- Small form factor drives mount viable challenge
- A smaller, greener drive
- Product review: Sun's Honeycomb
- Solid state and its mobility
- Infiniband: Back from the dead once again
- Review: Brocade's big, fat datacenter fabric
- Adventures in tape backup
- The changing face of storage insights
- The racing cars of IT
- The greening of storage
May 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Small form factor drives mount viable challenge
The 3.5-inch drive has reigned for years in enterprise storage arrays, but a viable challenger has appeared on the scene.
In an exclusive review of Infortrend's recently released EonStor B12S storage array, Mario Apicella finds a convincing case for 2.5-inch drives.
The end result is "a system that delivers performance and reliability comparable with large arrays -- not to mention a variety of redundancy features -- and all within a smaller footprint and with lower energy consumption.
"Notably, Infortrend was the first vendor to market with a storage enclosure based on [small form factor] drives, but Xyratex announced a 2U enclosure soon after."
Posted by Caroline Craig on May 2, 2008 05:19 AM
March 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Mario Apicella's first impression of Infortrend's EON B12 is that it's green enough to make IT pros reconsider the long-term viability of behemoth arrays.
"I was drawn to its potential to reduce power consumption, as well as its small footprint," Apicella writes in Time to bury big drive "diskosaurs."
"The B12 is happily idling in my lab at 238 watts. Care to measure how much juice your 3.5-inch-drive arrays are slurping?"
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 28, 2008 08:06 AM
March 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Product review: Sun's Honeycomb
Call it sticky and sweet. Senior Test Center analyst Mario Apicella does.
With its StorageTek Honeycomb, Sun has taken a different approach than many of its competitors for addressing the special needs of "fixed content" archiving.
"Sun has not wedded Honeycomb to any specific application, leaving that task to partners and customers. The upside of Honeycomb's openness is that the possibilities are endless," Apicella explains. "In fact, Honeycomb's powerful, built-in administrative software is complemented by an SDK that allows Java or C developers to define their own metadata schemas consistent with the specifics of their application."
All that said, the usual caveats do apply.
"What I feel reasonably sure would remain consistent across different environments are the system's remarkable resilience and persistence."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 24, 2008 08:32 AM
March 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Mario Apicella offers this breakdown of where retrofitting current machines with solid state could reap worthwhile rewards.
"Solid state opens up the possibility of safely using disk drives to move backups off-site. I dropped my test drive from six feet over a concrete floor, and it's still working without problems," Apicella writes. "Try that with a spinning drive."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 21, 2008 07:11 AM
March 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Infiniband: Back from the dead once again
Whereas the much-snubbed Infiniband protocol has gained purchase in high-performance computing, in the lower tiers vendors favor Fibre Channel and iSCSI.
But that's a pity, Mario Apicella writes, because "Infiniband could very well be the ultimate server connectivity protocol -- at least for the time being."
Is Infiniband back from the dead again?
"My guess is yes, but only for as long as its current bandwidth advantage will continue. 100-Gigabit Ethernet could be the death sentence for Infiniband, but I don't see that coming on too fast."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2008 10:44 AM
March 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Review: Brocade's big, fat datacenter fabric
Marking the debut product in Brocade’s new Data Center Fabric architecture is DCX.
“At 230 pounds, the Brocade DCX Backbone would be on the lighter end of middle linebackers in the NFL, but it's well-built to fill the middle of a storage network,” senior analyst Mario Apicella begins.
Apicella had the chance to visit Brocade’s labs to put the DCX through its paces.
“As impressive as the raw specs of the DCX may be, the DCX's most innovative features are software functions that provide better control of bandwidth allocation, let you restrict access to specific ports according to security policies, and allow you to create independent domains to separately manage different areas of the fabric.”
That said, Apicella most appreciated the effort to bring more intelligence to the fabric.
“As impressed as I was by my first experience with the DCX, it would be deceiving to think that future requirements would be satisfied by the cocktail of networking muscle and smart management tools that Brocade injected into this debut version.”
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 7, 2008 08:09 AM
March 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)
"RTFM." That's what the IT guy in charge of PCs at my first job used to bark at everyone, as in "Read the (expletive) manual."
Some folks learn that one the hard way, such as our Off the Record author, a college student working in a corporate IT shop who saw new backup software as an opportunity to try his hand at upgrading.
Everything seemed to go fine -- only, it didn't. I'll cut to the chase: 30 days of data was not recoverable and paychecks had to go out the next day. "We got the HR staff, the new head of IT, and some of the other administrators and started manually entering the paychecks, printing and stuffing the envelopes by hand," our author explains.
After that, he read the manual and found the telling little piece of information.
"I'm older and wiser now."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on March 4, 2008 04:37 AM
February 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The changing face of storage insights
We're rechristening the weekly Storage Insider column and naming it Storage Adviser. Why the change?
"There are several reasons, the most important of which is to better align this space with my day-to-day hands-on experience putting the latest technologies through their paces," senior analyst Mario Apicella explains.
That, and the industry itself has changed. The proliferation of blogs, both independent and corporate-sponsored, along with other types of commentary makes storage news and opinions abundant today.
"It's time for more meaningful advice to rise above the cacophony of opinion. After all, I too spend much of my time in the storage trenches. From now on, consider this space an extension of my daily experience testing -- and wrestling with -- storage products."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 15, 2008 04:43 AM
November 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Storage: In storage, like networking and hardware, speed turns heads. That holds particularly true for high-performance computing, otherwise known as HPC, which Mario Apicella calls the racing cars of IT. "Whereas finding practical use for a racing car outside of competition is difficult, without HPC systems many companies would fall flat," he writes in Storage built for HPC speed. To that end, SGI and DataDirect Networks recently announced somewhat complementary solutions in the form of a database accelerator and a storage array. Both, Apicella urges, are worth a look. "After all, there's nothing wrong with kicking the tires, even if you don't need a car right now."
Careers: With an eagle eye, perhaps, Nick Corcodilos finds hope in Electronic Engineering Times. "I see light and funding coming down the tunnel," he explains in this Ask the headhunter post. "While you might come up with 15 reasons why it's a mirage, I intend to watch these trends carefully." Within is also a confession of sorts. "Yah, I worry about the tech industry. I'm often just as cynical as many of you are. But, I keep an eye on the hardware."
Gripe Line: Best Buy, CompUSA, Good Guys and GE are all under the gun for dubious wrangling with customers who bought flat-panel TVs along with extended warranties only to find that, in the experience of one reader, "Best Buy says they get to take as long as they want to try to repair it ... they did finally agree to come pick it up, but it took them six weeks to fix it." Ed Foster explains that "a big part of the problem is extended warranties are often serviced by third parties like GE that might have little incentive to keep the customer happy and can also have their own interpretation of what is covered." Part-by-part extended warranty torture. "Unfortunately, I think what executives of Best Buy, GE, etc. understand is that a lot of their profits depend on customers not ever collecting on pricey extended warranties."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 19, 2007 04:47 AM
October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Video: Even though much of the focus is on servers, chips and cooling, storage definitely plays into the green datacenter big picture. "The problem with storage is that it keeps increasing," says Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida in this interview. "Pretty soon, the majority of equipment in the datacenter will be storage." It's more energy-efficient than servers, but there are storage tiers where the data is not active and could be powered down. "I'm not particularly a fan of the green hype, I'd rather talk about efficiencies and utilization," Yoshida says. Related: Storage grows greener, and InfoClipz on green technology.
New to our site: Building out from its core desktop franchise and into online advertising, search, and even consumer electronics, Microsoft reinvents itself once again. And Wall Street is eager to see Microsoft break out, Bill Snyder writes in this Tech's bottom line post. "Microsoft is moving onto Google's turf. But it's obviously far behind, and will remain so for quite a while. Investors understand that this is not a zero sum game. Successful companies don't need to destroy their competitors. They simply need to make money. And both of them do -- truckloads of it. So forget all that fashionable nattering about The Art of War, and focus on the bottom line."
Open source: Putting his money where his mouth is and saying he'll wager a brand new Loonie on it, Savio Rodrigues bets that Microsoft is going to start allowing user contributions to .Net 3.5 within the next year. "Then we'll see a Microsoft-led OSS project around the .NET runtime within the next 2 years. Microsoft will likely create a pseudo-GPL license (which isn't the GPL) for this purpose," he predicts in Microsoft is taking its lead from OpenJDK. "Offering the 'allusion' of allowing multiple distributions, based on the original Microsoft code, is a natural progression."
Quoteworthy: Services are indeed important, however the understanding, management, and use of data is something that needs to be the foundation of your SOA, as with any architecture. As I always say, you need a semantic or data-level understanding of your problem domain, then services, then processes. Truth-be-told many neglect the data, and data connectivity, when designing and building their SOA. This mistake typically causes project failure, or even worse ineffective SOAs that really just add to the complexity of the core architecture. That's not good. -- David Linthicum, SOA needs data. Data needs SOA. Now repeat.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 5, 2007 05:01 AM
October 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The dirty little storage secret
Storage: Storage requirements, more often than not, are grossly overestimated. There you have it, the clandestine reality you're not supposed to know. But you likely already do. Only thing is, it's not that simple. A typical enterprise situation involves "authority without responsibility," explains Mario Apicella in Thin provisioning, fat savings. "For larger companies that buy millions of dollars of storage, thin provisioning is too good an opportunity to pass on because in addition to the financial aspects they also save kilowatts/hr or at least push back in time the demand."
Columnist's corner: Lamenting for the bygone days of old-fashioned film, Tom Yager points out that in the case of digital photography more really is less. And we're all the worse for it. "Having 12 or 36 images on a roll put me on a budget to shoot only that which was worth remembering," he explains in Digital living means digital junk. "Some things don't make the analog-to-digital leap so well ... for our sake and the sake of those who might want to know something about us after we're gone, perhaps we should take pictures as if we're on our last roll of film, and write like we're using our last sheet of paper. Anything we commit to digital posterity in that frame of mind is worth archiving."
Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely is hardly the nostalgic type. But in More thoughts on terror and bombs, he reflects on the six months since his weekly column morphed into a basically daily blog. His two most commented-upon posts are about the Creation Museum and, more recently, Star Simpson. The latter drew many harsh responses. "Several readers believed Simpson should have been shot and/or carted off to Guantanamo Bay for a few years," Cringe reports. "I realized later I should have offered up more details of the incident, since many posters seem to have the wrong idea about what happened."
The news beat: A report published by StopBadware.org finds that trusted Web sites are being hacked and don't even know it. Microsoft launches an enterprise antipiracy program that it claims will help large customers "get legal" if they're found in violation. Apple competitors are touting their own openness in relation to the iPhone. And with its support of Rich Internet applications, Adobe has become a target for malicious hackers.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 3, 2007 10:53 AM
September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Storage: The marriage of Web services and storage as a service was bound to happen. The questions are, "Are you ready for Internet storage? I mean, would you even consider tapping capacity that doesn't come from a pile of storage devices in your datacenter but instead originates somewhere in the cloud?" So begins Mario Apicella in this Storage Insider episode. Perhaps you'd answer in the negative, at least initially. But certain situations do indeed call for it. Think Amazon S3. More recently, startup Nirvanix announced its SDS, as in Storage Delivery Service. "If Nirvanix delivers on its promise, its SDS system could prove an important first step in getting more organizations to think outside of the storage box," Apicella writes.
From the Test Center: Excel is everywhere. Even still it's not often treated as the enterprise resource it really is. "Here's where the SaaS movement fills the gap," writes Mike Heck. In this case, that means eXpresso, a new hosted application that blends document management with spreadsheet-based workgroups and brings community features, too. "A second major difference between eXpresso and run-of-the-mill document managers emerges when you consider the technology underneath eXpresso, which is an Oracle database," Heck adds. That's not to say eXpresso is without gaps, namely workflow, but "overall, eXpresso provides a very satisfying experience." Read the full review.
Security: Question Google. That's precisely what Roger Grimes does in Continuing the Web server security wars: Is IIS or Apache more secure? Specifically, Grimes wonders about a Google report stating that IIS Web servers are twice as likely as Apache servers to be hosting malware. "I wasn't refuting the data, but I was questioning the conclusion, given the fact that the report's authors calculated their statistics using server IP addresses only," Grimes explains. "Installing a secure Web server is easy; hosting secure applications on top of that secure base is the true challenge."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 10, 2007 04:37 AM
July 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Kicking a storage spending addiction
Storage: Who's responsible for the ostensibly unstoppable increase in storage spending? Not the vendors alone, Mario Apicella asserts in Storage spending at a crossroads. "Our research indicates that only 7 percent of storage budget allotments will be spent on services in the next 12 months, up a meager 1 percent from a year ago," Apicella writes. "That said, the actual increase could be significantly more than our respondents anticipate; after all, the need to ensure compliance while protecting data assets shows no signs of abating."
Best of the blogs: Having spent more and more time with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Randall Kennedy declares Virtual PC 2007 the great CPU gobble. "One of the unexpected side effects of moving from Virtual PC 2007 to VS: Lower CPU utilization," he reports. "For testing applications that use high-resolution timers, or that make frequent calls to certain system libraries, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 does a much better job of handling what should normally be a very fast, lightweight operation."
Gripe Line: Best Buy "no lemon" buyer is bitter. Say that three times fast. Okay, so it might not technically be as tortuous as some traditional tongue twisters, but that's little consolation to the reader who bought into the company's guarantee on its extended warranties only to find out that Best Buy did not fulfill it. Not by a long shot.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on July 16, 2007 05:04 AM
June 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
When backups go awry, and it's only the beginning
Storage: With a failed hard drive and backups gone wrong, our Off the Record author sought 'expedited' services for recovering the data. The vendor promised to be done in 4 days, with progress reports every 4 hours. Well, zero reports and 16 days later, they said the data was finally ready, and so was the whopping bill. "But there was a catch." The data recovery company refused to accept credit card payment -- and, despite broken promises and missed deadlines, they wouldn't budge. "Never in my life had I had such a good argument and not gotten what I wanted."
Security: InfoWorld's own Enterprise Data Protection Forum kicks off today in the Big Apple, and Paul Roberts is blogging live from the scene. First up is an entry on keynote speaker Stephen Katz, president of Security Risk Solutions. The moral: CISO's need to make even rank and file employees understand why security is important to them and their customers, Katz said.
Gripe Line: Ed Foster typically breaks tech companies down into one of two molds: those run by engineers, and those by marketeers. Well, now Microsoft, it appears, belongs to yet another category: companies run by their lawyers. At issue is its internal squabbling over virtualization licensing. "It's inevitable that one of the main uses of virtualization technology in the coming years is going to be by Linux and Intel Mac users who need to run a Windows app or two and don't mind the performance hit of a virtual system," Foster writes in Lawyers virtually call the tune in Redmond. "Who else is going to think the solution to fighting a form of piracy that DRM can't prevent is to have a prohibition against it deep in the fine print?"
The news beat: Microsoft's Virtual Earth gets a new dimension through a partnership with Dassault Systemes that will enable users to contribute 3D models of buildings featured on the maps. Symantec takes heat over its Chinese compensation offer, with critics saying it just isn't enough. And Sun needs AMD chips to launch Constellation, the supercomputer it has been working on to compete with IBM's Blue Gene/P.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 26, 2007 10:48 AM
June 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
RAIGE against the RAID machine
Storage: Whereas clustered storage can reign supreme over dangerous situations which disk drives cannot, drive reliability is still critical. "Even when it doesn't cause data loss, a drive failure is more than a minor annoyance," Mario Apicella points out in Taking RAID out of the box. Then again, more and more clustered systems are challenging the status quo. Example: Pivot3 and its RAIGE, as in Redundant Array of Independent Gigabit Ethernet.
Best of the blogs: One might not know it from the title Red Hat Linux vs. the World, but "Red Hat is not desperate," asserts Dave Rosenberg. At least not when it comes to intellectual property deals Microsoft is cutting with the likes of Novell, Linspire and Xandros. "For all you companies that want to work with Microsoft, I would suggest you get them to acquire you. Anything else is a dead end."
App Dev: Even if it's not as powerful as Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation, Adobe's AIR, as in Adobe Integrated Runtime, creates what one designer calls "a new breed of applications somewhere between traditional desktop applications and Web applications." What's more, another developers says in Adobe AIR fulfills hopes for cross-platform developers that it represents the next evolution of how people engage with the Internet.
Video: In the Week Ahead with Gina Smith, get the scoop on the Enterprise 2.0 tradeshow. "There's a lot of promise for Web-based applications and social networking in the enterprise." Also, Apple news and perspective, and storage management technologies. Watch it here.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 18, 2007 04:57 AM
May 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Challenging the storage status quo
Storage: If, like many IT professionals, you're not exactly satisfied with your storage gear, you just might find what you need in an ostensibly unlikely place, offers Mario Apicella in Raising the storage bar. That would be vendors NEC and Stratus. "New or old, both companies are putting some heat on the storage industry," Apicella writes. "Although Stratus has perhaps more moderate ambitions, NEC has the financial and technological muscles to give the largest storage vendors a headache or two."
Security: It's been ten months since Roger Grimes kicked off his password hash cracking contest in which he posited that short and complex passwords are easier to break than longer but less complex ones. The first piece was cracked in November of last year. "We have a winner for the second of three hash challenges," Grimes writes in this week's installment of Security Adviser. "I just don't know who they are." The original contest guidelines are here. Oh yes, and to the very clever cracker of part 2: reveal yourself and collect your well-deserved prize!
Columnist's corner: Indifference and incompetence can make for a potentially lethal combination. At least according to our Off the Record author, who claims to have gotten a cold, hard look at the dynamic duo -- and in a piping hot server room, to boot. "The machine and drives were so old that there was a legitimate concern that they would not power up again." Guess what ... management, comprised of non-IT folks, "never really understood what was at stake."
Startups: London-based Cogneto brings risk analysis to the authentication equation with its Unomi solution for verifying user identity and measuring risk against biometric and behavioral factors. "The way that people interact with information is incredibly unique," CTO Patrick Audley says. Cogneto: to identity and beyond! "So if you can find a way to capture that, then you can measure someone's identity." View the slideshow Month of Enterprise Startups to see all those we've thus far revealed.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 25, 2007 10:25 AM
May 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The key to stopping data leaks
Storage: It is with blood-boiling indignation that Mario Apicella explains how remedies for data breaches have been inadequate, at best. "Almost all of those disclosures could have been prevented by using data encryption on sensitive data, especially when that data flows to mobile devices or removable media," he explains in this week's installment of Storage Insider. What's more, the tools to do so are widely available. "Why, then, are companies not implementing encryption whenever possible and appropriate?"
Startups: Silver Peak Systems claims to transition WANs into LANs. And no, I don't have that backward. The idea was born while Silver Peak co-founder CTO David Hughes was an executive in residence at Benchmark Capital and examining the branch office to create an appliance that would improve the link to the home network. The result of that quest is disk-based data reduction that eliminates repetitive data transfers by identifying byte-level patterns of data that have traveled the WAN and serving them locally on subsequent requests.
The news beat: After losing out to Google in the DoubleClick bidding war, Microsoft reveals intentions to scoop up aQuantive for its digital marketing services. Adware maker Zango sues PC Tools over the antispyware program flagging and removing Zango's technology. A year-long study conducted by the OpenNet Initiative finds that government filtering of online content is on the rise. And Symantec says Chinese hackers are growing in number and skills.
Careers: Most people have something to say worth hearing. You can't possibly have all the good ideas. Those are but two pieces of the advice John West shares in this Leading from the trenches post. "People in all situations feel valued when they feel they have impact or influence on their surroundings," West writes. "The strength of your solutions will increase ten-fold, and the strength of your implementations will increase exponentially."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 18, 2007 10:56 AM
April 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Storage: While most folks preparing to buy iSCSI storage do a fine job defining technical needs, they all too often ignore aspects such as budget capacity, Mario Apicella points out in The Storage Network. "If you don't provision proper budget figures you might end up having to choose a less fitting solution than what your technical requirements and your selection suggests," Apicella explains.
From the feature well: High-performance computing, a.k.a. HPC, is a specialized undertaking, and one that corporations have typically left to scientists and universities. But thanks to clustered standards-based commodity servers, Leon Erlanger writes, "HPC is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise." Four case studies prove it. Take engineering firm BAE Systems for instance, which learned that "little changes can have big implications."
Editor's letter: Steve Fox loves to hear from readers, particularly when they have something kind to say. That's not exactly what his inbox has been flooded with since we switched from print to online, though. "Let's just say you got my attention," Fox begins in Magazine content in a tidy bundle. In response to those of you asking for a select subset of our best weekly content, we've created InfoWorld Express. Register here.
The news beat: Three U.S. groups ask the FTC to block Google's acquisition of DoubleClick for privacy reasons. Motorola scoops up Terayon Communication System for its digital video processing and networking software. And Wi-Fi cloaks the city of London.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 23, 2007 11:26 AM
April 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Storage: While storage titans and analyst firms alike predict once-unfathomable data growth, Mario Apicella points out that "what matters is how much data your company is going to create and how you are going to store and manage it." Prepare for the upcoming data deluge. "At some point you will meet an insurmountable wall." Simply buying more capacity won't help you climb over it, either. Apicella's advice? "Data deduplication is one of the weapons to keep in mind."
Security: If the recent TJX Companies exposure of more than 45 million records related to credit cards doesn't have you concerned, then perhaps a little perspective on it will. "This breach alone compromised a quarter of the U.S. population's cards," Roger Grimes explains in When identity theft becomes standard operating procedure. "It's becoming clear to me that credit card and identity theft are so common that affected companies are almost not caring." One such company, for instance, does not issue new cards until three separate fraud incidents have been reported.
Notes from the field: Resolution. That's what Cringester J.M. got, thanks to Robert X. himself. "ASUS finally did the right thing," our roving reporter explains in Kicking ASUS and taking names, by replacing J.M.'s defective notebook battery.
Best of the blogs: Car emissions and IT at first glance have little to do with each other. But as Ted Samson reports in Sustainable IT, last week's Supreme Court ruling that the EPA has the power to regulate greenhouse gases could wind its way into datacenters. "The ruling likely will affect the EPA's approach to the regulation of other significant sources" of emissions, Samson writes, including IT organizations since, "enormous, energy-hungry datacenters not only gobble up a lot of power but emit GHGs as well."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 9, 2007 04:44 AM
January 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Podcasts: While converged communications devices and consumer-oriented products are garnering tons of attention at CES, the enterprise-worthy hybrid drives are coming into their own as well. And, they just might give you one more reason to wait before deploying Vista. Tune into Storage Sprawl.
Gov't: Net neutrality has come back this week with two U.S. senators proposing legislation to prohibit broadband providers from favoring access, and yesterday FCC chairman Kevin Martin says at CES that the notion 'means different things to different people.' He adds that consumers should have access to everything available for free on the Internet, but slipped in his thoughts that operators ought to be able to charge for premium services. In other words, he's straddling both sides of the hotly-contested debate for the time being.
Slideshow: Storage and Net neutrality are not the only news at CES, of course. The latest coverage includes a wide array of new products and happening at the show. Just think: an iPod dock that doubles as toilet paper holder. Weird, indeed, but somebody out there actually made it. (I'll skip any jokes about focus groups.) The EPA talks tech recycling. Plus, new cameras, projectors, leaf-like lights. View the slideshow here.
The news beat: Microsoft details Titan, the next version of its Dynamics CRM software, slated to ship in summer '07. Oracle provides advance notification of what customers ought to expect when it releases the next security update on Tuesday. And the U.S. trails Europe and Japan when it comes to exporting technology goods to China.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on January 12, 2007 04:34 AM
December 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
2006 trends carrying into 2007
Columnists' corner: The coming year, no doubt, will be a big one for Redmond. Think Crossbow ("that's next-gen Windows Mobile for those who don't like goofy code-names"), Longhorn, Small Business Server 2007, virtualization. "There'll be a lot more, obviously, but these are the ones I'm thinking about," explains Oliver Rist in Microsoft, version 2007.
Storage: One of the hottest topics of this past year was data deduplication and "it should stay so in 2007," according to Mario Apicella in this week's installment of Storage Insider. "No wonder so many vendors are dancing to the data-deduplication tune: No other technology comes even close to cutting down the amount of required storage," he writes. That's not say that Mr. Apicella has no concerns about the technology, though.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 28, 2006 10:29 AM
December 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Podcasts: What with 2007 so close, Oliver Rist looks at which technologies SMBs should be considering in the new year. "Office 2007 is a major step up over Office 2003." Plus, what to look for in an online backup package. The technology has gotten much more refined, Rist points out. Listen to Emerging Enterprise.
Columnist's corner: Mr. Rist is not the only one looking ahead, of course. Tom Yager, in 2007: Something for everyone, bids good riddance to the closing year, and advises readers to "create possibilities with an eye toward profiting from them; I forgive you. While we wait like new parents for altruistic motivation to care for others, we waste opportunities where investment serves the needy better than charity."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 27, 2006 05:48 AM
December 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
The consolidation continues in storage and mobile devices
Storage: Seagate buys EVault for its online network backup, recovery and data protection products. EVault specializes in on-site and in-lab data recovery of corrupted or inaccessible storage devices.
Hardware: Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, reveals its intent to swallow Bitfone, which it will use to strengthen its iPAQ lineup. The acquired company makes applications that help manufacturers better manage wireless devices.
Operating systems: For those participating in Microsoft's Longhorn beta program, the company issues another build, the December Community Tech Preview. The company says it is on track to finalize the forthcoming server OS by the second half of 2007.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 21, 2006 11:03 AM
October 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Storage: The World Series is over and the NFL playoffs are yet to begin, so perhaps you gamblers out there would like try your luck at betting on the future of storage? Okay, okay. This is more akin to playing the stock market than calling your bookie, but startup Storage Markets aims to bring the predictive market approach to storage, Mario Apicella reports in this post. "As an honorary trader, I can testify that Storage Markets is fun and addictive, which should motivate more people with storage expertise to join and keep the transactions going," Apicella writes.
Best of the blogs: Jon Udell finds himself redesigning one of Edward Tufte's data tables, and wondering how his version could work more interactively on the Web and how more people could conduct such changes. "Can web collaboration address these scaling problems? Maybe. We have lots of good ingredients: social networks for images, code, and documentation. Time to get cooking!" Scaling the Tufte effect.
The news beat: Microsoft says that its Office Live service will emerge from beta testing come November 15 and bring a few new features along for the ride. SPEC.org forms a working group to build benchmarks for virtualization software. And Hewlett-Packard details its first c-Class line of storage devices to tap the blade form factor and to make SANs a reality for smaller companies.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on October 31, 2006 07:26 AM
October 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
EMC and the debate over power efficiency
Columnists' corner: EMC's recent power efficiency claims may be overstated and have rivals up in arms, but that's a debate that customers need to hear. Mario Apicella throws down the gauntlet over power and cooling costs and asks for formulas to back up EMC's claims.
Reviews: In Part 2 of his review of the Xserve Xeon, Tom Yager takes a more detailed look at the hardware and says that Apple hasn't lost its touch for server engineering. Apple's value-add "is easy to see if you open yourself to the possibility that putting Intel chips in a server needn't define the boundaries of a server's capabilities." If you missed Part 1 of this review, look for it and other discussions of Xserve Xeon in the Enterprise Mac blog.
The news beat: In an already crowded blogging market, Six Apart is launching a service for blogging newbies. Vox will even compete with a couple of services from its own company. The global recall of millions of laptop batteries has pushed Sony into an operating loss for Q2 despite a jump in sales. And Cisco continues its summer buying spree with yet another acquisition, this time snapping up mobile telephony software company Orative for $31 million in cash.
Posted by Caroline Craig on October 26, 2006 05:51 AM
September 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft betas data protection software
Storage: With the test edition of System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 version 2, Microsoft is inching further into the data protection realm. This latest iteration brings the ability to monitor data changes and can recover with no data loss, the company claims.
Hardware: Tom Yager asks "If your wildest dreams were realized, how many cores per CPU would you have in your servers, workstations and power desktops right now?" You know, Mr. Yager, if my wildest dreams came true, no CPU cores would be anywhere near the picture, but I digress. "Well, Intel and AMD are giving it lots of thought right now, and I imagine the burning question at AMD is this: What do we do after AMD and Intel are matched at eight cores?" Chip wars go to the core.
The news beat: Microsoft sues DRM hackers who, it alleges, gained access to the company's source code and then broke its Windows Digital Rights Management software. Fugitive Jacob "Kobi" Alexander gets arrested in Namibia for conspiring to commit security fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud. And IBM opens a venture capital center in Dublin.
Podcasts: EMC's new Infoscape product, as well as its purchase of Network Intelligence, form the basis of its grand vision. Plus, the week in storage with news from IBM, Storage Bridge Bay and Oracle. Tune into Storage Sprawl.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 27, 2006 11:23 AM
August 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Challenging LTO with a DLT drive
Test Center review: Digital linear drives are being outsold by Linear Tape-Open, or LTO, drives these days. But Quantum hopes to change that with its DLT-S4. "The DLT-S4 offers twice the capacity-per-reel of its LTO-3 rivals, and Quantum makes this technical advantage even more appealing with an aggressive price," senior analyst Mario Apicella writes. "The Quantum DLT-S4's remarkable speed is still well behind the nominal 160MBps of the LTO-3, but customers might appreciate its large capacity, moderate cost, and powerful management features." Read the full review.
Best of the blogs: Rpath may be looking to obviate Red Hat, but Matt Asay says that won't be happening anytime soon, in this post. "Still, there's a lot of value in tightly integrating an operating system to an application, so that you take one vendor/moving part out of the support equation. It will be interesting to see how Rpath plays out."
The news beat: StopBadware.org slaps AOL on the wrist and calls version 9 badware because it interferes with computer use and meddles with components, namely the IE browser. Google unwraps a Web-based Office rival compelete with several, but not all, of its services. And BMC whips up better batch management.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 28, 2006 04:52 AM
August 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
A new generation of automated backup solutions
Test center review: SonicWall's CDP 1440i provides customers with a choice between disk and data vault storage. It's the "first of what may be a new wave of personal and small-business automated backup solutions with optional off-site storage just a click away," points out Brian Chee. "Even if you just use the internal hard disk, you can still ... get a pretty darn nice restore system. Add the off-site storage, and you get truly inspired end-to-end backup-and-restore." Still there are some capabilities Chee would like to see added. Read the full review.
The news beat: Salesforce.com integrates Google Adwords so that customers can manage those marketing campaigns through Salesforce's CRM service. Sprint Nextel COO Len Lauer leaves the company while CEO Gary Forsee assumes control of operations. And Lenovo creates a new 'Center of Excellence' to monitor and improve its responsiveness to customers' needs.
Best of the blogs: Dell batteries are not the only recall for IT this month. Microsoft's Small Business Server R2, too, is being recalled, Oliver Rist reports in SMB IT. "In case you got your hands on it somehow and were thinking of upgrading -- don't."
Gripe Line: Evergreen services clauses from the likes of Protection One (and countless others) that require customers to pay for services months after cancelling them raise the question "what can any of us do about the money traps companies are setting for us in their fine print?"
Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 22, 2006 04:44 AM
August 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Best of the blogs: Paul Venezia has been using an MXI Security Outbacker MXP for months now and, contrary to most portable storage devices, he finds that the 2.5-inch 20GB drive with a fingerprint scanner is "a good solution for carrying around sensitive information."
Open source: IDC finds that, of those surveyed, open source is being used by 71 percent of the developers in the world, and is in production at 54 percent of their organizations, reports Dave Rosenberg in IDC on the impact of open source. Rosenberg lays out some more of IDC's findings as well. "None of this sounds new but it's always good to have analysts on your side."
Podcasts: In a conversation with Charlie Hoffman and Brian DeLacey, Jon Udell delves into the history of XBRL, how it relates to XML, and what the future holds in terms of XBRL's goals, successes and challenges. The real story, in Udell's words: The inherent complexity of accounting standards, the competitive forces at work in the realm of global finance, the regulatory pressure being brought to bear -- these and other factors form the context in which the development of XBRL must be understood.
The news beat: In what some are calling the largest of its kind in consumer electronics history, Dell recalls 4.1 million laptop batteries due to the potential fire hazard. CA says it will layoff about 1,700 employees as part of cost-cutting efforts. And the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs now plans to spend $3.7 million on encryption software.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 15, 2006 04:28 AM
August 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Storage: Brocade says it will acquire rival McData for $713 million. McData, the companies say, will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary that will help Brocade as it attempts to fend off Cisco's encroachment into the realm of storage area networking switches. The merger has Mario Apicella harking back to 2002 when nobody would have predicted this. "The difference is that today instead of a stand-still that similarity of body and mind between the two vendors becomes a reason to join forces," Apicella writes. "Is this the happy ending of that tale?"
Best of the blogs: Continuing his coverage of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Tom Yager reports that Apple elected to open the source for the x86 Darwin kernel. "I can say with absolute certainty that I had zero influence on Apple's decision; the decision predates my involvement with the issue. Not many truly understood why I made this my hill to die on, so fewer still will understand why I'm so elated at this news," he explains.
The news beat: Another PC housing veterans' data has gone missing with as many as 36,000 personal records. IBM unveils the entry-level System Storage DS4200 Express for SMBs. Open Text agrees to acquire Hummingbird, causing the latter to reject an offer it previously accepted from Symphony Technology Group. And Sony launches a Wi-Fi personal communicator, dubbed Mylo.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 8, 2006 11:03 AM
August 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Storage: Giving the product a 'very high on my check-this-out meter' ranking, Mario Apicella peers under the hood of emBoot's winBoot/i. "It's tempting to say that you could cover the cost of deploying winBoot/i with the cost of the drives spared on each server. However, I won't say that because the main reason to boot your servers from iSCSI volumes should not be to save money on drives, but to give your data center a more manageable and forward looking structure," Apicella writes in Giving Windows a boot to iSCSI.
Best of the blogs: Another Dell laptop has ignited and turned into a flamethrower after it began making popping noises, this time in Australia. This one follows on the heels of a fiery laptop in Illinois last week and another in Osaka, Japan last month. Dell owners, are you concerned?
The Screening Room: Episode #7 features Dr. Donald Thomas, who began his career as an engineer before turning to medicine. In host Jon Udell's words: The story this month is partly about the mTuitive toolkit, and partly about the tablet-based application that Dr. Thomas' company, Mentat Systems, is building on top of that toolkit. But mainly it's an exploration of two themes in the development of expert systems. First, what makes an expert system useful to the people it aims to support? Second, what makes a toolkit for building such a system useful to the developer who aims to provide that support? Watch the screencast.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 1, 2006 10:46 AM
June 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Special Report: What with more solutions available than ever before, NAS is becoming fast, cheap and scalable. And, with data growing in leaps and bounds, the new generation of NAS will be welcome in many an enterprise. Take Cedars-Sinai, for instance. The hospital opted for clustered NAS to save time analyzing and diagnosing and saving lives, as seen in this case study. There are times, though, when just plain NAS beats clustering. All the stories are wrapped into Special Report: The new face of NAS.
Columnists' corner: When even a major vendor like Sun Microsystems has to wade through intellectual property issues to drive its open source DRM, perhaps patent overload hinders open source innovation, points out Neil McAllister. "Open source licenses work with copyright law to ensure that code always stays freely accessible, but copyrights aren't the only kind of intellectual property in the software world. Patents can be equally troublesome; in fact, they can often be showstoppers for open source," McAllister explains.
The news beat: Yahoo enters enterprise waters with partner X1. Nokia and Siemens will merge telecom infrastructure units in a joint venture worth $19.9 billion. And a ruling by the FDA is seen as a boost for RFID.
Best of the blogs: "I'm growing a wee bit impatient with the major enterprise ISVs and their alleged support of open source," Matt Asay begins in Open Sources. The latest to do so: Oracle, with its content management for the masses, which Asay calls a "feature-weak, closed-source, closed standards CMS."
Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 19, 2006 04:40 AM
May 23, 2006 | Comments: (0)
An IT detective story, suffering standards, and Dell's PowerVault ML6000
SOA: Web serivces and, in turn, service-oriented architectures, are suffering from a standards problem. "There are too many standards, they are too confusing, and many of the standards, such as BPEL, don't work without a ton of proprietary enhancements. Indeed the WS-* standards are actually hurting the emerging SOA space, since there are so many and some are redundant and competing," writes Dave Linthicum. And he offers three suggestions to correct the problem, in The state of the stack: Where Web services standards are today.
Podcasts: A new episode of Storage Sprawl was posted this morning. Within, you'll hear a review of Dell's PowerVault ML6000 -- which the InfoWorld Test Center places among the new crop of tape libraries that are more modular and scalable, yet easier on the IT wallet. And the week in storage news.
Best of the blogs: Paul Venezia couldn't find a gkrellmd add-on for IPCop, so he put one together, based on gkrellm-daemon 2.2.5 and including the necessary glib2 2.4.7 libraries. Grab it right here.
Columnists' corner: IT folks sometimes wear many hats. Rarely, however, does a private investigator cap wind up in the back-office. But when the desktop support manager at a large telecom firm was asked to perform double-duty as a hardware inventory clerk, it became immediately clear that a thief was afoot. Suddenly, just when he was onto something, the tracking "wasn't going the way I expected -- although I guess one of the standard detective plots involves the PI suddenly finding himself cast as the prime suspect." When someone is stealing your hardware.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 23, 2006 10:58 AM
April 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
EMC, still on shopping spree, chases IBM
Storage: At its EMC World conference, CEO Joe Tucci says that "there are more companies on out hit list" for acquisitions, while the heads of two company divisions named IBM as EMC's chief competitor.
Personnel: Scott McNealy steps down as Sun's CEO, with the board of directors naming president and COO Jonathan Schwartz as his replacement, but company employees remain hopeful. Readers are voicing opinions in this Tech Watch post: With McNealy out, what should Schwartz focus on?
Test Center review: "If you think of server virtualization in terms of VMware, SWSoft Virtuozzo will turn that thinking around," begins Paul Venezia in Virtuozzo for Linux plays very well with others. That's not to say that it's a VMware killer, though.
The news beat: Microsoft debuts a beta of IE 7 that brings features to fight security problems. Cisco and Nokia join forces to create dual mode phones for VoIP, cellular handsets. NetCustomer offers migration services to Ingres. And IT is driving Ireland's diversity by providing a much-needed boost to the country's economy.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 25, 2006 06:46 AM
February 02, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Storage: Mario Apicella credits EMC for its perseverance. "Since the very first briefings I had with them years ago, EMC has been a relentless and vocal advocate of ILM (information lifecycle management)." Apicella conjures the old joke that "if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (Coincidentally, perhaps, once during an interview with EMC's former CEO Mike Ruettgers, he told me that same line.) Apicella comes around to a more serious question: Does the ILM reference get your attention, or is it a rather annoying and unwanted spin to a product announcement?
The news beat: Lenovo says it will offer notebooks armed for 3G wireless connectivity via Vodafone's network by the second quarter of this year, Microsoft now claims that the EU denied it rights in the antitrust suit, specifically access to files relating to the case, and U.S. lawmakers promise action against the sale of phone records.
Best of the blogs: Dave Rosenberg discusses how enterprise SOA apps are taking off on lightweight architecture, while Michael Baum wonders how hard is it to troubleshoot IT anyway? Jon Udell, meanwhile, cooks up a quick and dirty Google Maps mashup to accompany san.francisco.eventguide.com in Semantic screencraping.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 2, 2006 12:33 PM
January 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Columnists' Corner: While portable storage devices make the lives of end-users easier, the same cannot be said for the IT admins who support them. This can apply to a range of devices, points out Mario Apicella in Storage Insider. What's more, protecting tape drives won't prevent insider threats.
Quoteworthy: What business does Red Hat think it's in? -- Tim O'Reilly, as reported by Matt Asay in Open Resource, from SDForum's Open Source in the Enterprise summit.
Security: Backup vendors EMC and Veritas face security flaws in their software. EMC issues patches for Networker to fix the problems, which could enable unauthorized remote access or cause a system crash. Exploit code, meanwhile, has been released targeting a hole in Netbackup that Veritas plugged late last year.
Best of the blogs: Paul Krill proclaims in a Tech Watch post that "consolidation in the Web services management market clearly has arrived." The catalyst of his declaration is Progress Software's acquisition of Actional. Oliver Rist discusses event logs on a SOHO budget.
The news beat: Microsoft releases a JDBC driver for SQL Server 2005 to help developers link Java applications to the database. The Tokyo stock exchange admits it is having difficulty keeping up with market volumes, as a rapid jump in Internet trading is seen as the root of its problems. And a study finds that Google users in China find the search engine more frustrating to use than do U.S. surfers.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on January 19, 2006 11:09 AM
December 21, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Another storage merger to round out 2005
Storage: In what seems as if it could be the final merger of 2005, Seagate buys Maxtor for $1.9 billion. The companies say combining will enable them to expand the range of products they offer and to save $300 million per year.
Hardware: IDC projects that in 2006 PC growth will slow down a bit, but that it will still remain above the 10 percent mark. The third largest PC maker, Lenovo, recruits the former head of Dell's Asia-Pacific region to be its new CEO. Lenovo also announces that it is buying out its partner's stake in a mobile phone joint venture.
Best of the blogs: Dave Rosenberg's take on Google banning Kozoru from searching. Here is a hint: "I like Google search, but the blind faith really needs to stop."
Listen now to the audio companion for this blog. InfoWorld Daily Podcast: Enterprise technology in 5 minutes or less.
http://akamai.infoworld.com/podcasts/IFW_Daily_12-20-05.mp3
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 21, 2005 05:25 AM
December 01, 2005 | Comments: (0)
iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel: The battle that is not
Best of the blogs: While some folks are training iSCSI to be the contender that dukes it out with Fibre Channel, Mario Apicella writes in The Storage Network, iSCSI SAN products won't alter the landscape to the extent that many people would like to think. "This isn't an epic winner-take-all battle." The good news: It's the customers who come out on top. [Correction: Mickey McIntire, CEO of String Bean Software wrote the above in The Storage Network, which is open to outside contributors, pending approval by Mario Apicella at mario_apicella@infoworld.com.]
Mobile computing: Marxist in spirit, Fon is calling for hot spots of the world to unite, intending to "take this Wi-Fi mess and turn it into a Wi-Fi network." And AOL adds mobile search services that enable users to query just as they would from a PC.
The news beat: Microsoft is coming under increasing pressure from its Software Assurance customers to deliver Windows Vista in a timely fashion. EDS CEO Michael Jordan credits EMC head Joe Tucci with suggesting that EDS start its Agility Alliance partner program. Google mints a blog to foreshadow upcoming manifestations of Google Talk, and the European Information Society's commissioner says that the newly established .eu domain is as important as .com.
Hardware: Intel admits that it may experience more capacity constraints in 2006, and the chipmaker's CFO touts its manufacturing clout, insisting that its manufacturing operation is a cost-advantage rivals can't match.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 1, 2005 10:58 AM
November 10, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Security guru as tribal medicine man -- well, almost
Quoteworthy: Not surprisingly, many companies view their security guru pretty much like the way ancient tribal people saw their medicine man -- although perhaps with much less confidence these days. -- Mario Apicella, in Getting tough on data security.
Hot review: Hewlett-Packard takes a step down the right path toward network stability with its ProCurve Access Control Solution. The product, however, isn't quite to the level of providing a high degree of security and management at the network edge, writes contributing editor Paul Venezia, largely because of its preference for HP equipment. "Nevertheless, HP's work on open-standards infrastructure components is laudable, and it truly seems to have a desire to wrestle this access-control beast on behalf of network admins everywhere. If HP succeeds, the results should be outstanding," Venezia adds.
SOA: Following up on the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, David Linthicum posts the question What's a standard? Linthicum adds that it's never a good idea to "adapt" standards for particular purposes. Unless, of course, you're willing to abandon that standard altogether.
Best of the blogs: In the latest addition to our blog roster, IT Troubleshooter, Michael Baum joins the discussion about cultural and technical roadblocks to SOA by adding troubleshooting to the list. At stake is whether anyone really has a clear sense of what will be needed to actually fix problems with a services-oriented architecture once they arise.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on November 10, 2005 11:04 AM
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