Storage: Interviews

In the first part of an in-depth interview with ARN's BRIAN CORRIGAN, local EMC president, David Webster discusses the progress being made around information lifecycle management and predicts the rise of virtual datacentres.

Small and midsize businesses would rather chew tin foil, an industry pundit says, than spend money on enterprise backup software that is little suited to their needs. Senior Editor Deni Connor recently talked to George Symons, CEO of Yosemite Technologies, about what SMBs really need in backup software. This is an edited transcript.

At the recent EMC World in Orlando, chief development officer, Mark Lewis, sat down with IDG's DENI CONNOR to chat about the vendor's past, present and future.

Online dating site eHarmony.com continues to amass scores of data to fuel its online relationship service for 15 million registered users. The company 18 months ago deployed clustered storage systems to handle the photos, images, logs and other content types it has added to the online profiles it stores for its users. In an interview this week at the Computerworld Storage Networking World conference in San Diego, Mark Douglas, vice-president of technology at eHarmony, talked about the company's use of storage clusters, how he chooses storage vendors, why the company is phasing out tape backup, and about new projects planned to keep online dating rolling along.

IDC's Richard Villars knows a thing or two about storage. He has spent 19 years with the analyst firm assessing the emergence of network technologies and general business practises. Now vice-president of IDC's information infrastructure team, he advises on the impact of tiered storage, blade servers and regulatory compliance on an organisation's information management.

Standardization is the last line of defence for many enterprise firms in the battle against vendor lock-in; however, the time taken to formulate product standards, for the early adopters, is risky. We asked Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Australian and New Zealand vice chairman Clive Gold about how standards, and standard-based products, free enterprise firms from being locked into using proprietary technologies for years to come.

Sun Microsystems last month pulled out of the IBM-led open-source storage group Aperi, and said it would back an older SMI-S storage management software standardization effort being championed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). After Sun's move, Aperi said it would place itself under the auspices of the vendor-neutral Eclipse Foundation. With that backdrop, Wayne Adams, chairman of SNIA's board of directors, recently spoke with Computerworld about friction between SNIA members who support the Aperi/Eclipse open source project -- and those who don't.

Scott Stallard, senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard's enterprise storage and servers group, spoke with Computerworld this week after the launch of the company's new BladeSystem c-Class hardware line.

EMC in April announced a multi-year agreement with Intel that allows the chipmaker to resell EMC's latest low-end storage arrays. The two companies also signed an expanded technology development agreement. At the same time, Dell is saying its four-year-old reseller partnership with EMC has garnered 15,000 joint customers. But as EMC continues to drive more of its products into the low-end space -- until now, Dell's bailiwick -- some analysts see a coming conflict. And at least one said the EMC and Intel partnership could send Dell packing. Praveen Asthana, director of Dell's Enterprise Storage Unit, spoke to Lucas Mearian about EMC, Intel and its own technology road map. The following are excerpts from the interview.

Ameritrade completed its acquisition of TD Waterhouse in January to become TD Ameritrade Holding Just prior to the completion of that acquisition, Ameritrade finished rolling out technology that encrypts all data as it moves from servers to tape backup devices. The encryption effort was a reaction to the company's loss of a data tape with the names of 200,000 clients in April 2005. Jerry Bartlett, CIO at TD Ameritrade, spoke with Computerworld recently about data security and storage management.

Sun Microsystems recently announced new servers based on its UltraSparc T1 processor but still remained mum on its storage plans. The new vice-president of strategy and planning for Sun's Data Management Group, Randy Kerns, spoke about the status of the integration of recently acquired StorageTek and Sun's plan to address the coming threat to tape systems of holographic storage.