Big Blue is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services that are the result of a $2 billion investment. A CNET article by Reuters, . Published on September 7, 2008 9:45 PM PDT.

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I have believed for sometime now that storage market will stay healthy for the foreseeable future no matter what happens to the broader economy in general and IT in particular in the short term. IBM has recognized the bullish future in storage market and is pitching new solutions focusing on virtualization, deduplication and solid state drives. Cool, isn’t it! I thought so, all these are amazing technologies designed to cut storage cost, and energy footprint of the data centers. The article also talks about EMC coming up with wholesome solutions, covering hardware, software and services around it. I think NetApp is also eyeing the same market, with increasing focus on virtualization and services offering to the enterprise client. This market is getting interesting by the day, and I think the pie is big enough for many players to survive, will see! As a storage experts, anything positive on this industry is really good news for us!

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Big Blue is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services that are the result of a $2 billion investment. A CNET article by Reuters, . Published on September 7, 2008 9:45 PM PDT.

read more | digg story
I have believed for sometime now that storage market will stay healthy for the foreseeable future no matter what happens to the broader economy in general and IT in particular in the short term. IBM has recognized the bullish future in storage market and is pitching new solutions focusing on virtualization, deduplication and solid state drives. Cool, isn’t it! I thought so, all these are amazing technologies designed to cut storage cost, and energy footprint of the data centers. The article also talks about EMC coming up with wholesome solutions, covering hardware, software and services around it. I think NetApp is also eyeing the same market, with increasing focus on virtualization and services offering to the enterprise client. This market is getting interesting by the day, and I think the pie is big enough for many players to survive, will see! As a storage experts, anything positive on this industry is really good news for us!

NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

>NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

I came across this article from NetApp on thin provisioning and found it very interesting. Growth in storage is a fact of life and the businesses today have to just learn to deal with them. Thin provisioning promises to increase capacity utilization and bring down the Total Cost of Ownership. NetApp has this great concept of FlexVol as part of ONTAP 7G which lets you allocate storage as you need it, a JIT (Just In Time) implementation for the storage world. The FlexVol virtualizes the underlying physical storage helping the administrator add capacities on demand.
If thin provisioning is so cool, is the NetApp the only vendor? Hardly. IBM has a similar product called SAN Volume Controller. Hitachi Data Systems has the TagmaStore product, EMC has Invista virtualization platform. This is a nice article documenting the birth of Invista and the challenges EMC faced with it.

>I came across this article from NetApp on thin provisioning and found it very interesting. Growth in storage is a fact of life and the businesses today have to just learn to deal with them. Thin provisioning promises to increase capacity utilization and bring down the Total Cost of Ownership. NetApp has this great concept of FlexVol as part of ONTAP 7G which lets you allocate storage as you need it, a JIT (Just In Time) implementation for the storage world. The FlexVol virtualizes the underlying physical storage helping the administrator add capacities on demand.
If thin provisioning is so cool, is the NetApp the only vendor? Hardly. IBM has a similar product called SAN Volume Controller. Hitachi Data Systems has the TagmaStore product, EMC has Invista virtualization platform. This is a nice article documenting the birth of Invista and the challenges EMC faced with it.