Complete Industry Article List

2/8/10  Briefing Report by Eric Slack: F5 ARX2000 File Virtualization Appliance - Automated storage tiering is a primary capability that file virtualization provides, usually driving down storage costs. Since they control the access to files, virtualization appliances can move these files to the appropriate physical NAS storage devices or file servers in the background, transparent to users....[MORE]

2/5/10  Article by George Crump: Managing VM Sprawl - Server virtualization has been extremely successful. It has reduced physical server counts, increased business flexibility and made DR planning simpler. But server virtualization has also brought its own set of challenges, one of which is virtual machine (VM) sprawl. VM sprawl is the ‘weed-like’ growth in VMs that, similar to ‘NT server sprawl’ a decade ago, has become a management problem for IT administrators everywhere....[MORE]

2/3/10  Article by Eric Slack: Optimization - the New Normal in Storage - Relentless data growth and continually dropping storage costs has for years fostered routinely inefficient storage practices - even wastefulness. Thanks in part to Moore’s Law (as applied to storage) and ever increasing IT budgets, it seems that the cost per GB has dropped regularly and capital availability has kept much of the business pressure off of storage managers. But no more....[MORE]

2/1/10  Case Study by George Crump: ISV Leverages the Cloud - Rescentris, Inc., an independent software developer (ISV) based in Columbus, OH, offers an “electronic lab notebook” application to researchers in the bio-pharmaceutical industry and other diverse R&D organizations. The goal of their solution is to bring digital advantages to the traditional lab notebook in the form of improved data analysis, search and collaboration, as well as help the scientific community comply with increasing regulations around long term record preservation....[MORE]

1/27/10  Article by George Crump: Backup Optimization - Getting the Most out of Your Backup Investment - In life there are three ‘givens’: you can never be too thin, you can never be too rich, and your backups can never be completed too soon. This last given has led to a tremendous amount of growth in the data protection marketplace. There are solutions that protect in real time, recover almost instantly, optimize backup data so it can be stored on disk for a long period of time, and those that can replicate backup jobs. The problem is how do backup managers make sure they are spending their precious budget dollars on solutions that will provide the most improvement for their investment?...[MORE]

1/26/10  Article by George Crump: Selecting which SSD to Use - Part One- Solid State Disk (SSD) is quickly becoming a go-to technology to deal with performance issues and SSD manufacturers have released a variety of deployment options for potential customers to select from. As is often the case, there is no one perfect choice for all situations and customers will have to understand their needs when selecting which SSD to use....[MORE]