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During the last decade, a handful of start-up suppliers pioneered the development of storage systems that were highly virtualized, and automated many management tasks. During that period the storage market was consolidating around a handful of large suppliers, but this new wave of vendors bucked that trend and established itself as a major competitive force. It did this by offering storage products that provide clear advantages over incumbent technology.
Technology Audits - published 08/06/2010 - Tim Stammers
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Barracuda Backup Service is a hybrid solution that combines local backup of data to an appliance owned by the organisation but supplied by Barracuda Networks, with a storage subscription to replicate the data to Barracuda’s two offsite data centres via the cloud to provide disaster recovery. Many smaller organisations struggle to maintain regular backups and only discover that the backup process has failed when they need to restore data. They also struggle to create effective disaster recovery provision,…
Technology Audits - published 17/03/2010 - Sue Clarke
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Data Protector is an enterprise data backup and recovery solution from HP that works with both physical and virtual data centres. It is suitable for large as well as small and medium-sized organisations (SMEs), and fits easily into existing IT environments due to its high degree of interoperability with IT platform vendors. The product offers multiple methods of protection for VMware environments, and works best with HP storage hardware. It offers virtual full backups and data de-duplication, which reduc…
Technology Audits - published 15/12/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Sue Clarke
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Compellent Storage Center is an enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN), provided in a single box, that enables organisations to make significant savings through reduced storage management and administration time, higher utilisation levels, and lower capital expenditure. Mid-sized organisations have rapidly growing data volumes, but they have limited options when it comes to implementing efficient storage systems to manage this plethora of data. Storage Center includes many of the features associated…
Technology Audits - published 01/12/2009 - Sue Clarke
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The idea of offering storage backup as a service is not new as there were companies at the turn of the century offering such services. However, the development of cloud storage has resulted in the growth of a new generation of vendors providing managed storage. Barracuda Networks has a slightly different approach to the cloud backup service. It offers a hybrid solution that combines the backup of data internally on an appliance owned by the organisation but supplied by Barracuda, with a storage subscript…
OpinionWire Articles - published 26/11/2009 - Sue Clarke
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Given the current economic climate, IT departments, like everyone else, are under pressure to reduce costs. However, can they do this without compromising on data security or quality of service?
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Richard Blanford
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Traditionally Storage Area Networks (SANs) were complex Fibre Channel-based systems that were expensive and difficult for organisations to implement, which in the early days limited their adoption to the largest enterprises
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Sue Clarke
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DroboPro from Data Robotics is a business-class storage array, which is largely self-managing and self-healing, therefore requiring few technical skills to manage it. The needs of smaller companies are often ignored when storage vendors are designing new storage arrays, yet they have rapidly growing data volumes that need to be managed. DroboPro is an innovative solution that uses Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID™ to protect data in the appropriate manner either by using RAID (striping with single or dual parit…
Technology Audits - published 24/09/2009 - Sue Clarke
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DroboPro from Data Robotics is a business class storage array designed for Small-to-Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) with up to 100 employees, and departments or remote offices in larger organisations. It includes self-monitoring and self-healing capabilities with the aim of radically simplifying the management process, and is built on Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID™ virtualised storage platform, to provide high availability through protection against multiple concurrent drive failures and no-downtime capacity…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/08/2009 - Sue Clarke
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The Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 (ABR10) family of software solutions allows organisations to create server and workstation backups: either for rapid restoration in the case of a disaster, or for testing and development purposes. The ABR10 software portfolio provides backup capabilities for OS, data, applications, and settings, and the ABR10 Advanced Server Virtual Edition extends this technology to Virtual Machines (VMs). Product functionality is based on Acronis’ patented disk-imaging and bare-metal re…
Technology Audits - published 12/08/2009 - Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy, Stephen Mann
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Archiving has become a critical requirement for organisations that have rapidly increasing volumes of fixed content to retain, either for compliance purposes, or because it comprises business critical information.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/05/2009 - Sue Clarke
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CommVault Simpana Suite provides a holistic data and information management solution. There are a number of components, which are built on a Common Technology Engine and can be implemented in any combination. These components are: Data Protection, Data Archiver, Replication, Content Indexing and Searching, and Resource Management. Organisations increasingly struggle to locate data and information, particularly when they have distributed environments with multiple repositories. One of the strengths of the…
Technology Audits - published 21/05/2009 - Sue Clarke
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NetVault:Backup (NVBU) and NetVault:Real-Time Data Protector (NVRDP) are the core products of BakBone’s NetVault range of backup and recovery products. As awareness has grown of applications and data as critical resources, more organisations have come to appreciate the need to protect information via regular and automated backup processes, and some applications are now judged sufficiently vital to merit specialist information recovery facilities that minimise service outages. NVBU is a flexible, highly s…
Technology Audits - published 08/05/2009 - Alan Rodger
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A press release from General Electric Company (GE) has unveiled another stage in the evolution of optical storage. It has demonstrated an optical disc technology that will allow 500 gigabytes to be stored on a DVD-sized disc, an order of magnitude greater than today’s Blu-ray. The technology uses micro-holographics to store information in three dimensions through the entire volume of the disc instead of just on the surface layer. It seems quite likely that during the development of a market-ready product…
OpinionWire Articles - published 30/04/2009 - Rob Hailstone
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IASO IP Backup is a disk-to-disk backup solution, which has been designed to run over remote IP connections. Many large enterprises struggle to protect remote offices and laptops, whilst smaller organisations often lack the expertise to effectively back up their data. Small SoHo operations, and the consumer market, all too often fail to protect their computers at all, and with individuals now holding vast music and photograph libraries on their PCs the data is increasingly valuable. The client-side data …
Technology Audits - published 20/04/2009 - Sue Clarke
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Double-Take Software, Inc. is a provider of software solutions aimed at protecting business-critical applications, including custom and home-grown, and thereby ensuring business continuity. Double-Take products are a key element in an enterprise-wide High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) strategy and offer capabilities for replication, failover, and failback. Butler Group likes the Double-Take approach to replication where byte-level changes in the production server’s system state are replicated…
Technology Audits - published 03/04/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
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Transactional Content Management (TCM) is the latest buzz phrase to hit the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor community. It can be described as a special discipline within ECM and several of the ECM vendors are providing TCM capabilities.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 05/03/2009 - Sue Clarke
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The technology areas of content management and storage are continuing to converge.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/01/2009 - Sue Clarke
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Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite provides a set of High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) software solutions to ensure business continuity. These solutions provide high availability or disaster recovery for business-critical applications such as e-mail, mobile, and database systems even if an underlying IT system has failed. Included as a part of the offering is an Application Management Framework, which continuously monitors these applications in real time, leverages a set of pre-define…
Technology Audits - published 02/12/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
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Unless organisations replicate all of their data to a disaster recovery site at a separate location to their data centre, they should ensure that at least their latest back-ups are stored off-site.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/11/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Back in August this year, IBM demonstrated the results of Project Quicksilver, which involved the transfer of data using Flash solid-state technology along with IBM’s storage virtualisation functionality. Data was transferred at a sustained rate of over one million Input/Output (I/O) operations per second, which according to IBM, outperforms the fastest disk storage by over 250%; the response time was under one millisecond (ms). The company has now applied this storage technology to data warehouse enviro…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Networks (SAN) are now maturing. However, despite organisations rolling out SANs across the data centre eliminating the islands of information that were a feature of early SANs, IT administrators still need to maintain two sets of networks: one for storage and the other for data network traffic.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/10/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Earlier this month Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced its next generation range of storage systems, the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 Series, for the mid market. According to the company, AMS provides higher levels of operational efficiency than are usually found in mid-range storage systems, and they deliver improved performance, connectivity, scalability, reliability, and ease-of-use. One of the characteristics of the new range is its ability to scale to meet the requirements of mid-ra…
OpinionWire Articles - published 23/10/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Cloud storage is gaining traction as organisations once again look to outsource storage provision.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 15/10/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Server virtualisation is the killer application for iSCSI. While this sounds like just another aggressive sound bite, the reality is that the facts back it up.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 15/10/2008 - Laurence Lock Lee
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