Elizabeth Ferrarini

Networked storage will continue to see a truce, if not a nice cooperative friendship, between storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) devices – two different methods of attaching storage and servers. For the past several years, the trade press, however, has produced tons of articles about the distinct differences between NAS devices and […]

How can you gain the cost benefits of a storage area network (SAN) without a lot of unnecessary expense and Excedrin headaches? Fibre channel, you say. After all, it’s the most widely used way to connect devices and create a SAN. Besides, fibre channel provides a speed of up to 100 Mbytes per second. The […]

LAN-free tape backups and server-less back ups have become a key storage management capability for the early birds building economies of scale (mostly large organizations) in their storage area networks (SAN). However, the emergence of low-price tape automation systems could provide similar SAN backup capabilities to organizations of all sizes. Working together the SAN backup […]

Backup Software. Disk Defragging. Disk Space Quota Management Software. Regardless of what type of storage management product you need for distributed computing, you need to know what you’re getting before you decide to get it. So, don’t be afraid to ask the vendor the following 10 questions. Probe until you get the answers. For example, […]

HP Hood’s IT department has closed its server backup window forever, sliced yearly backup expenses in half, and stopped singing the backup blues. How? Outsourcing! With yearly sales of $500 million, HP Hood, a 150-year company based in Chelsea, Massachusetts provides frozen deserts, citrus, non-dairy, and specialty food products throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic […]

To provide group-buying services for more than 1,800 hospitals, Premier, Inc., based in San Diego, California, maintains about 300 Windows NT servers, as well as more than 50 Unix servers, across four U.S. sites. Some of the sites use Microsoft Cluster Servers with about 200 gigabytes to 400 gigabytes of disk storage. One site has […]

Tired of developing storage management tools for some zettabyte factory? If so, two former IT professionals know how you feel. However, Chris Hickman and Steve Anderson – both veterans of Microsoft’s MSN – parlayed their knowledge of load balancing to raise an initial $7 million in venture capital in 1999, and to set up Viathanin […]

Storage is hot. In fact, Fortune Magazine’s March 19, 2001, issue includes storage in a list of the ten top trends for this year. And apparently, IT professionals have gotten the message. They’ve started to take events, such as Storage Networking World , very seriously. Say goodbye to vendors speaking to vendors, and say hello […]

“Man will use all the space he can.” This line from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species provides a good metaphor for the network storage groundswell caused by employees. IT departments that buy more disks willy-nilly to cope with megabytes won’t have any more success than if they warded off a flood by piling up […]

For the past five years, Quantum Corp.’s Digital Linear Tape (DLT) format for tape backup systems has dominated the midrange of the magnetic tape marketplace. Now systems administrators have other new tape formats to consider. Digital Linear Tape Quantum Corporation’s successor to DLT8000, SuperDLT, will feature 110GB of capacity. It will read/write data at 11MBps […]

In 1989, the Loma Prieta Earthquake put thousands of Northern California companies out of business for days. In 1995, dust-like nylon fibers ignited, causing a fire that completely destroyed the $450 million Malden Mills textile mill in Lawrence, Mass. Any type of a disasterbe it brought on by man or by the extremes of naturecan […]

Storage has blossomed into a plethora of storage-only outsourcing services beyond the traditional off-site vault for backups. These services range from backup variations–desktop-only, server, and real- time replication–to on-demand virtual storage utilities. For example, StorageNetworks Inc., based in Waltham, Mass., has become the de facto resource for dot-coms looking for rented IT infrastructures–a line from […]