Drew Robb

Storage World Conference (SWC) 2006 rolled around this week in its traditional Long Beach, Calif., home. And as usual, the show was replete with end users and somewhat light on vendor interest. Surprisingly, IBM, Sun, NetApp and HP didn’t even bother to set up a booth at the exhibit. Despite that, however, about 100 smaller […]

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 was touted as resolving most of the problems of backup and restore within an Exchange environment. Yet it appears that the hassle is far from over. Even the widely hyped concept of Exchange Storage Groups, which allows backup and recovery and migration of a single storage group, is not without issues. […]

Ever since Symantec entered the world of storage with the acquisition of backup king Veritas, storage vendors have been casting an uneasy eye upon the distant shores of security. How should they approach this thorny subject? Should they evolve more comprehensive products that address all security concerns? Should they charge more for such features, or […]

New, heterogeneous storage architectures make it easier to provide a wider set of users with access to a broader range of data. It also means that companies can adopt information lifecycle management (ILM) policies, economically assigning files to online, nearline or offline storage. At least that’s the theory. In practice, as data stores climb into […]

Hurricane season officially begins June 1. And on May 22, meteorologists will unveil their latest forecast — just how tough is this year likely to be? For the moment, the signs are that it won’t be as bad as last year — but that doesn’t mean it will be free of disaster. Preliminary forecasts give […]

The devastating hurricane season of 2005 won’t be forgotten anytime soon. So how is the coming hurricane season, which will officially begin June 1, likely to measure up? Forecasters expect another busy one, but fortunately, not as many intense storms are expected to develop as last year — a total of nine hurricanes, five of […]

The SAN switch market is showing some healthy signs. According to Dell’Oro Group, existing SAN users have increased the amount of backup they require and want to back up to multiple locations. This has ramped up demand for SAN-related gear such as switches. The regulatory picture is also propelling more and more users into the […]

With its Xsan and Xserve RAID, Apple recently expanded its push into the storage industry. But it’s not alone. Applied Micro Circuits Corp. in Sunnyvale, Calif., developed its Serial ATA RAID with a 2 TB capacity along with technology expected to deliver enhanced speed and scalability in a fledgling new market sector for the G5. […]

SMI-S, Aperi, StorageRevolution.com, HP/AppIQ — it seems there’s no shortage of efforts to simplify the world of storage. SMI-S has been in development for years and enjoys massive backing from a veritable Who’s Who of the vendor community under the umbrella of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). More recently, however, IBM appeared to break […]

When is a server not a server? When it’s a Storage Server. Explore what a Storage Server is and how it differs from a regular server. Click here now.

Surviving a disaster — natural or man-made — is never something an enterprise can predict in terms of what might happen in the event of a strong hurricane, widespread power outage, fire or explosion. Yet during the disaster, the company should have a viable way to use a remote disaster recovery site to stay online […]

First came Google, with an ambitious move into enterprise data management and plans for online storage, followed by Amazon with a Web storage service. Yahoo, MSN and AOL, meanwhile, have their own online storage ambitions. So what’s going on? Certainly at the consumer end of the scale, “dot-com storage” is alive and well. My DSL […]