More articles by Drew Bird

Management protocol compliance will enhance backup and restore operations.

In this, the second part of our look at storage certifications, we discuss some of the factors that you need to consider before starting down the road to your chosen certification track. We also talk to some industry figures to find out whether today's storage cert's are worth your time, money and effort.

Falling squarely into the category of specialized storage titles, Windows administrators will want to check out this excellent book from Wiley which picks up the topic of managing Windows storage where many other resources leave off.

Looking to save a few (thousand) bucks on your next storage networking purchase? The answer may lie in the highly active market for previously owned equipment. Read on to find out how you can get what you need for much less than you thought.

In this article, the next in our series 'Storage Basics', we are going to look at the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI). In part one, we'll look at SCSI as a technology, discuss some of the more popular SCSI standards and examine SCSI device numbering. In part two, we'll look at implementation considerations and how SCSI actually works.

In part II of our series articles on storage basics, we introduce the basic purpose and function of a storage area network and examine its role in modern network environments

Are you new to network storage? If so then this series of articles is for you! Over the next few months we are going to take a look at the basic principles of network storage and answer questions like 'What is network storage?' and 'Why do we use it?' After covering the basics, subsequent articles will look at specific technologies in more detail. All of the articles in the series will have one simple aim; to educate and inform you about network storage.

Fibre Channel LAN-free backup offers all the management advantages of centralized backup approaches, and the performance capabilities of distributed backups. As the name suggests, LAN-free backups move backup data off the LAN and onto dedicated links that network servers use to communicate with centralized storage devices.

Off-site storage is one of the challenges of the IT world. You want to keep data secure, and the best place for it is on site, but you also want that data off-site for disaster recovery purposes. The question is how to keep the data secure once it leaves the confines of the data center.

It used to be that networks had a slow time or even a dedicated backup window. Nowadays, many administrators do not have this luxury. So how does one protect the ever-increasing volume of data without compromising data access? LAN-free backups.

Is there a method to connect devices to a SAN that avoids the costs and shortfalls of a Fibre Channel? The answer appears to be yes. IP storage.

In an effort to address a possible gap in the certification market, Adaptec recently introduced a program called the Adaptec Certified Storage Professional (ACSP) RAID

In this, the second part of our look at storage certifications, we discuss some of the factors that you need to consider before starting down the road to your chosen certification track. We also talk to some industry figures to find out whether today's storage cert's are worth your time, money and effort.

Falling squarely into the category of specialized storage titles, Windows administrators will want to check out this excellent book from Wiley which picks up the topic of managing Windows storage where many other resources leave off.

Looking to save a few (thousand) bucks on your next storage networking purchase? The answer may lie in the highly active market for previously owned equipment. Read on to find out how you can get what you need for much less than you thought.