Storage: Opinions

Shaw reviews the Seagate Central network-attached hard drive.

Correctly sizing a disk backup with deduplication to meet your current and future needs is an important part of your data protection strategy. If you ask the right questions upfront and analyze each aspect of your environment that impacts backup requirements, you can avoid the consequences of buying an undersize system that quickly exceeds capacity.

The recent RSA conference in San Francisco was awash in talk of big data, but it was clear there was some disagreement about what people mean by big data and some outright skepticism about it being the answer.

OK, lots of interesting stuff for you this week. First up, LinkedIn has open sourced a system called Databus, a real-time database change capture system that provides a "timeline-consistent stream of change capture events ... grouped in transactions, in source commit order."

For my recent column of predictions for 2013 I polled a huge number of IT people to see what they are expecting, and ended up getting more than 400 responses.

Shaw reviews Western Digital's WD TV Play, by Western Digital.

See-through screens won't happen for phones and tablets, but get ready for your windows to run Window, says Mike Elgan

Software defined networking (SDN) offers significant opportunities and challenges for enterprise IT professionals. SDN has the potential to make networks more flexible, reduce the time to provision the network, improve quality of service, reduce operational costs, and make networks more secure.

Hitachi has a system that can analyze how happy your organization is and maybe even re-engineer it to make it happier!

Fingerprint readers, iris scanners, palm vein scanners, facial recognition systems and more -- biometric ID tools are going mainstream. But will the mainstream go biometric?

Shaw reviews G-Connect wireless storage for iPad, by G-Technology by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Shaw reviews Seagate's Backup Plus external storage drives, Rubbo International's D-Wings.

A few months ago I started writing about my saga of getting AT&T U-verse DSL service established at the new location of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker.

Like Larry Ellison's yacht, the RDBMS is sailing into the sunset. But if NoSQL is to take its place, a standard query language and APIs must emerge soon

Rumours that Cisco is plotting its very own server offering have been circulating for over a month now, but it was a blog entry from the networking giant’s CTO that shows the scope of the vendor’s plans.

The Storage Networking World show in Dallas seemed to me to represent a microcosm of the widespread concerns about the economy. There was a good deal of focus on how to do more with less, and my perception was that it was a quieter, more somber conference than usual. However, that's not to imply that there weren't some significant happenings. Here are some of the items that struck me as particularly notable:

It's no surprise that Microsoft has its eye on the cloud. Cloud computing, that is.

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

Storage vendors of every stripe have been feverishly working to hitch their wagons to the server virtualization juggernaut. Going far beyond the basic integration and certification activities that one would expect for support of a popular application, storage products are integrating management functionality and working to develop other ways to distinguish and differentiate their VMware support.

Working with several enterprise clients of late, it's become apparent that there is a not-so-subtle shift of emphasis or prioritization taking place regarding the tiering of storage. To understand this, it's helpful to review the recent history and drivers related tiered storage.