Drew Robb

A couple of innocuous words that have insidious consequences. A simple marketing tagline, yet it appears to be seriously undermining a vast segment of the computer sector. What is it? The phrase, “industry standard.” It comes from the same warped (but ingenious) minds that coined the term “legacy” back in the 1990s. That harmless word […]

In an ambitious effort, Seattle’s King County District Court has gone paperless, with the help of EMC (NYSE: EMC) and other vendors. KCDC, as the court is known, is rolling out an EMC-based information infrastructure for better management and distribution of court records and legal documents, in the process converting years of paper documents into […]

The network file system (NFS) protocol is getting its biggest overhaul in more than a decade, and the results could be profound for end users. Version 4.1 of NFS, developed by a team of veterans from various storage interests, promises to unlock new performance and security capabilities, particularly for enterprise data centers. NFS was originally […]

A few weeks ago, Apple decided that it was no longer cost effective to continue to manufacture its own storage hardware. Instead, it has opted for an OEM agreement with storage vendor Promise Technology. Apple isn’t leaving the storage world completely, though. It will continue to supply a SAN file system known as Xsan 2. […]

Disk and component manufacturers are getting excited about 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSCI (SAS), but storage users will have to wait a while to see what the excitement is all about. “Going to 6G SAS is the next natural evolutionary step for SAS,” said Henry Fabian, executive director for enterprise product marketing at Seagate. “6 Gig […]

With EMC World winding down today in Las Vegas, it’s interesting to note that despite its ever-broadening product portfolio, EMC (NYSE: EMC) still enjoys a good fight with its closest rival in the NAS space. NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) pioneered the network-attached storage (NAS) field, challenging EMC’s supremacy in the storage market with a message of […]

LAS VEGAS — EMC sees a big role in enterprise storage for flash drives and data de-duplication technology, if the start of EMC World today in Las Vegas is any indication. The opening press conference focused on several new products: two new disk libraries for LAN backup to disk; another disk library incorporating data de-duplication […]

When it comes to security flaps, the British government takes the 2007 prize. The personal records of about half the population of Britain were copied onto a CD, sent through the mail and lost. No encryption, no registered mail and no idea where they vanished to. And that’s one of the big trends in security. […]

Online backup seems to be all the rage as of late. Vendors are springing up either catering to a specific niche or claiming to do everything for next to nothing. While such services aren’t likely to attract enterprise users, they are certainly luring many SMBs. All you have to do is sign up, decide which […]

Intel is just a chip vendor, right? Not anymore. A casual glance at the company’s home page reveals news stories about rugged PCs for elementary schools, the thinnest laptop in the world and even online gaming. Of course, there is plenty of real estate given over to processors, too. But look to the left of […]

Thin provisioning is something of a tightrope act, promising users loads of storage in the hopes that nobody will actually need it all, while delivering only what is absolutely necessary. Yet end users seem to like it nonetheless. “We were buying more storage than we actually needed at any time because we had to over-allocate […]

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is all the rage these days. Whether it’s a data center in rural Denmark, downtown Columbus, Ohio, or one belonging to a federal agency in Washington, D.C., you see the same thing — announcements on the notice board about the latest ITIL meetings and process refinements. While ITIL is seemingly […]