More articles by Drew Robb

IBM's venerable storage portfolio includes tape, disk, SAN and NAS. Even more important than the hardware, however, is the intelligence Big Blue offers to easily and efficiently manage  enterprises' ever increasing storage needs.

As part of Brocade's mission to offer the best and fastest storage networking environments, it now offers a wide range of 16 Gbps Fibre Channel products without overlooking Ethernet.

What Infortrend lacks in name recognition it makes up for in product selection. Its ESVA and EonStor product families aim to meet the SAN and NAS needs of the midrange and SMB markets.

Long known for its tape automation products, Quantum has added a large disk-based portfolio to satisfy enterprises' preferences.

From hybrid hard disk drives and HPC to tape and midrange neglect, storage analysts weigh in on what they love and hate in the industry today.

These days, Cisco is about more than just networking. Its Unified Fabric strategy makes it possible to mix and match  from the MDS and Nexus product families, harnessing the same command lines and GUI operations to perform SAN functions.

Data deduplication has hit the mainstream and nearly all of the major vendors have an offering along with numerous smaller players. Here are 13 dedupe offerings worth a look. At least one is likely to more than meet your needs.

Oracle continues leveraging the servers and ZFS software it picked up in its acquisition of Sun. The recently released Sun ZFS Storage Appliances are one example of this. Learn what the Sun ZFS Storage 7120, Sun ZFS Storage 7320 and Sun ZFS Storage 7420 have to offer.

Server virtualization is far more advanced than in storage virtualzation, which causes provisioning headaches for storage admins. Overland Storage believes its DynamicRAID technology will help bridge this gap.

Just when tape was (once again) left for dead, big data has arrived to save the day.

Looking for a SAS or SATA disk array? Nexsan's product line may lack the hype of the major players' but its high value proposition and low price point make it a worthy contender.

Last week, Spectra Logic held a press and analyst day in Boulder, Colo. These 10 highlights stood out among the news, technology trends and company's pure ambition.

DataDirect Networks  is positioning  its three product categories -- storage arrays, files systems and web object storage systems  for the cloud -- to deal directly with the convergence of storage and compute power resulting from organizations'  ever-growing volume of data.

Big data, business intelligence, cloud and big boxes were featured prominently at Oracle's big conference this year.

It wasn't long ago that data deduplication was niche player territory. Now, all of the major vendors have a stake. Here are 8 dedupe offerings that stand apart from the crowd.

HP is a leader in multiple technology avenues. Recently, its massive portfolio of products, built both organically and via acquisitions, has made HP a storage giant. See what it has to offer.

Considering a cloud deployment? Here are 10 examples to check out and possibly emulate.

If you have servers or storage devices, chances are you have at least a component or two from LSI Corp's arsenal of RAID and HBAs, controllers, SAS switches, PCIe-based solid state storage adapters and various software options, which are all sold through major server and storage OEMs as well as through the reseller channel.

Numerous backup options are on the market. Which one is the 'best' is a matter of opinion. Which one is best for your organization is a question only you can answer. Here's a short list to help get you started.

Panasas is no longer the lone wolf in advocating for scale-out storage. Now, it faces competition from both traditional storage OEMs and several startups. See how it stacks up.

Cloud computing dominated at EMC's annual trade show, but it wasn't the only message the storage vendor was trying to get out.

A rundown of the NAS pioneer's four primary product families: FAS Series, V-Series, E-Series and Flash Cache.

What does 'big data' really mean? Here are 6 implementations helping define it.

Between internal R&D and various strategic acquisitions, Dell has built an extensive portfolio of NAS, SAN and DAS gear in recent years. Here are four product families any enterprise in search of a storage solution would be remiss in overlooking.

These eight storage companies are pushing cloud, SSD, big data and virtualization to the next level.

Backup and recovery is a key part of EMC's business, with five separate product lines making up its Backup and Recovery Systems division. We look at what Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker, Disk Library and Disk Protection Advisor have to offer.

With so many definitions of the cloud and so many vendors rushing into the market, choosing which cloud services and implementations to pursue is tricky. Here are 7 to consider that make sense and add value.

EMC's acquisition of Isilon has been the cornerstone of its big data strategy. Enterprises wrangling large volumes of  file-based data will find  many of their needs met with Isilon's core offerings.

Hitachi Data Systems is typically regarded as a disk array vendor specializing in large enterprises systems. As of late, however, the company has been dominating in the high-end disk array space as well.

SSD dominance shows no sign of abating as the aisles of Storage Networking World demonstrated earlier this month. With nearly half the vendors touting their latest flash products, we look at 10 to keep a close watch on.

Although best known for its tape library products, Spectra Logic is also a supplier of disk storage servers.

On the surface, Fibre Channel over Ethernet seems a slam dunk. Reality, however, says otherwise. What will it take for the less-expensive and easy-to-use technology to win over CTOs?

HP also introduced an iSCSI SAN blade and a data deduplication system.

The company claims the first scale-out virtual NAS appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

About half of the respondents said that SAN storage and server refreshes are a top priority this year.

EMC announced 41 new products, and claimed records in storage performance in a wide variety of categories.

EMC announced 41 new products, and claimed records in storage performance in a wide variety of categories.

While not perhaps as firm a guarantee as it used to be, holding a storage certificate is often required even to be considered as an applicant.

Case studies illustrate the benefits of unified storage.

Amid speculation about the fate of the open-source file system, Oracle has vowed that it has an "unwavering commitment to Lustre."

There is no shortage of technologies and techniques that can help you get more out of your storage dollar. Here are 10 more ways to keep costs down.

The early results are in and Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine is getting a vote of confidence from end users.

There are many ways to lower the costs associated with storage. Here are a handful of tips for making storage more cost efficient.

Storage, servers and software, oh my! Oracle pulled back the curtain on a myriad of products at OpenWorld this week as it is poised to give the rest of the IT industry a run for its hardware money.

Larry the Hardware Guy? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison showed his hardware side at this week’s OpenWorld conference when he launched the Exalogic Elastic Cloud – an integrated "cloud in a box."

Enterprise Storage Forum visited VMworld this week. Here are the top 10 takeaways. Some are obvious and some are forecasts of where we might be headed.

Attendance is up and storage is taking center stage as IT pros make their pilgrimage to VMware’s VMworld conference.

Acquisitions have the storage landscape in constant flux, but some vendors fall under the category of untouchable.

Storage startup Gluster has married open source software with commodity hardware to solve the problem of file system scalability.

Which of the many IT and data storage rumors are true and which are hogwash? Take your pick.

The recent EMC Forum in Long Beach featured news of the imminent release of Unisphere for unified array management, VAAI and vBlock, the first tangible product from the EMC, Cisco and VMware partnership.

There is so much hype these days in storage that it’s hard to get a handle on what is truly important and what is mere marketing fluff.

Hadoop provides a framework for storing and analyzing petabytes of data. Should EMC and Oracle be worried?

Want to hang with the cool kids? Well here they are.

We offer 10 observations from two days spent roaming through EMC's annual product showcase.

EMC may believe the future is in the clouds, but its growth is in data deduplication.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci says VPLEX is just the start of the company's vision for private clouds.

It's sure to provoke debate, but here are our nominations for the coolest SSD implementations.

Cloud vendors moving data over the Internet can only promise so much.

Data deduplication has hit the mainstream and nearly all of the major vendors have an offering along with numerous smaller players. Here are 13 dedupe offerings worth a look. At least one is likely to more than meet your needs.

Big data, business intelligence, cloud and big boxes were featured prominently at Oracle's big conference this year.

It wasn't long ago that data deduplication was niche player territory. Now, all of the major vendors have a stake. Here are 8 dedupe offerings that stand apart from the crowd.

Considering a cloud deployment? Here are 10 examples to check out and possibly emulate.

Numerous backup options are on the market. Which one is the 'best' is a matter of opinion. Which one is best for your organization is a question only you can answer. Here's a short list to help get you started.

These eight storage companies are pushing cloud, SSD, big data and virtualization to the next level.

With so many definitions of the cloud and so many vendors rushing into the market, choosing which cloud services and implementations to pursue is tricky. Here are 7 to consider that make sense and add value.

SSD dominance shows no sign of abating as the aisles of Storage Networking World demonstrated earlier this month. With nearly half the vendors touting their latest flash products, we look at 10 to keep a close watch on.

On the surface, Fibre Channel over Ethernet seems a slam dunk. Reality, however, says otherwise. What will it take for the less-expensive and easy-to-use technology to win over CTOs?

Case studies illustrate the benefits of unified storage.

There is no shortage of technologies and techniques that can help you get more out of your storage dollar. Here are 10 more ways to keep costs down.

The early results are in and Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine is getting a vote of confidence from end users.

Storage startup Gluster has married open source software with commodity hardware to solve the problem of file system scalability.

The recent EMC Forum in Long Beach featured news of the imminent release of Unisphere for unified array management, VAAI and vBlock, the first tangible product from the EMC, Cisco and VMware partnership.

Hadoop provides a framework for storing and analyzing petabytes of data. Should EMC and Oracle be worried?