RSSNews Analysis
Get Out Your Checkbooks, The IT Recovery Is Here
Analysts from the research firm IDC say the IT economy will grow faster than the overall economy this year as the recovery from the recession builds. IDC forecasts information technology spending to grow by about 3 percent in 2010, modest by historical standards, but 1.5 times faster than the growth in the overall economy, said Stephen Minton, vice president of IT markets and strategies for IDC. Minton was one of a number of IDC experts who spoke Wednesday at the IDC Directions 2010 conference in Santa Clara, at which the Boston-based research firm shared its research on a wide range of IT topics.
More News Analysis
Architectures
Smart Grid Integration A Daunting Task As Green Energy Comes Online
As alternative green energy sources come online, power plants and energy distribution substations find their networks challenged by smart grid demands that call for rapid changes between traditional and alternative energy sources. System and network integration on a smart grid that manages hybrid energy sources is on technology road maps for virtually every utility company now, but a majority are still not diversified with alternative energy. Consequently, the prospect of integrating traditional and alternative energy systems with networks looms large.
More Architectures
Reviews & Workshops
Review: Vidyo Video-Conferencing
Vidyo provides a family of video-conferencing products that are designed to use the Internet rather than a private WAN to connect videoconferencing systems. Vidyo's product line includes a room system, VidyoRoom, as well as a PC client, gateway-to-SIP and H.323 devices, as well as a friendly administrative system. Vidyo uses off-the-shelf cameras and microphones that you can purchase anywhere. We tested VidyoRoom and several PC clients at Hippensteel Labs.
More Reviews & Workshops
Blogs
Recovering From RedoLog Corrupt Errors On VMware ESX/ESXi
March 11, 2010 2:50 PM
Posted by Jake McTigue
RedoLog corrupt errors are a common issue on VMware ESX/ESXi machines where machines are snapshotted and the datastore is allowed to run low on space. Use this step by step guide to get your machine back in business.
See all blogs by Jake McTigue
Brocade Shifts Ethernet Strategy
March 11, 2010 11:57 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
I must admit I was surprised when Brocade, in their quarterly earnings call last month, announced that while their total revenue and earnings were up, Ethernet sales were down almost 25 percent. Analysts were busy downgrading the stock, declaring the Brocade/Foundry merger a failure and generally decrying the foolishness of anyone that dared challenge Cisco in the market. Methinks they doth protest too much.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
The Battle For WLAN Differentiation
March 11, 2010 9:30 AM
Posted by Michael Brandenburg
The recent announcement that security vendor Fortinet is entering the enterprise wireless market highlights the ubiquitous availability of WLAN hardware. However, unlike the major players in the market, Fortinet does not have buildings full of RF engineers designing new radio hardware from the ground up. Today, just about any vendor can build (or have built for them) wireless access points based off of reference designs from the radio chip-makers. Add some controller and management software, and you have a basic wireless solution. The barriers for entry into the WLAN market are rapidly eroding, and when a products becomes a commodity, it usually lowers the price as new players and approaches appear in the space.
See all blogs by Michael Brandenburg
Issues With Automated Tiering
March 10, 2010 2:10 PM
Posted by George Crump
While the industry, myself included, has been busy extolling the virtues of automated tiering, it's important to understand that it's not a be-all-end-all for the storage manager. Certainly there is plenty to like but, there are a few caveats that you should be aware of. From a performance perspective most (if not all) automated tiering systems leverage SSD or RAM to accelerate I/O and reduce latency. The upside of this, as we have discussed, is that it provides an automated way for storage managers to take advantage of SSD. The downside is that the rest of the environment has to be fast enough to take advantage of it. Putting a really fast drive at the end of a wire is not necessarily going to deliver better performance.
See all blogs by George Crump
FalconStor And Violin Add SSD To NSS
March 10, 2010 9:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
While I had been waiting for FalconStor to add flash support to their Network Storage Server (NSS) storage virtualization software, I was expecting flash volumes off a Fusion-IO or TMS PCIe flash card with promises of automated tiering to arrive sometime before Snow White's prince. I was pleasantly surprised when the folks at FalconStor called to tell me they were aiming a little higher than that and using Violin's solid state memory array as a cache.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
IBM Reloads Enterprise Branding
March 9, 2010 3:00 PM
Posted by Alexander Wolfe
Global CIO's Bob Evans and I were talking with Rod Adkins, the senior vice president who runs IBM's Systems and Technology Group. That operation is Big Blue's Big Kahuna, accounting for $19 billion in annual revenues and including IBM's chip, server, storage and systems software businesses. Did I mention that Adkins is also responsible for IBM's global manufacturing, procurement and customer fulfillment operations? All of this is by way of saying that, when Adkins speaks, one should listen.
See all blogs by Alexander Wolfe
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.
