A Wave of Storage Products Hits Dallas

More new storage products, upgrades, enhancements, and line extensions, along with the usual bells, whistles, and press release buzzwords may be introduced this week in Dallas than at any other time of the year as storage professionals and vendors gather for one of the industry largest tradeshows.

Tech builders, ranging from the smallest startup to the largest systems vendors, will have their wares on display in the hopes of attracting the attention of IT managers and storage administrators looking for new tools to help them deal with the growing complexity of their infrastructures as they seek to improve the management and availability of the exploding volume of data they must store and protect.

It can be hard to know what is significant and important when so much is being thrown up against the wall. It may not be clear what sticks until three or six months down the road, after businesses start testing new hardware and software and services to see if they truly deliver what they promise and, if they do, whether they actually solve a real-world problem at an affordable price.

Some of the trends seem clear. More vendors are promising enterprise-level capabilities in smaller, cheaper, and easier to use packages that are designed to appeal to small and mid-sized businesses seeking to control storage volumes that are rapidly growing into multiple terabytes. At the high-end, more power and performance is being offered to manage petabytes of data. And the hot buzzwords are everywhere: virtualization, clustering, file virtualization, data de-duplication, encryption, automatic data migration and tiering, e-discovery, solid-state drives, "green" spin-down disks, and much more.

The following is a brief description of some of the more interesting new storage products being introduced this week. We will have follow up stories as the week progresses.