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 …

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 …

Most people in the storage industry have known Overland Storage for years as a manufacturer of some of the best tape loaders and libraries in the industry. Overland was also one of the first companies to make an affordable disk to disk backup device called the Reo, which quickly became an industry success. What you may not know is that with the acquisition of Snap Appliance, Overland has entered the NAS and iSCSI storage market place. With Overland’s excellent engineering and support teams this is sure to …

Storage virtualization is not a new concept – a number of vendors have been offering storage virtualization as an effective means of managing storage growth while extending the life of existing storage resources for sometime now. The challenge for many IT departments (and management) is to understand the true value that storage virtualization brings and to translate that value into real dollars.
“ROI” is one of those terms that is thrown around to demonstrate value. Tech Validate did a survey late last year of HDS end-users that quantified actual return on …