Leslie Wood

Enterprises are at the mercy of ever-increasing amounts of data that need to be stored and as a result continually require more effective ways to store and maintain this data. This makes it critical for companies across the globe to better understand and address key storage issues. In part one, we examined some of the […]

Storage not only plays a critical role in a company’s IT strategy, it’s also increasingly important to the survival of the overall business. It’s vital that IT departments understand key storage issues, how to address them, and how these issues impact the entire enterprise. A strong understanding of key storage issues enables companies to rapidly […]

IDC reports there are over 93,000 North American-based businesses with under 999 employees, compared to just 9,000 large companies with 1,000 or more employees. These “mid-size” businesses account for about half of North American companies’ spending on hardware, software, and other IT services, according to industry analysts. To the storage industry, this means there is […]

Mid-size businesses need storage every bit as much as their big brothers, but is storage really viewed as a priority by these businesses in the same way that it is by large enterprises? At the same time, vendors looking to take advantage of growing backup and recovery needs in the mid-range are finding themselves in […]

As far back as IT managers can remember, enterprise data backup has always been a time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes unreliable and frustrating process. And as organizations continue to generate more and more data, IT managers need more and more time to back it up. So, what’s an IT manager to do? In Part I of […]

IT managers are always looking for new ways to back up more data in less time. And even though there’s always room for improvement in backup speed, IT managers realize that performing a backup without disabling users would reduce the impact of the backup and therefore reach the same goal as improving backups with more […]

Picking up where we left off in Part 1 of our look at the state of true integration in the storage sector, Part 2 addresses whether storage technology has reached the point where true integration is even achievable, discusses the possibility and likelihood of cooperation between storage vendors advancing the promise of true integration, and […]

Well, two things are true when it comes to integration. SANs are faster and more reliable than ever before, and enterprises are finding more and more ‘sound’ reasons to integrate their SANs. But integration can be a difficult undertaking, with several critical challenges associated with the process — all of which can be frustrating for […]

Picking up where Part 1 of our focus on the storage industry’s “Compliance Effect” left off, part 2 examines how compliance issues will likely evolve over the next five years, addresses what organizations can do now to get the ball rolling to be ready for future data retention rules, and reveals which current and emerging […]

A never-ending issue facing storage managers is trying to get the resources needed to make their systems run more efficiently. In fact, it’s almost the same situation that networking managers found themselves in during the mid-sixties. Good news for storage management has arrived in the form of new data retention laws handed down by the […]

In Part 1 of this Storage Focus series on IP SANs, we discussed how with iSCSI recently gaining the IETF’s seal of approval, some industry experts are predicting many startups and large storage vendors will redouble their efforts to develop storage arrays, host bus adapters, TCP offload accelerator cards, and management software products that support […]

iSCSI provides a means to transport native SCSI commands over TCP/IP, allowing storage arrays to be shared over the Internet Protocol (IP) and storage area networks (SANs) to expand by utilizing Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networks. Earlier this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved the specification as a viable standard. However, the protocol faces […]