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Live From SNW: Page 3 of 10

Enough whining and complaining. Permabit continues to march forward with its disk-based archiving solution, with a focus on improving performance and being ever watchful of the price per GB. Expect them to crack the $3 per GB barrier soon. Disk Archive is one of the few storage optimization technologies that also increase IT efficiency, something I will be harping on quite a bit over the next few blog entries.

Speaking of efficiency, Virtual Instruments is tackling an angle of storage and server virtualization that seems to get lost in the conversation -- performance. While there are a few good tools for managing capacity, there are not many that address I/O capacity and can tell you from a performance perspective which virtual machine should go on which virtual host and where in the SAN should that host be connected.

Not having this information makes it tough to virtualize what I call the hard stuff. So far, virtualization has been about virtualizing test and development more so than Exchange and SQL. Tools like this allow you to know what workloads should be placed on which hosts and then monitor them for I/O issues.

Storserver was next up. They are an interesting company that has attempted to make Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) an SMB product by putting it onto an appliance and improving the interface. What users get is a turnkey appliance that is ready to take over the data protection process.

What Storserver is highlighting here is the ability to improve TSM's VMware protection capabilities by taking a lot of the scripting out of the VMware Consolidated Backup-to-TSM integration process. More importantly, it has designed a specific interface just for the VMware admin to back up and restore its particular machines. Considering that many times the VMware administrator is also in charge of the backups of that environment, that approach may capture some attention. The company has also made the VMware module available to stand-alone TSM customers as well.