Storage: Features

The little USB stick on your keychain and the memory in your iPod is fueling a revolution in the enterprise storage world.

What are the three most important ingredients of a successful project? Planning, planning, planning. For our datacenter makeover at the University of Hawaii's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, we planned early and often, and still got bit by last-minute surprises and devilish details that cost us time and money. We'll do it a little different next time. You too can learn from our mistakes.

More servers, more racks, more UPSes, more users -- the reasons for expanding a datacenter are the same everywhere. Today's datacenter projects, however, have the additional component of modernisation. Rebuilding takes place for tighter integration, greener power usage, greater redundancy, and especially more control. Datacenter administrators would control individual dust motes in their racks if they could.

The explosive growth of data has made information storage management ever critical within the enterprise. But data growth aside, major issues and trends in storage technology are injecting added complexity to that storage strategy. Industry experts identify some of these influencing factors on the enterprise.

Jonathan Snyder's five-person team at Dreambuilder Investments isn't your typical IT organization. Or is it?

Down economy or not, the growing appetite for enterprise data storage won't be sated anytime soon, if ever. The rise of data-heavy multimedia files, new customer touchpoints, evolving reporting and compliance standards and other trends are contributing to near exponential growth rates in the amount of data created and stored in the digital universe.

We asked IT executives and industry experts to dream big and tell us about their ultimate wish lists for a brand-new, built-from-scratch data center -- if money were no object. Here's what they had to say:

Today's data centers pack more processing power into smaller physical spaces than ever before. But too much of a good thing creates new challenges for next-generation data center design.

About 15 miles from its medical center in downtown San Antonio, Christus Health is building a US$23 million data center to house a flood of digital information ranging from patient insurance records to CT scans.

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding "the dawn of a new era." Overblown? Sure, but also prophetic. While the 8086 was slow to take off, its underlying architecture -- later referred to as x86 -- would become one of technology's most impressive success stories.

Managing data stockpiles can be tough. These technologies can help ease the difficulty.