Drew Robb

The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is designed to improve efficiency in healthcare though the standardization of electronic data interchange, as well as to provide measures to make sure that patient data is kept secure. A major threat to HIPAA compliance is posed by the fact that anyone can walk away with up […]

There has been a lot of debate over the past year about how storage virtualization should be done and who has the best technology. Some say it should be done in the switch, some prefer the array, others insist that it must be contained within an appliance, and a growing number believe it belongs in […]

A growing trend among large corporations is to set up their IT departments as distinct business units that sell their services to the other business units of the company. AOL has taken this a step further by setting up a storage service utility. The various departments buy storage capacity by the GB as well as […]

Chevron Corp. of Houston, Tex., must have one of the largest storage environments around. It has swollen to nearly 1800 TB and is growing at a rate of 2TB a day. The company utilizes storage directly to drive the bottom line. “The modern organization marches on storage, like the soldier marches on his stomach,” says […]

Big things have been predicted for iSCSI for what seems like years, with each new year bringing with it claims that iSCSI would finally hit the big time. So has reality finally caught up with the hype? Analysts appear to be warming to the idea that iSCSI’s time may have arrived at last. “iSCSI usage […]

New Orleans domain name and hosting provider Directnic.com adopted an interesting strategy during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — dig in and grind it out. Situated in a high rise in the central business district, IT staff and its crisis manager battled through winds, floods, looting, army raids, power cuts, diesel shortages, water shut-offs and more […]

Amidst a barrage of hysterical hype and cacophony of vendor announcements, it can be hard to separate the vaporware from the technology that is changing the face of storage. So what’s really hot right now, as opposed to press-release hot? We asked a few analysts what they see as the trends worth watching, and here […]

A British company named Njini Inc. hopes to make data management easier with an approach it calls information asset management (IAM) that captures the relevance of data at creation. “IAM is a means to interact with structured and unstructured data in real time to identify, collect and classify information such that any application can access […]

Microsoft has had a busy year in storage, in a quiet sort of way. The company partnered with Tacit Networks to offer wide area file services (WAFS) as an add-on to a Windows Storage Server foundation. It added high-end features to its iSCSI initiator. And at last spring’s Storage Networking World, it launched the Microsoft […]

Despite the hype surrounding it, the vision of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) seems to resonate with the bulk of storage end users. Why? Because ILM promises to solve the headaches associated with storage management and provisioning. However, the chasm between vision and reality requires standardization of data and data types. “Some people incorrectly think that […]

When news of the Symantec-Veritas merger broke last December, Wall Street frowned. Over the next few months, shares took a beating, losing nearly half their value. Since April, Symantec has recovered some of that lost ground, and predictions are gradually becoming a little brighter. “Wall Street was confused by the merger, as to their mind, […]

In the consumer world, tape formats have all but vanished from the scene, replaced by CDs, DVDs and other digital disk-based systems. Will the use of tape in storage follow the same fate? Possibly not, but with each passing year, tape loses a little more ground to the encroachment of disk. “Large customers are permanently […]