Drew Robb

EMC put on a show today at multiple venues and with a global webcast audience. Attendees watched a 100-minute event complete with world record leaps by daredevil biker Bubba Blackwell, and 26 people packed into a Mini Cooper to achieve a Guinness World Record. That was the glitz surrounding EMC’s announcement of 41 new products, […]

Unified storage platforms seem to be the in thing these days. EMC, NetApp, Pillar Data Systems, Reldata, Cisco and others have brought such products to market. But how are they doing in the real world? First State Bank & Trust in Kansas opted for a Pillar Axiom system when faced with a doubling of storage […]

Since Oracle acquired Sun last year, there has been uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Lustre file system. In fact, that uncertainty stretched back well before the acquisition. To end the speculation, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) chose last week’s Supercomputing 2010 conference as the forum to reaffirm its commitment to Lustre. “Nothing in Lustre has been […]

In last month’s story, Top Ten Ways to Trim Storage Costs, we offered up some alternatives to expensive disk arrays and a few tips and technologies that can make storage more cost efficient. Since there are more than 10 ways to skin your storage budget, here are 10 more ways to keep costs down and […]

At Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference last month in San Francisco, Larry Ellison announced the Exalogic “cloud-in-a-box” system aimed at the application market. Whether the industry will embrace Exalogic remains to be seen, but there are users who have logged many hours with Oracle’s other solution-in-a-box – Exadata – and we now have a gauge on […]

Once upon a time, storage was regarded as an expensive necessity. Not anymore. As data growth has exploded and technology has evolved, the days of paying a premium for numerous expensive disk arrays are over. Today’s priority is keeping costs down. Here are ten ways to make storage more cost efficient. Smart Tape Despite the […]

Now a full-fledged member of the storage community, Oracle made a splash at this week’s OpenWorld conference with a slew of new hardware and software products that quelled any doomsday projections about the fate of the Sun storage portfolio. Oracle is traveling headlong towards domination on as many fronts as possible – and that includes […]

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, became a full-fledged hardware pitchman at this week’s Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, where he announced a new integrated Oracle-Sun box known as the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Growing out of the success of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine – a combo of servers, storage, networking and software tailored to database […]

VMware’s VMworld conference has come and gone with a cavalcade of storage vendors putting their stamp on the show with product announcements, demonstrations and presentations for the more than 17,000 attendees. Beyond the product parade, there were some takeaways from the show that gave Enterprise Storage Forum a glimpse into what might be the future […]

This week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco highlighted how it is possible to prosper regardless of the state of the economy. Fewer than 200 people gathered at the first VMworld in 2004. By 2008, it was up to 10,000 – right when the recession hit. While some IT conferences have faltered since that time, attendance […]

Gluster is an open source startup that most people in storage have never heard of. Yet its value proposition could spell trouble for the big boys and potentially send the prices of proprietary hardware crashing down. Its flagship product, the Gluster Storage Platform, is aimed primarily at unstructured data. It combines open source software with […]

Winston Churchill said it best: “There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.” But which of the many IT and data storage rumors are true and which are hogwash? Take your pick. 1. IBM or Oracle to buy EMC On […]