RSSNews Analysis
Riverbed Ramps Up Disaster Recovery
Riverbed's two new SteelHead appliance models, the 7050-L (low) and 7050-M (medium) add to the upper end of the company's appliance line, increasing WAN throughput and connection performance as well as enhancing disaster recovery fault tolerant options. The 7050-L lists for $179,995 and the 7050-M lists for $234,995 and will be available in Q1, 2010.
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Architectures
Humana Builds A Twenty-First Century Data Center For Healthcare
Healthcare costs face national scrutiny--and healthcare companies are responding with green data centers designed to deliver lower capital and operating expenses (CAPEX and OPEX).They are doing this by systematically reducing energy costs and by virtualizing away hardware and the costly software licensing fees that go with it. A case in point is Louisville, Kentucky-based Humana, Inc., a Fortune 200 corporation that employs 23,500 associates to market its health benefit consumer services in 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Humana decided in the mid-2000s to proceed with a green data center build that would not only deliver hard dollar savings over the long haul, but also be well-positioned for a business that has nearly tripled to 11.5 million participants over the past few years, making Humana the second largest Medicare prescription drug carrier in the United States and the most rapidly growing U.S. Medicare Advantage carrier.
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Reviews & Workshops
VDI Rolling Review: Wrap Up, Virtual Desktops Are For Real
Server virtualization is one of the few technologies that have managed to live up to its hype. Can its virtual desktop cousin do the same, or is VDI destined to fizzle out like a wet firecracker? Our forecast says VDI has a good future in enterprise IT. Here are our reasons why.
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Blogs
Wave Systems Rides The Wave Of Self-Encrypting Disk Drives
February 9, 2010 9:13 AM
Posted by David Hill
Protecting the confidentiality of data on mobile devices is an increasingly critical issue. For example, the loss or theft of laptop computers has led to numerous breaches of data privacy laws for exposing confidential information, such as Social Security and credit card numbers. Public admission of such a data breach is not only a matter of embarrassment and direct costs, such as notifying individuals of the thefts, but may also subject the company to fines and other sanctions.
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Converged Network Savings Less Than Expected
February 9, 2010 8:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
The proponents of converged data center networks, especially those in the FCoE camp, take it as an article of faith that their new network architecture will be less expensive than separate data and storage networks. When I sat down to figure out the real cost of connecting a server to the data center network, I was surprised that my FCoE configuration was just $300/server, or 5 percent, cheaper than using separate 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gbps Fibre Channel networks.
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Can You Afford 384GB of RAM? Or How Much is Too Much Memory?
February 5, 2010 4:00 PM
Posted by Howard Marks
When Cisco announced its UCS last year, I was impressed by the fact that the double-width blades could hold a whopping 384GB of memory. Now it's budget time here at DeepStorage Labs, and I'm figuring how much we're going to have to shell out for the pair of Nehalem servers we're adding to the lab in next few weeks. Turns out if you try to even get close to 384GB, you'll end up paying several times as much for memory as for the rest of the server.
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CommVault Delivers A Cloud-Enabled Platform
February 5, 2010 1:00 PM
Posted by David Hill
Everybody wants to go to heaven someday, but nobody seems to want to go now. Why so? Perhaps it's mere uncertainty. If we substitute the cloud for "heaven," the same seems to be true today. That is why it is so important for vendors to create products and services that can actually get clients to the cloud today while still keeping their feet on the ground. With that in mind, CommVault's ability to effectively extend its data management platform into the cloud provides a positive illustration that the cloud can provide real value today and not just someday. Such examples are important so that the cloud is not just dismissed as hype.
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Banning iPhones Leaves Money On The Table
February 5, 2010 10:30 AM
Posted by Michael Brandenburg
Like many others, I spent a couple of hours last week scanning through the gadget websites and feverishly refreshing my browser to get all of details of Apple's latest wonder, the iPad. Despite some critical panning from the pundits, gadget-friendly consumers will no doubt stand in line for hours to buy one when it ships in couple of months. For those talented folks in IT, the iPad release day will bring with it a chorus of users asking a single question: "Can I get my work e-mail on it?" While the path of least resistance for most administrators might be to simply say no, I would like to suggest that it's time to rethink any corporate-owned smartphone policies that still exist within your organization.
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We Still Need Storage Hardware Vendors
February 5, 2010 8:29 AM
Posted by George Crump
Let's face it, most storage hardware vendors are now really software vendors or at best integrators. They take their software stacks, buy storage hardware from an OEM and then integrate the two together. There are a few storage vendors that are adding additional value in custom ASICs, and some are customizing their software to take advantage of the hardware that they OEM. Most, though, are just loading their software on what is essentially an Intel server with external drive expansion capabilities.
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Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
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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.
