Stories by: Jim Damoulakis

Among the multitude of data protection challenges facing IT organizations, arguably the least favorite for IT managers is dealing with laptop systems. Each week we read more horror stories about lost notebook computers and potentially compromised data as organizations attempt to grapple with what is literally a moving target.

Every Storage Networking World conference tends to serve as a gauge on the mood of the market and provides indications of trends and directions in the storage industry, and last week's in Orlando, to me at least, reflected a storage market that is transitioning to a mature phase, where new developments are likely to be more incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

With server virtualization being all the rage, it can be very tempting to jump into it with a "build it and they will come" mentality. This could be risky, as recent surveys have indicated that a sizeable number of adopters aren't able determine if their projects were successful. We shouldn't forget that a virtualization project is no different than any other large scale IT undertaking: it takes careful planning, clearly defined objectives, and reliable execution in order to realize the benefits. Here are a few items to help avoid some common pitfalls:

Last week's flurry of reports stemming from a Wall Street Journal article about Google's unannounced plans to offer an online storage service represented the latest in a long-running series of rumors on the subject.

A recent technology discussion among some colleagues unexpectedly turned to focusing on the operational challenges introduced by new technologies like server virtualization, dynamic (a.k.a. thin) provisioning, data de-duplication and grid-based clustered file servers. Although each of these technologies is at a different phase in market acceptance, each is having an influence on the future planning and architecting of IT infrastructure. And while there is often a groundswell push for adoption, many organizations haven't given appropriate consideration to the organizational changes that will invariably accompany their introduction.

Somewhere near the top of the list of activities that storage people like doing least is data migration. Slow, time-consuming, and often scheduled at convenient times such as 3 a.m. Sunday morning, it has to rank up there with tasks like disaster recovery testing and SAN reconfiguration. To make matters worse, the process often seems to be a prime candidate for Murphy's Law, often exceeding scheduled windows or needing to be rolled back and rescheduled due to unforeseen problems.

Largely due to its cost and transportability, tape remains the most common choice of media for long-term data retention. However, this may be mainly an artifact of the still prevalent practice of "backup as archive." In this situation, tape essentially serves as "WORN" (write once, read never) storage, since once it's sent away to an off-site vault, the real hope is that it will never need to be recalled again. If this weren't the case, then organizations would have comprehensive programs in place to regularly recall and refresh these archival tapes, and we know that this rarely happens.

The New York Times recently published an article on Panasonic's attempt to push its higher-margin plasma sets over LCD technology despite the fact that it makes and sells both. Regardless of particular technical merits, LCD is rapidly becoming the dominant flat-screen TV technology, and, in fact, the technical distinctions of one technology versus the other diminish with each new product generation. But, as "the world's largest plasma seller," it is not surprising that Panasonic is trying to defend its turf.

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the postgame interviews after a professional baseball or football event to see how many sports cliches a single athlete can weave into a single interview, such as, "We take it one game at a time," "It was a team effort," "Ya gotta give the other guys a lot of credit," and, my personal favorite (usually heard after a loss), "We just need to stick to the fundamentals." Like most cliches, of course, each carries a measure of truth, and in particular, it is easy to run into problems if you ignore the basics.

Moore's Law states that computing power, as measured by the density of microcomponents per square inch on an integrated circuit, will double every 18 months. Another way of looking at this is that the cost of a given level of compute power will decline by 50 percent in that period.

Years ago, when IT folk and vendors still bandied about the term MIPS, an over-repeated witticism of the time was that the acronym actually stood for "meaningless indication of processor speed."