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FibreCAT provides three storage product ranges for the SME market. These comprise FibreCAT SX – a SAN-based storage system, FibreCAT NX – NAS-based file and print servers, and FibreCAT TX – automated tape devices. The SME market faces the same pressures, caused by rapidly growing data volumes, as large enterprises, but has fewer options available when selecting storage solutions. One of the strengths of the FibreCAT range of products is that it provides SMEs with storage solutions that would only have be…
Technology Audits - published 22/02/2008 - Sue Clarke
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CA Recovery Management provides data protection and recovery for organisations of all sizes through a number of flexible and interoperable solutions that comprise CA ARCserve® Backup and CA XOsoft™ WANSync™HA. Most organisations diligently perform regular back-ups, but many fail to ensure that they can restore data from their back-ups should the need arise. It is not until they need to recover data following a loss that they discover they have a problem.
Technology Audits - published 18/02/2008 - Sue Clarke
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A few years ago, it would have seemed unimaginable to mention storage and content management in the same sentence, let alone bracket them together under the same umbrella term.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Sue Clarke
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For Christmas I received a new, larger capacity, hard disk for my laptop. Before installing it, I took a back-up of my old 20 GB hard drive to an external disk. It took in excess of 12 hours! Even taking into account that the connection between my laptop and the external disk is USB – not the fastest of connections – this is still a long time and it brought home to me issues that organisations have; firstly, the length of time required to perform a complete back-up, and secondly, the problem of backing u…
OpinionWire Articles - published 17/01/2008 - Sue Clarke
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There is something of a resurgence of data protection as a service. With growth in data volumes not just affecting large enterprises but also SME organisations, there is a growing opportunity for service providers to provide data protection services to these smaller organisations that often struggle to adhere to regular back-up schedules.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 27/11/2007 - Sue Clarke
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Dell has announced that it plans to acquire storage vendor, EqualLogic in a US$1.4 billion cash deal. EqualLogic produces iSCSI-based Storage Area Network (SAN) systems, which enable SMEs to implement SANs using their existing Ethernet networks. EqualLogic’s technology will be integrated into future versions of the Dell PowerVault storage products, as well as being retained as a brand for current and future products. The deal is due to be completed during Dell’s fourth financial quarter or early in the f…
OpinionWire Articles - published 09/11/2007 - Sue Clarke
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There is much organisations can do to improve their storage utilisation, which will at the same time, make them ‘greener’. Organisations that still use direct attached storage typically have very low utilisation levels, and these can be as low as between 5% and 15% for individual applications. Even organisations with more efficient storage systems have a tendency to buy too much storage at a time, often purchasing up-front the storage resource that they estimate will be required for the entire lifetime o…
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/10/2007 - Sue Clarke
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Disk is becoming increasingly popular as a long-term storage medium for data that is being retained in increasing volumes. The major reason for this is that retrieval times from disk are much faster than from media such as tape or optical discs. The raft of regulations and legislation that many organisations are subject to, and the risk of litigation that affect many other companies are driving organisations to retain a higher percentage of their data, which means that data volumes are continuing to grow…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/10/2007 - Sue Clarke
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CommVault Simpana Suite provides a solution that encompasses all aspects of data management. 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. CommVault’s products address a problem that is faced by many organisations – that of having increasingly complex environments that are managed by an array of point prod…
Technology Audits - published 28/09/2007 - Sue Clarke
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New technologies and techniques are making it easier for organisations to protect their data without having to perform full back-ups. These include data deduplication, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), and Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Replication technology also eliminates the need for full back-ups as data is replicated on a frequent basis, even every time it changes. The back-up technologies themselves also reduce the need for full back-ups, such as the various types of snapshots available, including…
Butler Group Review Articles - published 06/09/2007 - Sue Clarke
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CommVault QiNetix Suite has been renamed as Simpana™. The suite uses a set of common services and a single code base to provide back-up, recovery, replication, archive, and retrieval capabilities. These capabilities are built on a Common Technology Engine, which provides a single underlying code base that has some inbuilt features such as data classification. I regard this single platform to be a major differentiator for CommVault, as it includes other benefits including a single management console, whic…
OpinionWire Articles - published 02/08/2007 - Sue Clarke
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Symantec’s new long-term vision is an integrated storage solution that goes under the title of Storage United. At the same time, the company is also reviving the VERITAS brand, which had largely disappeared following the acquisition of VERITAS by Symantec approximately two years ago.
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/06/2007 - Sue Clarke
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Storage virtualisation helps organisations to manage their storage resources more efficiently in order to achieve higher utilisation rates. It was developed predominantly to work in Storage Area Network (SAN) environments, where the high costs of implementing a SAN in the early days of this technology were compounded by poor utilisation rates.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/06/2007 - Sue Clarke
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As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, organisations are looking for ways of reducing the amount of data they need to store. Unfortunately, some technologies such as continuous data protection are actually increasing the amount of storage that is required. However, help is at hand as technologies are emerging to make data storage more efficient, and one such technology is data deduplication.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 31/05/2007 - Sue Clarke
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As high street retailers start to run-down their stocks of the once ubiquitous audio cassette tape, I consider the ramifications of a world where the life of data and information far outlives that of the media upon which it is stored.
OpinionWire Articles - published 10/05/2007 - Richard Edwards
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With a requirement to retain information for longer periods of time, in some cases in excess of 100 years for industries such as healthcare, organisations need to examine the options available for the long-term storage of data in light of the fact that some types of data will need to be readily available at all times.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 08/05/2007 - Sue Clarke
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It seems to me that we are continually being bombarded with predictions of the amount of information that organisations will be generating over the next few years, and the fact that most of this information will need to be stored. Many of these predictions are made by, or on behalf of, storage vendors wanting to sell more storage, but although the actual growth rates may be disputed, it is a fact that volumes of data and information stored by organisations are growing at a rapid rate. The two main reason…
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/03/2007 - Sue Clarke
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At the beginning of January 2007, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced that it had developed what it claims to be the first 1TB hard drive for the home market. The Deskstar 7K1000 provides a high capacity storage drive for games, photos, music, and home movies. HDS has increased the capacity by using perpendicular magnetic recording, rather than longitudinal. A spokesman describes the perpendicular technology as “recording the bits standing up” – in the past they have been laid across the disks. It is al…
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/02/2007 - Sue Clarke
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CommVault QiNetix comprises a number of components, which are built on a Common Technology Engine. These components provide data protection, recovery management, archive management, and data resource management, and they can be implemented in any combination. CommVault’s products occupy a technology area that is generally regarded to be storage related. However, the company feels that its products more accurately fit the title data management, as they do manage data. Whichever term is used, they address …
Technology Audits - published 05/01/2007 - Sue Clarke
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The use of tiered storage is becoming increasingly popular, driven by the need to meet often conflicting demands of information access, cost-reduction, regulatory compliance, and risk management. The proliferation of different disk, tape, and optical technologies in combination with new software solutions enables significant cost savings by matching the appropriate storage architectures to specific business requirements. However, a tiered storage strategy introduces new security challenges.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 01/12/2006 - Steven Tongish
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One of the messages that came out of the EMC Analyst event held in London last week was that the company will continue to make acquisitions to enhance its product line. The company has acquired more than 20 software companies over the last three years, evolving its business from a storage-only vendor to a company focused on delivering solutions for the entire information infrastructure. Acquisitions include Documentum, Legato, VMware, Smarts, nLayers, RSA Security, and network intelligence. It is, theref…
OpinionWire Articles - published 23/11/2006 - Mark Blowers
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Dell Inc. and Symantec Corp. have announced a new bundled service that will help smaller organisations with e-mail management. Secure Exchange is a package of hardware, software, and services designed to improve the security and archiving capabilities of their e-mail infrastructures, and to simplify the implementation of Microsoft Exchange. The bundle includes Dell PowerEdge servers, PowerVault storage, Dell/EMC Storage, Symantec Mail Security 200 Series, Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange, Sy…
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/10/2006 - Sue Clarke
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Despite several high profile cases of companies losing unencrypted data tapes compromising personal customer details, many large organisations are still failing to encrypt their back-up tapes. One reason for this is a lack of best practices for encrypting data, and the fact that organisations have no idea how to tackle the issue. To encrypt all data will invariably produce an overhead in terms of the window required to complete back-ups, and also in recovery times. Added to this is the fact that there ar…
Butler Group Review Articles - published 01/09/2006 - Sue Clarke
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In the past, much has been spoken about the convergence of SAN and NAS technologies. Whilst this can never happen – after all, they are different technologies – there is a move on the part of vendors to provide SAN and NAS storage within a single box. One vendor that has produced such a system is the start-up Pillar Data Systems. Pillar was founded in July 2001 with funding from Larry Ellison.
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/07/2006 - Sue Clarke
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