Stories by: Jerome Wendt

Last week, while attending the Spring Storage Networking World in Orlando the big news was, believe it or not, storage networking. In this case, multiple vendors are touting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as storage networking's future.

The number of times that someone has declared tape "dead" probably numbers in the thousands. So it should come as no surprise that when I inquired of one tape vendor how much tape they sell annually the vendor's response was, "We sell a *&^% load of it".

I am not sure who the bigger winner is after this week's announcement that Iomega rejected EMC's takeover bid: Iomega or customers. Based on EMC's past attempts to enter the consumer storage market space, one would think that consumers are better off because Iomega remained independent.

A multiple choice question that companies have to answer on almost daily basis as they consolidate and virtualize their evolving data center infrastructure is:

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Yahoo. Although Yahoo has since announced it plans to fight Microsoft's takeover and court other suitors, most notably Google, there is an element of shared search technology that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can easily dismiss because of Microsoft's earlier 2008 announcement to acquire FAST Search and Transfer.

Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic spawned some initial speculation about whether Dell was going to try to cut EMC out of its product portfolio. Though that is possible, Dell knows better than to bite the hand that feeds it.

Storage is awash in TLAs (three-letter acronyms). LUN, SAN, NAS, ILM, SWD, SAS, HBA, DAS, CAS and FAN are all acronyms that regularly appear in storage-related literature, publications and columns. But to many IT managers, they provide no meaningful information, and for storage technicians who use them too frequently without context, they may alienate rather than connect them with their manager.

I am an admitted addict of new storage technologies and the benefits they can potentially deliver. Yet as interesting as they are, one should never underestimate the risks behind using these technologies or the companies that offer them. The problem is quantifying what risks they present to you and your company.

Over the past two months, Network Appliance completed its acquisition of Topio, IBM announced its intentions to purchase Softek Storage Solutions and now Hitachi Data Systems is buying Archivas. But which of these acquisitions can users expect to succeed in the long run?

The first wave of network-based storage virtualization fell apart. It was too new, too untested and required companies to install it in one of the most sensitive parts of the corporate infrastructure: in front of expensive storage arrays and behind mission-critical, highly visible applications. This was a strategy destined for failure.

Tens of thousands of users are deploying open-source storage software in an effort to avoid pricey proprietary products such as array clustering and disk eraser applications and to get some long-term protection through the availability of source code.