If you haven’t already, right now is the time to virtualize your storage environment. If you’re still unsure aboutthe value of storage virtualization, consider the following advantages:

Better Storage Utilization - With a virtual storage environment, you can get much better performance out of your disk sub systems by combining all those spindles that were previously dedicated to each server. Second, when you have all those resources combined, you can better allocate your capacity across your environment in addition to benefiting from technologies like dynamic capacity expansion and thin provisioning.
Easier to Manage Your …

The data storage market is about to enjoy one of the largest bursts in growth ever seen. Until today data growth and retention have been overlooked and ignored at several corporate levels. Many organizations lack any data retention policies. Documentation is needed to prove anything in court. It is also needed to protect companies that operate in risky industries. What about Governments, law firms and financial institutions how long should they keep data? Individuals and businesses alike are becoming “e-based” with everything they do including things as simple as sharing …

In the storage industry, we have come to accept the concept of RAID. We started with striped and mirrored drives and have evolved to striped drives with parity or dual parity. RAID6, the latest version of RAID to take over the thinking in the storage industry is not exactly a ground breaking storage revelation; we have merely added a second parity stripe to RAID5. While we now have the ability to survive a dual drive fault, we still face the rapidly growing issue of rebuild times.
One terabyte drives with rebuild …

Most IT departments understand the value of data deduplication but we’ll recap them here:
Less Disk – Data de-duplication reduces disk utilization by 90 percent or more.
Less Cost – With less disk, logically you spend less on disk but the savings extends to reduced power, space, and cooling requirements… and backup administrators spend less time managing backups
Faster backup, faster recovery, less media failures – For backups and virtualized environments, deduplication reaps huge, obvious benefits as backups and VMDK files are typically copies of data already. Since writing and reading from disk …

Email has become a data storage warehouse for many organizations. The size of email stores are growing exponentially. With a number of different regulations trying to cover email and data retention it’s important for an organization to adopt an appropriate archiving strategy. When adopting an archiving strategy there is one main question (and the most important question) that needs answered: Do you go with Software as a Service (SAAS) or an on-premise solution. Below are the four questions I would consider:

IT Staff – Does your organization have a good in house …