Drew Robb

The sports world is well acquainted with fan frenzy, but the storage world is in the midst of its own bout, courtesy of one of its newest catch phrases, the File Area Network (FAN). “A FAN is defined as a way to improve management of unstructured data by decoupling that data from specific servers or […]

Storage administrators are not noted for their deep philosophical bent. Seldom are they spotted congregating around the water cooler discussing the meaning of life or the true spiritual essence of man. Yet recently, while modern thinkers ponder the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, storage sages are turning their thoughts in a similar […]

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is all the rage these days. Whether it’s a data center in rural Denmark, downtown Columbus, Ohio, or one belonging to a federal agency in Washington, D.C., you see the same thing — announcements on the notice board about the latest ITIL meetings and process refinements. While ITIL is seemingly […]

There seems to be no stopping the appliance juggernaut. Outside of the storage world, appliances are finding an abundance of applications. They take care of encryption, anti-virus, anti-spyware, spam filtering, content filtering and a host of other functions. Storage-specific appliances are also appearing on the market in record numbers. They, too, address a wide range […]

E-mail archiving start ups are like wonder drugs — the latest and the greatest one pops up just about every other week. For a while, the field appeared to be consolidating: KVS bought by Veritas/Symantec, iLumin pairing up with CA, Iron Mountain getting Connected, and many others. So with the big boys muscling in, how […]

IDC’s storage market stats contained a surprise in the first quarter: Revenues from worldwide external disk storage systems grew 5.9 percent in the first quarter of 2007 — compared to growth of more than 10 percent for internal storage. What’s this? After years of external storage beating the pants off internal disks, are we seeing […]

Conventional wisdom says that when you need lots of storage capacity, NAS just doesn’t cut it. You have to have a Fibre Channel SAN, they say, for larger capacities. But implementing an FC SAN typically requires plenty of know-how, several storage administrators and a lot of expensive gear. That’s why eHarmony.com of Pasadena, Calif., is […]

Compared to earlier years, a noticeable shift at this week’s Storage Networking World (SNW) show was the number of vendors hawking storage appliances. This trend seems to be driven by the rise of the small and mid-sized enterprise (SME) sector as a burgeoning storage market and the desire to simplify branch office computing. “Storage appliances […]

The “V” word was everywhere to be heard at this week’s Storage Networking World conference in San Diego. Analysts, end users and vendors alike preached the virtualization mantra to the gathered multitudes. Yet its utterance is not viewed as a positive in all quarters. “According to some analyst studies, SOA and virtualization are the two […]

In the first article in this series, we covered benchmarking in general. Now it’s time to dig in to a specific set of benchmarks that are frequently used in storage. The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has had a benchmark out for some time called the SPC-1. It has been used by dozens of vendors to […]

Content-addressable storage (CAS) is all about retrieving stored information according to content rather than location. Initially, CAS gained ground as a means to rapidly access documents for compliance purposes. But the indications are that it has moved beyond its compliance roots into such fields as financial record-keeping and preservation of precious documents. “Interest in CAS […]

Five years ago, Network Appliance was an $800 million company with a clear identity as a NAS provider. Today, it has transformed itself into a $2 billion company and is growing at an annual rate of about 30 percent a year. Its product line now spans NAS, SAN, data and storage management software, and professional […]