Drew Robb

The days when storage meant how much disk space is on a hard drive may be long gone, but the vast majority of organizations still don’t have dedicated storage specialists. According to a one study, fewer than 25 percent of either Unix-/Linux- or Windows-based IT organizations had their own storage management team at the end […]

The subject of storage grids is gaining some momentum within the industry as perhaps the next big thing. It probably started a couple of years ago when NetApp acquired Spinnaker Networks to add grid-like capabilities to its storage operating system, Data ONTAP 7G. More recently, EMC purchased grid software from Acxiom Corp. that provides a […]

McData has announced a series of Application Services Modules (ASM) aimed at adding more intelligence to switches. They cover virtualization, backup, security and more. So is this just more vendor over-exuberance? Or is switch intelligence finally about to materialize? Certainly, the early implementations of intelligence fell short, creating performance bottlenecks and posing difficulties in scaling […]

Archiving is certainly one of the hottest areas of storage right now. It lies at the heart of a subject that is near, though perhaps not so dear, to the heart of every storage manager — retaining a legion of records to comply with an ever-expanding roster of regulatory requirements. “Compliant records data is presently […]

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is getting a lot of coverage in the storage industry press as the latest and greatest. Instead of backing up files once a week or once a day, they can be protected continuously throughout the day. Fine in theory, but most small businesses struggle to afford a tape library and backup […]

Storage managers have been barraged by a wave of claims on the subject of data retention (see Can Data Ever Be Deleted?). The argument is that every single piece of data has to be retained, since otherwise you could get into severe trouble in the future. And, of course, with disk now being so cheap, […]

Inspired by Enron and other data cover-up fiascos, legislative bodies around the country appear to be taking the words of Joni Mitchell to heart: Don’t it always seem to goThat you don’t know what you’ve gotTill it’s gone. In this case, though, they are thinking less of big yellow taxis and more about making it […]

Business continuity is relatively easy for large enterprises. They have the IT staff and the deep pockets to be able to spend millions of dollars implementing redundant data centers, instantaneous mirroring of all information and a host of other disaster recovery (DR) technologies. On September 11th, for example, several financial services firms situated in and […]

Backup tapes and tape libraries were supposed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs by now. The much-hyped disk-to-disk (D2D) solutions have been signaling the end of tape for some time. Yet tape usage, as reflected in tape library sales, continues to grow. According to Robert Abrahams of Freeman Reports, total revenue from all […]

Backup and snapshot technologies focus on making, managing and storing copies of data as it exists at specific single points in time (i.e., SPIT copies). While faster recovery objectives can be met by making more frequent SPIT copies, doing so is time consuming and expensive. But in the event of a data loss, corruption or […]

You can’t be too careful these days when handling other people’s data. Leaks are exposed ruthlessly in the press, shareholder confidence is eroded, and customers wonder if they should move their business elsewhere. That’s why more and more firms are turning to encryption technology. To avoid being tomorrow’s headline horror story, companies are beginning to […]

The pairing of server blades and storage seems to be all the rage these days. IBM, for one, recently released a few products pairing the two technologies: an embedded switch module co-developed by McData and QLogic; the LS20 blade with iSCSI capabilities; and a SANRAD blade version of its Switch-V iSCSI SAN switch based on […]