Drew Robb

Analysts and vendors tend to act a lot less seriously at this time of year. In fact, plied with a healthy dose of Christmas cheer (or Christmas beer in some cases), they can get downright frivolous. Here, they wax lyrically about the 12 storage trends of Christmas: On the twelve trends for storage, a vendor/analyst […]

The storage world is abuzz with the potential of open source storage projects such as Cleversafe and Amanda. What could they mean for enterprise storage? Could this spell the end for high-margin storage sales? Could they revolutionize backup and disaster recovery? The answer is maybe yes, and — once the vendor community wraps its wits […]

What’s up with all these new RAID types such as RAID 5EE and RAID 6? What’s next, RAID 666, a scheme that guarantees your data will survive Armageddon? And with all this talk about additional hot spares and protection strategies, does that mean that SATAdrives are unreliable? “RAID 6 addresses RAID 5’s inability to recover […]

Two important trends have emerged over the last three years that have brought the worlds of network management and storage much closer together. First, basic network problems have evolved in complexity, often becoming more difficult to detect, let alone determine a cause. This trend is occurring in conjunction with a distinct rise in the number […]

Data centers have traditionally been cooled by chilled air blown out of air conditioning units. More recently, though, with heat densities rising, vendors have been taking the cooling closer to the source. Known as supplemental cooling, the idea is to bring the cold air source nearer to overly hot chips or spinning disks. But how […]

Direct attached storage (DAS) was supposed to be on its last leg by now. After more than a decade of steady encroachment by storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS), the DAS market has taken quite a hit. Yet the decline of DAS has been slower than expected. According to analyst firm International […]

Server users aren’t the only ones who need to worry about power and cooling issues. Rising capacity demand means that storage now accounts for nearly as much of a data center’s power load as servers. That was the message at Liebert’s AdaptiveXchange show this week in Columbus, Ohio, where more than 2,200 IT, facility and […]

EMC has rolled out the information lifecycle management (ILM) bandwagon relentlessly over the last couple of years. And it’s easy to be put off by the marketing hype that surrounds the term. Of course, it doesn’t help when there are few real products that live up to the ILM promise. Yet there may just be […]

Rydex Investments had been using direct-attached storage (DAS) or SCSI-attached storage in conjunction with an AIT library for backup purposes. This caused performance and capacity problems, as well as greatly adding to the storage management burden imposed on administrators because of the need for manual tasks. Recently, Rydex upgraded to an HP StorageWorks storage area […]

Storage market data released last month by Gartner highlight an alarming trend: The big vendors keep getting bigger, and the rest are being squeezed into oblivion. The trend is due in part to the merger mania sweeping the storage sector, and in part to some savvy market moves by the biggest vendors. According to Gartner’s […]

Quantum acquires ADIC, Sun steals StorageTek, Symantec sucks in Veritas, Brocade breakfasts on McData, EMC eats up everybody, and just this week, QLogic snacked on SilverStorm. And those are just a few of the storage mergers taking place in the last year or so. So what’s up with all this M&A mania, anyhow? From a […]

What EMC wants, EMC gets — or so it appears. Just as it was completing its acquisition of RSA Security earlier this week, it also announced the acquisition of Massachusetts-based Network Intelligence. It seems that EMC takes on a different identity each month. Just a few years back, it was a relatively simple creature — […]