Drew Robb

Disaster recovery used to be a costly affair. You built a duplicate site in some remote location with its own complete set of hardware, software and systems. You replicated your data to it so that in the event of a disaster, you could stay online. But that entailed complete system redundancy with one set sitting […]

File synch and share appears to have become pervasive, even in large companies. A 2014 study by Forrester Consulting found 70% of employees using file sync and share every day, while nearly 1 in 5 use it hourly. Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group, has also observed file sync and share growing in popularity […]

The big storage vendors have been battling now for a few years to deliver an all-encompassing storage architecture that can take care of file, block and cloud assets in one system. No matter the protocol, they want to be able to house and manage it. Early generation systems were limited and more than a little […]

For years, there were backup products, deduplication appliances, disaster recovery systems and a whole host of separate systems that storage managers had to cobble together. But that appears to be gradually changing. Eric Burgener, an analyst at IDC, sees a trend underway: the introduction of unified data protection products that combine a number of data […]

 There are an almost infinite ways to run data storage backups incorrectly.  But doing it correctly requires following a few tried and true practices. It’s important to adapt t data storage backup best practices so they can function well in the face of rapid technological advancement. Here are the some tips on how to do […]

Data storage backup may have lost its “sex appeal” over the years as it is now largely regarded as part of the plumbing and a “necessary evil.” Yet it still accounts for the lion’s share of storage software spending each year. Data storage backup it is a vast field and no short guide could possibly […]

At the recent EMC World, EMC announced a cloud appliance product. Let’s take a look at this market and some of the products available. “Common denominators of many of these cloud appliances are low-cost storage using commodity servers and hardware-agnostic software capable of supporting block, file or one of the various forms of object,” said […]

At the recent EMC World, EMC made some bold claims about how its flash arrays were faster, better and more reliable than those of the competition. Let’s review EMC’s statements and flash array offerings, and also hear from some of its competitors about those claims, as well as what they offer as an alternative. EMC […]

This year’s EMC World conference in Las Vegas attracted tens of thousands of attendees from all corners of the globe. Its theme of “Redefine” continued the heavy push on the software defined data center (SDDC) that started at last year’s show. But there were more than a few surprises at the event.   For additional […]

Despite the immense changes in IT over the last decade, the Storage Area Network (SAN) remains the backbone of the storage world. Indeed, the complexity of modern environments has grown to the point where SAN management tools have become a necessity, particularly in larger enterprises. Here is a sampling of what is offered in the […]

The follow-up article to our hybrid cloud storage buying guide provides tips, advice and cautions for those seeking to implement a hybrid cloud storage environment. Some companies are already well on their way to building a sophisticated internal cloud. Others have gotten their feet wet in the public cloud and know the ropes there fairly […]

First there were public clouds offered by service providers like Amazon. Then there were private clouds set up within the enterprise and safely locked up behind the firewall. And now we are seeing a greater incidence of hybrid clouds, which are a blend of both. This concept is catching hold as companies manage to assure […]