Some may disagree (or refuse to admit) that today we are dead in the midst of a significant paradigm shift as it relates to data storage.  What I am referring to primarily is “general purpose” data storage, the type of storage that 60% – 70% of the data at any given company could reside upon.
For years the storage industry was driven by the manufacturers.  As drive technologies improved, capacities increased, and companies began listening to the iSCSI story, storage manufacturers engaged in a bloody battle to develop and bring to …

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 …

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 …