Storage: Features

Gustav had nowhere near the effect on the Louisiana Supreme Court that Katrina did three years ago -- in fact, the network never went down.

If you're an IT executive, chances are you're already thinking about storage virtualization. Nearly one-quarter of companies with at least 500 employees have deployed storage virtualization products already, and another 55 percent plan to do so within two years, a recent Gartner survey found.

We don't have Olympic Games for file server systems but the SPEC SFS (System File Server) benchmark serves as the next best thing, providing a comparable rank of file server performance. If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you'd find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.

Amazon's Web Services (AWS) are based on a simple concept: Amazon has built a globe-spanning hardware and software infrastructure that supports the company's Internet business, so why not modularize components of that infrastructure and rent them? It is akin to a large construction company in the business of building interstate highways hiring out its equipment and expertise for jobs such as putting in a side road, paving a supermarket parking lot, repairing a culvert, or just digging a backyard swimming pool.

Some CIOs and data center managers have found themselves having to wring performance out of monstrously deficient facilities. Ultimately, these three wrestled with their infrastructures, made major changes and won the day.

Solid-state disk, once considered a niche technology for ruggedized, industrial and military applications, is on its way to the mainstream. This is partly because of SSD benefits, which include performance, power efficiency, ruggedness and a lightweight, compact size. But other developments have also come into play, including technology and market developments that have begun to help this technology overcome its pitfalls -- namely capacity, reliability and price.

Five, four, three, two, one and it's done. It's certainly no magic trick but that's about as many minutes as it can take to completely backup data from a laptop over an Internet connection through a remote storage service. Whenever the data is needed again, presto - it will reappear on demand. And as large organisations continue breaking storage limits, shipping data to an offsite or Internet-based location in this manner is increasingly viewed as a remedy to painful storage swelling.

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.