Paul Rubens

What’s the best way to reduce the cost of complying with the privacy and data protections laws and the numerous regulations designed to protect the sensitive and confidential customer information that you store? It’s a tricky question to answer, but one that’s worth exploring, as compliance can have a very significant cost. A survey of […]

Sun’s (NASDAQ: JAVA) open-source ZFS file system has some amazing features. It was originally designed for Solaris and unveiled in 2005, but you’ll also find it in OpenSolaris and related distributions. In the future it may well become a popular file system to run with Linux and BSD as well. Here are the top 10 […]

WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) can breathe new life into slow wide area network links, relieving congestion, speeding up file transfer and making applications more responsive. But how exactly do vendors such as Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), Juniper Networks (NASDAQ: JNPR), Blue Coat Systems (NASDAQ: BCSI) and Expand Networks get their devices […]

Memory sticks can be used to store confidential corporate data and passwords, and can also act as “something you have” security credentials for two factor authentication. That’s why it’s important that these storage devices are encrypted to prevent unauthorized people accessing them. California-based IronKey has made a name for itself by supplying very high quality, […]

The market for WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) is maturing rapidly, but demand remains strong thanks to virtualization and server consolidation projects. That’s the view of Andy Rolfe, a research director at Gartner. “Vendors are moving away from the ‘mine is faster than yours’ approach to selling these boxes because most of them are already doing […]

Your main data processing facility suffers a catastrophe, but it’s not a total disaster because your corporate data is safely backed up in a cloud storage facility on the other side of the continent. But here’s the problem: how are you going to restore terabytes of information from the cloud to your local storage systems? […]

Mechanical hard drives with spinning disks are doomed to extinction, thanks to solid state flash drives that are becoming cheaper and offering greater capacity by the month. At least that’s how some in the data storage industry see it. Outwardly, there’s a convincing logic to this argument, especially when you consider what’s happened in other […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has been making quite a bit of noise over its new operating systems lately, and even a bit around virtualization, but when it comes to data storage products, there’s been nothing but deafening silence. Think about it: over the last 18 months or so there have been announcements about Windows Server 2008 […]

Imagine you are at a cocktail party on a Saturday night and you discover that one of your servers is running critically low on storage. You whip out your iPhone, tap the screen a few times, and get back to your Mint Julep. The server panic is over because you just gave it an extra […]

Companies concentrating their data center automation efforts on server automation are making a strategic mistake. That’s the view of Glenn O’Donnell, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He believes what’s needed is a more holistic view of data center automation. “It’s misguided to give server automation all your attention,” he said. “You have to look […]

Most companies that embark on a Virtualizationstrategy fail to plan for enough storage, at least initially. But there are also a number of technologies that organizations can use to make the most of the storage capacity they have, including storage virtualization, thin provisioning and data de-duplication(see Combating Virtual Machine Sprawl). These measures all address the […]

If you are embarking on a strategy of server virtualization, one thing is for sure: You’re going to need more storage space. Truckloads of it. There are a number of reasons for this, and some are, unfortunately, inevitable. Virtualization, by its nature, shifts storage requirements from internal and directly attached disks to networked storage because […]