.