Drew Robb

After years of unfulfilled promise and false starts, online backup has become one of the hottest segments of the storage market, fueling startups and sending the biggest storage vendors on an acquisition spree. “Online backup is a very nascent market that is fragmented in terms of the kinds of players,” said Doug Chandler, an analyst […]

To keep up with rapid data growth and performance needs, enterprises have deployed appliances en masse and used them to create countless virtual tape libraries (VTL). The result? The backup window is being met, but management headaches are cropping up. Instead of being the panacea to solve backup speed and management challenges, ‘VTL sprawl’ is […]

It’s that time of year once again, so we spent the last few days chatting with analysts and vendors to see what they think will be the dominant trends in storage for 2008. To sum up, it’s all about the green — saving money with virtualization, iSCSI and SATA/SAS, and saving power with green storage. […]

Remember all the hype about Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)? Not that long ago, you couldn’t get through a storage press release or presentation without running into the term. But in the last year or so, the acronym has faded from the headlines, replaced by the latest buzzwords like de-duplicationand thin provisioning. So what’s up with […]

Backup reporting, change management, capacity utilization, provisioning, performance monitoring, automation, migration. These terms roll off the tongue of storage software salesmen with such smoothness. Yet are all of them really necessary? And what about the idea that storage resource management (SRM) could handle all such tasks? Instead of SRM fulfilling its promise, it seems the […]

Consolidating servers and data centers is a great way to cut support and infrastructure costs. IBM, for example, estimates that its own project of migrating from 3,900 servers to 30 System z mainframes will save the company $250 million in energy, software and support over the next five years. But migrating the data and applications […]

The assignment seemed easy at first: find out whether bit error bugs (known as silent corruption) are a serious problem, and then find someone who’s had trouble because of them. Unfortunately, anyone who has suffered because of this situation isn’t likely to step forward. This might be a function of the types of environments likely […]

“In three years, SAS will completely replace Fibre Channel,” was the bold prediction made earlier this month by Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing at Network Appliance (see Storage Vendors Move Down Market). “SAS technology — comprising both SAS disk drives and SAS drive controllers and interconnects — provides significant end user benefits and […]

The first article in this series highlighted how SMBs can harness online backup as the cornerstone of their disaster recovery (DR) actions. This article will go beyond online backup and look at cost-effective options available for organizations that want to either perform the backups themselves or just go a bit further. While setting up a […]

Online backup seems to be all the rage as of late. Vendors are springing up either catering to a specific niche or claiming to do everything for next to nothing. While such services aren’t likely to attract enterprise users, they are certainly luring many SMBs. All you have to do is sign up, decide which […]

Intel is just a chip vendor, right? Not anymore. A casual glance at the company’s home page reveals news stories about rugged PCs for elementary schools, the thinnest laptop in the world and even online gaming. Of course, there is plenty of real estate given over to processors, too. But look to the left of […]

thin provisioning is something of a tightrope act, promising users loads of storage in the hopes that nobody will actually need it all, while delivering only what is absolutely necessary. Yet end users seem to like it nonetheless. “We were buying more storage than we actually needed at any time because we had to over-allocate […]