Computer storage hardware

Nirvanix failure – a blow to the cloud storage model?

Cloud storage firm Nirvanix has given customers a deadline to retrieve their data. Are the reasons for its failure specific to Nirvanix or a real blow to cloud storage overall? Continue Reading

By

• Simon Robinson, Principal Analyst

Disaster recovery planning: Don’t be fooled by suppliers

Disaster recovery planning is all about good preparation and not falling for supplier hype. Build appropriate systems, test them and train people well Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Software licences drive Oracle revenue, but hardware takes a hit

A drop in hardware sales dragged down Oracle’s revenue in its Q1 financial results, but software revenue increased Continue Reading

By

• Caroline Baldwin, Freelance editor and journalist

Quantum upgrades big data storage to StorNext 5

Quantum’s StorNext big data tiered architecture operating software gets a boost to five billion files and a claimed 10x performance jump via multi-threaded CPU ops Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Cloud file-sharing for enterprise users

Cloud file-sharing services have become near-ubiquitous among enterprise users. We survey the risks, benefits and alternatives to Dropbox Continue Reading

By

• Manek Dubash

iSCSI switch selection and configuration

iSCSI switch selection means looking out for the type of features that matter to iSCSI SAN traffic. We run the rule over the iSCSI switch market to see what’s available Continue Reading

By

• Martin Taylor

When to use flash SSD instead of SAS or SATA?

When to use flash SSDs instead of SAS or SATA spinning disk is all down to application requirements, says David Boyle, senior consultant at GlassHouse Technologies (UK) Continue Reading

By

• David Boyle, senior consultant, GlassHouse Technologies (UK)

British Airways unveils its new Airbus A380

The new addition to the BA fleet - the Airbus A380 Continue Reading

By

• Caroline Baldwin, Freelance editor and journalist

The Future Is Here: A New Industrial Revolution

London’s Design Museum is housing an exhibition on the future of manufacturing Continue Reading

By

• Caroline Baldwin, Freelance editor and journalist

LUN storage management for vSphere and Hyper-V

LUN storage partitioning has been transformed with the advent of virtualisation. Find out how it differs between VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V implementations Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Avamar and NetWorker to merge for 'backup-less backup'

EMC looks forward to backup as an embedded process, with apps and hypervisors copying versioned replicas in native format Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

What’s wrong with flash storage: And what will come after?

Flash storage has taken the enterprise by storm, but its days are numbered due to an unfavourable combination of technological obstacles and manufacturing economics Continue Reading

By

• Manek Dubash

Virtualisation and the LUN: Storage configuration for VMs

Virtualisation and the LUN: Storage admins used to match LUNs to physical servers, but that’s all changed. Find out how in this guide to the basics of VM storage Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Can Dell survive in the cloud era despite killing its public cloud offering?

Dell has ditched its public cloud IaaS in favour of partner cloud programme. But will the strategy help secure its future in the cloud era? Continue Reading

By

• Archana Venkatraman, Datacentre Editor

CW Buyer's Guide: Client Computing

Computer Weekly looks at Windows 8 and the complexities of mobile working, the benefits to the business of an enhanced user experience and the shift from the 9-to-5 office desk to IT delivered over a variety of devices, anytime, anywhere. Continue Reading

Sweating your datacentre’s IT assets - is it a good idea?

Amid economic uncertainties, businesses want to get more from existing IT assets. But does it make sense from an IT point of view? Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

VMware storage: SAN configuration basics

For VMware storage basics start here – the fundamentals of configuring SAN storage for VMware, such as VMFS, VMDKs, connectivity options and VMware storage features Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

AMD launches low-power server processors to rival Intel's Atom

AMD has launched Opteron X-Series low-power server processors that it claims “beat the top-performing Intel Atom processor” Continue Reading

By

• Archana Venkatraman, Datacentre Editor

Rare Apple 1 computer goes under the hammer

A rare and original Apple 1 Computer from 1976 will be auctioned off this month. Less than 50 are estimated to still be in circulation, with only six fully functional. The first computer to offer a complete motherboard was a revolution to home computing and changed the way people interacted with the technology forever. Continue Reading

By

• Caroline Baldwin, Freelance editor and journalist

World’s fastest supercomputer gets 40PB of DDN storage

The US Oak Ridge lab builds home-grown HPC NAS for 40PB DataDirect Networks with 1TBps of throughput as a SAN to back-end Spider II file system on Titan supercomputer Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Real-life disaster recovery boost at video firm with HDS clustered NAS

Special effects video firm The Mill boosts HDS/BlueArc clustered NAS capacity to cope with HD movies and build disaster recovery site at London’s Docklands Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Big data storage: Defining big data and the type of storage it needs

Big data storage: What is big data, what compute/storage system configurations are used for big data analytics, and what type of storage infrastructure does it require? Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

DDN launches hScaler Hadoop appliance for enterprises

HPC and clustered NAS supplier Data Direct Networks aims at enterprise customers with Hadoop appliance comprising its SFA12K storage and commodity compute components Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

In-house tape vs cloud archiving: What are the pros and cons?

Have cloud archiving services reached a tipping point that makes them cheaper and easier to manage than in-house tape archives? Continue Reading

By

• Chris Evans

Whiptail tops the class with flash array plus SAN two-tier strategy

School slashes virtual desktop login times with two-tier Whiptail flash array plus budget Huawei SAN Continue Reading

EMC seals deal with Chinese server giant Lenovo for desktop NAS

Storage giant EMC completes joint venture that will see it provide desktop NAS and SME rackmount storage hardware to Lenovo Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

Deduplication and single instance storage cut primary data storage costs

Data deduplication and single instance storage can cut costs in primary data environments, but implementations vary between suppliers. Continue Reading

By

• Manek Dubash

Whiptail promises four million IOPS all-flash array performance

All-flash array maker Whiptail has upgraded its Racerunner operating system so Invicta arrays can scale to four million IOPS and 360TB of capacity Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

World’s oldest digital computer is back in action

Built in 1951 the WITCH computer has been brought back to life thanks to The National Museum of Computing. Continue Reading

By

• Kayleigh Bateman, Computer Weekly

DataDirect Networks takes aim at clustered NAS with SFA7700

DataDirect Networks (DDN) makes a play for clustered NAS customers with big data needs on its journey from HPC to scale-out supplier Continue Reading

By

• Antony Adshead, Storage Editor

The future of computing at IBM Zurich research labs

Chips powered by the sun and cooled by water are just some of the long-term research projects at IBM's Zurich labs Continue Reading

By

• Bryan Glick, Editor in chief

Tune Raid performance to get the most from your HDDs

Tune Raid performance at the storage controller to match application I/O demands to optimal hard drive (HDD) performance Continue Reading

By

• Martin Taylor

Tesco signs £65m datacentre deal to drive online expansion

Tesco expects to cut several millions each year from its IT bill following a 15-year £65m datacentre deal with Sentrum Continue Reading

By

• Bill Goodwin, Computer Weekly

How to get the most from storage within budget

In this buyer’s guide, we assess the changing storage landscape and how the various technologies can be implemented to maximum effect Continue Reading

Dell expects tough next quarter

Dell expects third-quarter revenue to be down between 2% and 5% on second-quarter levels due to the “uncertain economic environment” Continue Reading

By

• Warwick Ashford, Senior analyst

IBM acquires Texas Memory Systems

IBM buys flash storage specialist Texas Memory Systems for an undisclosed sum and promises to invest in further product development Continue Reading

By

• Jennifer Scott, TechTarget

Tiers for Fears: an holistic approach to managing datacentres

Analyst group, Quocirca, explains the importance of a holistic approach between a data centre facility and datacentre equipment and assesses the benefits of external data centre services. Continue Reading

Making Sense of Big Data in the Petabyte Age

This report from Cognizant offers advice on the roadmap organisations should follow to survive the Petabyte Age. Continue Reading

KPMG 2012 Global Technology Innovation Survey

China and the US are most likely to come up with disruptive technology breakthroughs over the next four years, but Europe lags behind Continue Reading

Asian scientists call for government action on supercomputers

Scientists in India, China, Japan, Korea and India have called on their governments to collaborate on supercomputer technology Continue Reading

Cisco UCS blade servers integrate Fusion-io PCIe flash cards

Cisco UCS signs an OEM deal with Fusion-io to incorporate PCIe flash cards directly into Cisco servers Continue Reading

By

• Jennifer Scott, TechTarget

HP eyes EMC’s storage market

HP has released a StoreOnce data deduplication back-up system, which it claims can ingest data at 100TB per hour – three times faster than EMC’s recently launched Data Domain 990 Continue Reading

EMC World 2012 conference coverage

Keep up to date with all the news from EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas, and see the latest industry tips. Continue Reading

Vblocks revenues on track to hit $3bn in 2013

The tie-up between Cisco, EMC and VMware is ramping up revenues from its datacentre-in-a-box product Continue Reading

By

• Jennifer Scott, TechTarget

Tucci: FusionIO ‘darn right foolish’ for Flash attitude

EMC’s CEO hits back at FusionIO as the war of words continues between the two companies Continue Reading

By

• Jennifer Scott, TechTarget

Supercomputers: prestige objects or crucial tools for science and industry ?

Professor Hans Werner Meuer, co-founder of the Top500 supercomputer list, presents a critical assessment of high performance computing technology and applications. Continue Reading

STFC ploughs £30m into high performance computing centre with IBM

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has signed a £30m deal with IBM to develop high performance computing (HPC) Continue Reading

By

• Kathleen Hall, TechTarget

Gartner: Reducing storage costs

Gartner research director, Valdis Filks, offers tips to help businesses get to grips with escalating storage costs. Continue Reading

BMC Mainframe Survey 2011

Over a thousand large mainfram users took part in this survey and it reveals some telling plans across the IT sector for the coming year. Continue Reading

Buyer's Guide: Server Virtualisation

This Computer Weekly buyer’s guide looks at the potential barriers to successful virtualisation and how they can be overcome. Continue Reading

CW500: Getting to grips with big data

Experts from Standard Life, Deloitte and Intelligent Business Strategies share some useful tips for CIOs on understanding big data Continue Reading

By

• Bill Goodwin, Computer Weekly

CIO priorities 2012: Ali Jaffri, ICT manager, Gallions Housing

Ali Jaffri, ICT manager at Gallions Housing, talks about the challenges of 2012. Continue Reading

2012 Storage Trends

This in-depth analyst report covers the key trends in data storage, big data, and storage technology. Continue Reading

2012 Trends to Watch: Storage

This report covers data growth, Big Data, disk shortages, public cloud storage, flash memory, as well as other key trends. Continue Reading

Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index 2012

The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) index is an annual benchmark of businesses disaster recovery preparations worldwide. Continue Reading

Powering the data centre

A look at alternative approaches to managing energy for cost and/or sustainability reasons in data centres. Continue Reading

Oracle study shows data demands drive new data centre installations

Research from Oracle across 10 regions has found that an organisation's growth in data is becoming a boardroom issue. Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

Investment bank JP Morgan goes live with FPGA Maxeler supercomputer

JP Morgan has gone live with a supercomputer for fixed income trading operations. The investment bank is using a Maxeler dataflow supercomputer for analysing and profiling intra-day trading risk. Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

How open data creates new opportunities for the UK

The use of open data could be a critical factor in determining the success or failure of the UK’s growth agenda this report from the business advisory firm Deloitte reveals. Continue Reading

Special report on EMC

This 8-page special report from Computer Weekly, packed with graphs and diagrams, is essential reading for anyone considering EMC as a supplier. Continue Reading

Special report on EMC

This 8-page special report from Computer Weekly, packed with graphs and diagrams, is essential reading for anyone considering EMC as a supplier. Continue Reading

Thai floods could impact revenues and prices, says Dell

Computer maker Dell says flooding in Thailand is causing a worldwide shortage of PC hard drives that will last into the first quarter of 2012 and could impact the company’s revenues. Continue Reading

Self-encrypting drives: SED the best-kept secret in hard drive encryption security

The SED solves many common data loss problems and is easy to use and manage with minimal impact on system performance – yet relatively few businesses and governments use SEDs. Continue Reading

By

• Warwick Ashford, Senior analyst

ElasticStack delivers cloud with SAN-resilient storage on commodity hardware

Cloud platform provider ElasticStack has refined its software to deliver a cloud platform with resilient storage using low-cost commodity hardware... Continue Reading

By

• Warwick Ashford

Facebook has launched a project to ‘open source’ its datacentre

In the spirit of open source software, Facebook says it wants to share the innovations in one of its datacentres with the rest of the industry in its Continue Reading

By

• Kathleen Hall, TechTarget

Western Digital bids $4.3 billion for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Western Digital has tabled a bid of $4.25m (£2.6bn) to acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies ending the Japanese HDD vendor's previous preparations for an IPO. Continue Reading

By

• Paul Kunert

FULL DETAILS: EMC’s new VNX and VNXe ranges

EMC will next week launch unified storage devices under the VNX name, but also a range of low-end storage systems dubbed VNXe. Continue Reading

By

• Simon Sharwood

BCS CEO David Clarke talks about the future of the IT industry

David Clarke, CEO of the chartered institute of computing the BCS, talks to Computer Weekly about being awarded an MBE, the future of the IT profession and tackling a membership revolt against his leadership last year. Continue Reading

By

• Kathleen Hall, TechTarget

The last Storage Expo in pictures

What's going on at Storage Expo 2009 Continue Reading

By

• Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

Apple enters SMB NAS market with new server

Our regular roundup of storage news includes a new cloud backup service from Brennan IT, Quantum finding demand for LTO-5 before its launch, a new SMB server from Apple and SNIA ANZ’s last course for the year Continue Reading

By

• Simon Sharwood

Added critical data protection for SMBs

New technology aiming to solve small and medium size businesses’ perennial problems with protecting business critical data Continue Reading

By

• Joe O’Halloran, Computer Weekly

FC SAN vs. iSCSI SAN Part 1: Reliability and performance

Still undecided when it comes to the Fibre Channel/iSCSI SAN debate? The first part in our guide explains how the two differ in reliability and performance. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Peterson, Forsythe

Storage Basics Part 1: What is Fibre Channel?

In the first part of a four-day feature, we explain basic storage technologies. Today: Fibre Channel. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Learn all about SATA

This handbook offers three related SATA tips which compare SATA to SAS and SCSI and provides advice on striking the right balance between them. Continue Reading

3PAR, EqualLogic file for IPOs

The emerging storage companies file S-1 forms with the SEC, though some experts warn they could be headed for a volatile market. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

NAS appliance purchase considerations

NAS appliances are frequently touted for bringing convenience and simplicity to network storage. Appliances include their own dedicated disks for storage and RAID, and most NAS appliances can be upgraded with more or larger disks for additional storage space. However, NAS appliances do pose some disadvantages. Consequently, the choice of NAS appliance requires careful evaluation. Now that you've reviewed the essential issues involved in any NAS product, this guide focuses on specific considerations for dedicated NAS appliances. You'll also find a series of specifications to help make on-the-spot product comparisons between vendors. Continue Reading

NAS appliance specifications

NAS appliances are noted for their convenience, offering dedicated internal storage that is relatively straightforward to identify and manage. The biggest issue for NAS appliances is avoiding network bottlenecks and supporting expansion without having to proliferate additional appliances across the network. The product snapshots in this chapter highlight key specifications for a cross section of major NAS appliance products. Continue Reading

Data migration product specifications

Part of the Tiered Storage Buying guide focusing on product specifications for data migration tools. Continue Reading

Tiered Storage School: Table of Contents

Get a better understanding of what tiering can do for your storage, how it works and why a tiered plan can aid in backup, DR, overall management and long-term archive Continue Reading

IBM: We're No. 1 in storage hardware

A new combined disk and tape tracker from IDC has IBM trumpeting from the rooftops that it's the market leader. But what's IBM's story when it comes to software? Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Storage consolidation: SRM tools overview

SRM tools are an important part of storage consolidation. They allow admins to monitor the storage environment, allocate and organise available storage, and offer insights into future trends. Continue Reading

Storage consolidation: Disks and disk subsystems overview

Any storage consolidation effort must involve a serious consideration of disk subsystems and the specific disk types that those systems will contain Continue Reading

Storage consolidation: Weighing the pros and cons

Storage consolidation holds out the promise of more efficient storage management. But pitfalls include slower network performance and a difficult data migration process. Continue Reading

How data deduplication eases storage requirements

Storage administrators are struggling to handle spiraling volumes of documents, audio, video, images and large email attachments. Adding storage is not always the best solution, and many companies are turning to data reduction technologies such as data deduplication. This article explains the basic principles of data deduplication, and looks at implementation issues. Continue Reading

How is unstructured data affecting storage administrators and other staff?

There is absolutely an effect. Additional data volume translates into... Continue Reading

Midrange storage array specifications

Product snapshots highlighting key specifications for a cross section of midrange storage array products. Continue Reading

Storage Security FAQ audiocast

Don't have time to dig into the FAQ text now? Download the audiocast in MP3 format and listen in the car, at the gym -- wherever you want. You can download the entire presentation or the individual questions that you are most interested in. Continue Reading

Symantec makes major update to Enterprise Vault

Symantec adds automated data classification and integration with security products in Version 7.0 of its Enterprise Vault archiving tool; EMC reports record earnings for the fourth quarter. Continue Reading

By

• SearchStorage.com Staff

Storage Decisions Session Downloads: Architecture Track (LV 2006)

More than 70% of the attendees of Storage Decisions say they are setting up or evaluating a tiered storage architecture. Featured in this track are Tiered Storage School sessions along with other sessions that can help any manager set up or administer new architectures. Continue Reading

Storage IQ: Key technologies for 2006

We keep a close eye on what technologies our readers are most interested in. Here are the year's 25 most commonly searched terms. Do you know them all? Continue Reading

Symantec blames piracy for Veritas licensing snafu

Weekly compilation of storage news: Symantec says that software counterfeiting is throwing a wrench in tech support ; FRCP rules take effect. Continue Reading

By

• SearchStorage.com Editors

Tiered storage becoming tried and true

Tiered storage matches the value of data with the performance (and expense) of storage. Ideally, tiered storage can save money, while easing the access demands to any single storage tier. While tiered storage has clearly brought storage costs and performance into focus, it has yet to reach its full potential in the enterprise. Continue Reading

What do tiered storage and ILM have to do with disaster recovery?

That idea ties back into the topics of data growth, data control, data management and recoverability. Once you start categorizing your data based on criticality and recovery priority, it gives you an indication of your data segments. We have our high-priority data, we have our medium criticality data and we have our low restore priority data. Continue Reading

EqualLogic updates storage provisioning software

Users have more options when it comes to pooling storage with version 3.0 of EqualLogic's array software, but some are wondering whatever happened to the SAS disks. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Storage Management Survival School: Lesson five

In this session, Jamie Gruener examines the steps you should consider in designing a tiered storage model, what the pitfalls are and the overall benefits. Continue Reading

By

• Mark Lewis

Resource guide to disk-based backup

 Continue Reading

A beginners guide to iSCSI

After five years of working with Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs), I have personally been quite confused about iSCSI, about exactly what it really does and more importantly how it works and how we can actually use it to solve real customer problems. So here, after a busy few months talking to a lot of people on the subject, are a few of my own views. Continue Reading

By

• Simon Gordon