Drew Robb

Compared to earlier years, a noticeable shift at this week’s Storage Networking World (SNW) show was the number of vendors hawking storage appliances. This trend seems to be driven by the rise of the small and mid-sized enterprise (SME) sector as a burgeoning storage market and the desire to simplify branch office computing. “Storage appliances […]

The “V” word was everywhere to be heard at this week’s Storage Networking World conference in San Diego. Analysts, end users and vendors alike preached the virtualization mantra to the gathered multitudes. Yet its utterance is not viewed as a positive in all quarters. “According to some analyst studies, SOA and virtualization are the two […]

Enterprise IT was dwarfed by consumer, telecom and even gaming technology at the giant CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany this week, but storage vendors showed up in force nonetheless. In Hall 1 — one of 35 halls reserved for the event attended by more than 400,000 visitors and 6,000 exhibitors — EMC, NetApp, Brocade and […]

It appears that a foot race may be going on among storage protocols. Fibre Channel (FC) has more or less standardized now on 4Gbps, with 8Gbps and 10Gbps FC waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) is threatening to give FC a run for its money. Also waiting in the wings is InfiniBand, which […]

Storage security has been talked about for years. Several vendors specialize in nothing else, and EMC began securing its storage arrays just last week. A handful of standards bodies have sprung up devoted to the subject. Yet headlines continue at an alarming pace about identity loss and general data insecurity. “While the current standards initiatives […]

VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) was released last June to make backup easier on a VMware platform. That was followed by a cackle of vendor announcements outlining their support for VCB as well as various ways they could improve upon it. Some wondered, therefore, was there something wrong with VCB itself? “The main challenge of VMware […]

The storage world is abuzz with the potential of open source storage projects such as Cleversafe and Amanda. What could they mean for enterprise storage? Could this spell the end for high-margin storage sales? Could they revolutionize backup and disaster recovery? The answer is maybe yes, and — once the vendor community wraps its wits […]

What’s up with all these new RAID types such as RAID 5EE and RAID 6? What’s next, RAID 666, a scheme that guarantees your data will survive Armageddon? And with all this talk about additional hot spares and protection strategies, does that mean that SATA drives are unreliable? “RAID 6 addresses RAID 5’s inability to […]

Server users aren’t the only ones who need to worry about power and cooling issues. Rising capacity demand means that storage now accounts for nearly as much of a data center’s power load as servers. That was the message at Liebert’s AdaptiveXchange show this week in Columbus, Ohio, where more than 2,200 IT, facility and […]

EMC has rolled out the information lifecycle management (ILM) bandwagon relentlessly over the last couple of years. And it’s easy to be put off by the marketing hype that surrounds the term. Of course, it doesn’t help when there are few real products that live up to the ILM promise. Yet there may just be […]

What EMC wants, EMC gets — or so it appears. Just as it was completing its acquisition of RSA Security earlier this week, it also announced the acquisition of Massachusetts-based Network Intelligence. It seems that EMC takes on a different identity each month. Just a few years back, it was a relatively simple creature — […]

Brocade announced its acquisition of McData three weeks ago with great fanfare. The deal was going to save $100 million, create a broader range of solutions and services, accelerate the pace of innovation and benefit OEM partners. But what does all that really mean? Brocade and McData speakers at a recent Webcast were guarded and […]