Sean Michael Kerner

Open source storage startup Cleversafe is set to challenge the decades-old RAID approach to distributing storage with its global Dispersed Storage Network (DSN). With a traditional RAID array, data is striped across a number of disks, a fixed number of which are required to be operational for the data to be recreated. With its new […]

VMware is making its Lab Manager virtual lifecycle management software more accessible with the release of version 2.5. If an enterprise wanted to use VMware’s Lab Manager software before today and didn’t have a Fibre Channel SAN, it was simply out of luck. That changes in the new version. “We have expanded the storage options […]

Virtualization  isn’t only about supporting a virtualized operating system. Storage and security are key support sectors in any enterprise IT environment, real or virtual. XenSource, the commercial vendor behind the open source Xen project, has this crazy quilt of complexity in mind with its latest product release called XenEnterprise 3.2. Is it a Xen way […]

Supercomputer vendor Linux Networx announced this week a new lineup of storage solutions, while also revealing that it is no longer developing its Xilo scalable clustered storage system. Linux Networx has classified its new storage solutions under three tiers: Value, Ultimate and Premium Performance. At press time, specifications were only made available for two models. […]

There was a time not too long ago when a 40GB drive was the biggest single drive anyone could buy. As with other sectors of information technology that see continual performance improvements, storage capacities are similarly on a seemingly boundless growth curve. Once seemingly impossible storage capacities are now in full production. But is there […]

Once limited to the realm of supercomputing, InfiniBand is beginning to catch on as an enterprise storage interconnect. InfiniBand technology offers low latency, current performance of 10Gbps, and the promise of future performance of as much as 120Gbps as an I/O interconnect. While the technology failed to live up to its early hype several years […]

Optical storage is in the midst of a major technological revolution, as next-generation formats begin to emerge. The new optical formats are perhaps most promising for meeting WORM (write once, read many) archival storage requirements, a growing need as more regulations mandate that data be protected and unaltered. The next generation of DVD, Blu-ray and […]

A storage startup hopes to make a name for itself by basing its solutions almost entirely on open source technologies. The company even chose a not-so-subtle name to get the point across: Open Source Storage, complete with the domain name opensourcestorage.com. Linux and other open source technologies are found in a broad range of enterprise […]

After years of sightings and speculation, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products are finally hitting the market. Adaptec, LSI Logic and Promise Technologies are among the vendors who have recently announced SAS products and solutions. Adaptec has announced two SAS RAID controllers, a new host bus adapter (HBA), a pair of SAS subsystems, a four-bay internal […]

Open source continues to make inroads into enterprise storage, and its latest route is clustered file systems. Red Hat and Oracle have both been active in the open source clustered file system space recently. Oracle recently open-sourced its clustered file system (CFS 2). Red Hat has issued a number of announcements for its Global File […]

Imagine that all your data is always backed up on a continuous basis and can be rapidly restored to any point you choose. It’s not a dream, that’s the promise of continuous data protection (CDP), and it may hold the potential to change the backup landscape. At least that’s what storage vendors are betting on. […]

Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of StorageTek officially closed late Wednesday after StorageTek shareholders overwhelmingly approved the $4.1 billion deal on Tuesday. And now the hard part begins. “There’s lots of work still to be done,” said Mark Canepa, Sun’s Data Management Group executive vice president and head of the new merged Sun-StorageTek unit. “With as much […]