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News Analysis
Arts College Designs High-Tech Network For Voice, Data And Video
Known for its art, design, architecture and film studies, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) may not be what comes to mind first when thinking of high-tech campuses. However, the private college has built a savvy, high-speed IP network that supports thousands of students and faculty across multiple campuses, including a multitude of applications including voice, rich media, high-definition video, computer clusters, or render farms built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI) and more.
More News Analysis
- Chelsio Builds End-To-End Storage Offering
- Symantec To Offer Hosted Medical Image Archiving
- Quantum Adds Deduplication To StorNext 4.0
- IT Executives Have Better Handle On SSD's In 2010
More News Analysis in Storage & Mgmt Channel »
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.
More Architectures
- CYA: Cover Your (Vendor) Agreements
- Full Disk Encryption Evolves
- Long-Term Storage & Compliance: CAS Vs. Locked NAS
- An Interview With Simon Crosby, CTO Of XenSource
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Reviews & Workshops
Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d: One Snazzy NAS
Feature-rich SMB and home office multi-terabyte storage products are falling below $1000, and these NAS devices support a variety of file protocols, are easy to install and manage, and now, don't cost an arm and a leg to run. The ix4-200d, which ships with 2, 4 or 8 TBytes, stacks up against storage NAS products like the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 or the QNAP TS-439, though the TS-439 has some more advanced features such as front removable drives and more RAID levels. After several months of testing and use, we can say Iomega delivers on its promise of a low-cost SMB NAS.
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Blogs
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.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
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.
See all blogs by George Crump
Deduplicating Replication - Atempo
February 4, 2010 11:00 AM
Posted by George Crump
Enterprise Backup Software manufacturer Atempo has entered the deduplication marketplace, as have a growing list of other software manufacturers. Hopefully, we can cover all or most of them in future entries. Atempo has integrated deduplication as part of its Time Navigator agent software that is installed on a server to be backed-up. Atempo deduplication is source-side, meaning not only does it reduce the amount of data stored on disk, it also reduces the amount of data transferred across the network. The agent that includes deduplication has been available for Linux, Macintosh, Windows, AIX and HP-UX operating systems. They recently added support for Solaris, Windows 2008 and Windows 7.
See all blogs by George Crump
NAS Commoditization
February 2, 2010 3:09 PM
Posted by George Crump
Does basic office productivity application data like spreadsheets, word processing and presentation files belong on a purpose-built NAS? Most NAS systems are now tuned to deliver high-performance storage I/O for applications like VMware, Oracle and large processing type of environments. Most are well worth the expense if the increased I/O can increase productivity or response time for customers but often are overkill for basic office productivity data.
See all blogs by George Crump
Is D2D2C The Next Big Thing In Backup?
February 2, 2010 9:30 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
Today CommVault announced that their Simpana integrated backup and archiving software can now use public cloud providers in addition to local disk and tape as a data store. I hope that CommVault is, as they were with deduplication, leading a new wave of disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C)backup and archive solutions. While I firmly believe that there's a lot of life left in tape, especially for long retention archives with relatively low access rates, 25 years of consulting to organizations has taught me that tape drives, like backhoes and other heavy equipment, should be left to trained professionals. Small and even mid-size organizations rarely handle tape properly, leaving them exposed to data loss.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
A Private Cloud Is Called IT
February 2, 2010 9:00 AM
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
The title of this blog comes from a sentence penned by Steve Duplessie in Why the Cloud will Vaporize, and it's a sentence that really speaks to me. Duplessie writes an evocative article about the cloud market, but he made a few points on the benefits of cloud services and then wrote that little nugget, which I want to expand on. Whether you call it private cloud or a data center, the automation technologies and processes that are being developed for cloud services will trickle down into your data center and that's good for everyone.
See all blogs by Mike Fratto, Editor
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.
