Hunting for customers
Lowering prices in a sleepy market is a surefire way to stimulate demand. But another way to get customers to open their wallets is to offer an innovative product at a competitive price.
Stories by Mario Apicella
Smaller is better
The most intriguing part of my job is the opportunity to preview new products and technologies early. The interesting thing about looking at products early is that any given one could turn out to an immediate success, need some fine-tuning, evolve into something entirely else, or fail. You never know.
Product Guide: EMC, IBM, and HP in SAN-to-SAN combat
Midtier SAN solutions fall into arguably the most competitive and diversified segment of the storage market, suitable for companies that find million-dollar, top-tier solutions too expensive and yet cannot live with the limited performance of sub-US$100,000, entry-level SANs.
Boxing your storage controls
Just about all storage vendors seem to be buying in to the concept that key functions such as volume management should reside on network devices rather than on applications or storage servers.
Can we blame only storage vendors?
One of my job's most interesting aspects is keeping a dialogue open with vendors' reps, which happens mostly through formal meetings springing from a new announcement or from a "Mario-you-absolutely-have-to-hear-this" kind of urge.
Dancing with WORMs
Blame it on technological progress if you wish, but lately many IT managers have been looking for alternatives to tape backups to protect their data. The recent availability of disk drives offering exceptional capacity and contained cost, such as the latest 250GB units from Maxtor and Western Digital, motivates many companies to aim their data protection jobs at disk media, which grants faster backup time than tape, hence less time stolen from normal business hours.
Pure IP SANS are here
You've probably heard the news: IP-based SAN solutions offered at a price of only cents per MB are entering the storage arena. If your budget is tight, for your next storage-purchasing campaign take a look at the different but equally interesting solutions from companies such as
EqualLogic, Intransa, or LeftHand Networks.
Brocade plays it safe
By next year, building SRM (storage resource management) applications should become an easier task, thanks to a new standard that recently began its development path within the T11.5 technical subcommittee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).
Seagate strikes back
Disk drives are again stealing the spotlight as a flurry of related news comes from storage companies.
How many technicians does it take...
... (no, not to change a light bulb, but) to protect user data? Data protection grows in different shapes that vary according to the different business requirements of each context. Take, for example, application servers, which are synonymous with large data concentration, and compare their business-critical timing for backup and restore with that of users' PCs.
A switching storage world
A recent announcement from Fujitsu adds new Eternus3000 storage arrays models for entry-level and mid-range storage system captured my attention last week. The larger unit, the Eternus3000 model 600, can attach as many as 240 FC (Fibre Channel) drives for a maximum capacity of 35TB to Linux, Unix, and Microsoft Windows server using 2Gbps connections.
Product Guide: Better bunch of disks
A flurry of SATA (serial ATA) storage solutions is quickly pushing parallel ATA out of the market. Even though SATA is faster, more flexible, and more scalable than ATA, not to mention equally affordable, the protocol still fights a perception of inadequacy for critical business applications.
I told you so
If I were paranoid, I would think someone at Seagate was peeking when I wrote my previous column. The closing went: " ... the next big milestone for enterprise disk drives will be moving to the smaller 2.5 inch form factor." And only a few days later the good folks at Seagate announce 2.5" disk drives for the enterprise?
Small drives get larger and faster
Do you remember HGST? Hint: they just announced two new disk drives for laptops. Still doesn't ring a bell? Those 2.5 inches drives, part of the Travelstar line, are the 60GB 7K60, which is the first device in that segment to spin at 7200 rpm, and the 5K80, which rotates at a more quiet 5400 rpm but offers a plump 80GB capacity.
Surfing the services wave
I should never complain about information overload. After all, I am one of the offenders, along with my pals at InfoWorld. Nevertheless, those waves of announcements that storage vendors aim at the public are sometimes overwhelming. Often, the major topic those messages address is not a new technology or product, but rather a new (or revisited) strategy, a promising partnership or a statement of direction for the future.