RSSNews Analysis
NORAD Deploys Network For Watching Santa
Each December, NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command conduct a special mission, detecting, tracking and assuring the safe completion of an international flight that covers tens of thousands of miles in a 24-hour period. NORAD, you see, takes seriously the assignment of tracking Santa Claus. According to Army Major Mike Humphreys, of NORAD and US Northern Command Public Affairs, the annual project to track St. Nick falls naturally within the mission of NORAD. "We are constantly tracking the skies for man-made objects to defend and protect North America," he says, adding, "This is a bi-national command shared between US and Canada. The missions are aerospace warning and defense, and maritime warning. Obviously, tracking Santa falls within the aerospace warning space because [the sleigh is] a man-made object."
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Architectures
Case Study: The Value of Virtual I/O, New England Biolabs
When New England BioLabs realized that it had outgrown its 120 servers, it also soon discovered that options for physical expansion were limited and potentially costly--one option required the building of a tunnel. NEB provides enzymatic products for gene research and drug discovery and had housed its bioinformatics data center in an historic mansion. It was bursting at the seams; port utilization of its blade servers for networking and storage was at an unsustainable 99 percent. To address the problem, Thomas Peacock, IT architect at NEB, knew that the company's old 2U-per-server systems would have to go.
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Reviews & Workshops
Leostream Connection Broker Plays Well With VMs
The Leostream Connection Broker 6.0 is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product designed for organizations that have standardized on VMware ESX and VirtualCenter as their hypervisor and management infrastructure. We tested the software in our labs as part of our rolling review of virtual desktop management products.
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Blogs
Year End Transitions
December 23, 2009 4:27 PM
Posted by Howard Marks
While I'm usually a "Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night" kinda guy I'm feeling a little Grinchy as the end of the year brings more news from the walking wounded of the storage vendor community. I've already written about MAID pioneer Copan's slide, but this week brings unpleasant news from Verari and the long beleaguered pair of Overland and Adaptec, with a ray of hope coming from Exanet who had looked pretty dead the last time we looked.
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Are Storage Vendors Learning At Your Expense?
December 23, 2009 8:30 AM
Posted by George Crump
I was on a call the other day with a vendor who made a statement recalling their Solid State Disk (SSD) rollout that almost made me spray Mountain Dew all over my computer screen. They said, "We learned a lot about SSD when our customers started using them in our systems." Does that strike you as wrong? Shouldn't they know? What else are storage vendors learning at your expense?
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Deduplicating Replication - SEPATON
December 22, 2009 9:28 AM
Posted by George Crump
Sepaton is a pure VTL solution, meaning it is not available to backup to a NAS target like some of the other companies we have reviewed thus far. Sepaton is focused on enterprise data sets, which should be able to handle the challenges of a fibre attached backup device. They are also a grid or clustered based system, scalable to 16 nodes. Each node can perform deduplication as well as replication.
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'Twas The Day Before Audit
December 21, 2009 12:03 PM
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
'Twas the day before audit, and all through the net, all the sniffers were sniffing, the ACL's were all set. IDSs were tuned to cut out the noise, to catch hackers and crackers and steal all their toys. The servers were hardened and code all inspected while programmers fretted over SQL injected. Management hung around micromanaging us, while PCs where patched using WSUS.
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Citrix Receiver On Android: Your Desktop Anywhere
December 17, 2009 9:00 AM
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
Citrix's Receiver for Android is available as a Tech Preview (beta, don't use in production, etc) and runs on Android 2.0. Receiver, which Citrix expects to be out of Tech Preview and generally available by Q2 2010. Receiver is the company's universal client for desktop and mobile devices, providing a seamless remote application experience to end users regardless of where they are and what device they are using. Receiver on Android is surprisingly usable, given the Droid's relatively small screen compared to a netbook or small laptop. Receiver is also available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. Blackberry support is planned.
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Gridstore Puts Scale-out NAS In Reach Of SMBs
December 17, 2009 8:32 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
I've always been partial to scale-out storage systems based on the RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) model. If data grows faster than predicted, and it always does, I can just add another node or two to the cluster (or grid, cloud, fogbank or whatever the vendor wants to call it), and I never have to fire up the forklift for an upgrade. Now, an Irish startup, Gridstore, is taking the idea downscale by bringing the per-node cost of their SMB NASg to just $400.
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Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
Data deduplication is emerging as a critically important new arrow in the storage administrator's quiver to answer hard questions about the increasing problem in storage growth costs.
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists
Optimization is a fantastic way of saving money and creating really happy customers at the same time, but it doesn't work flawlessly for all applications.
WAN Optimization as a Managed Service: It's Not About the Cost
This insight examines how organizations outsourcing their WAN optimization initiatives to a third-party go about achieving their goals for application performance, reducing operational costs, and streamlining enterprise infrastructure.
