News

Storage

August 23, 2007 23 Aug'07
Fibre Channel director face-off: Brocade vs. Cisco Part 2

In the second part of our face-off we investigate other directors, and answer your most frequently asked questions about directors.
August 12, 2007 12 Aug'07
Storage basics

From the pages of Voice & Data, Simon Sharwood explores storage basics for businesses about to take their first steps into dedicated storage equipment.
August 08, 2007 08 Aug'07
New iSCSI SAN/NAS box touts better performance

Agami's new low-end iSCSI SAN/NAS box is pricier than other scaled-down offerings, but has a few more high-end features
August 05, 2007 05 Aug'07
Disaster recovery outsourcing: Simple and cheap

Outsourcing disaster recovery efforts can be smart for SMBs.

August 01, 2007 01 Aug'07
Kent Police pick San for back-up, explore virtualisation

Kent Police have bought a £120,000 EqualLogic storage area network from Infrasys to manage "exponential growth" of the force's data storage needs. Not only is it saving incremental costs now, but the force expects the system to pay for itself within...
July 31, 2007 31 Jul'07
Make an iSCSI SAN with a USB key

An intriguing open source technology lets you turn old servers and their direct-attach storage into a NAS or SAN.
July 30, 2007 30 Jul'07
Users make iSCSI SANs with USB keys

Users say that Open-E's iSCSI SAN software, which is delivered on a USB stick, is more affordable than prepackaged systems and has more support than free iSCSI target products.
July 26, 2007 26 Jul'07
Riverbed extends WAFS to laptops

Steelhead Mobile installs on workstations without an onsite appliance. Users say they'd like to see better integration between the mobile and data centre versions of the product.
July 24, 2007 24 Jul'07
IBM Australia to expand storage-as-a-service faciilties

Big Blue says customer demand for outsourced storage will see it bolster its local on-demand facilities.
July 23, 2007 23 Jul'07
LeftHand refreshes iSCSI SAN software

Version 7.0 of LeftHand's iSCSI SAN software contains dozens of new features, including support for four-way replication and brushed-up thin provisioning.

July 16, 2007 16 Jul'07
EMC upgrades hardware range, goes green - UPDATE

EMC has upgraded its five main hardware lines, introduced power-saving technology and hinted at enhancements to its data de-duplication tools.
July 16, 2007 16 Jul'07
Sun reveals open appliances

EMC has upgraded its five main hardware lines, introduced power-saving technology and hinted at enhancements to its data de-duplication tools.
July 08, 2007 08 Jul'07
RFID still faltering despite technology improvements

CHEP director of information systems Murray Fane is keen on RFID's promise, but concedes that many CIOs are still finding it hard to justify.
June 28, 2007 28 Jun'07
Data migration tool purchase considerations

This chapter of the Tiered Storage Buying guide focuses on specific considerations for data migration tools.
June 28, 2007 28 Jun'07
WA Newspapers upgrades to virtual tape

West Australian Newspapers needs to backup two terabytes of data each week, a task it finds much easier thanks to a new virtual tape library.
June 28, 2007 28 Jun'07
Temp agency moves hundreds of terabytes to iSCSI SAN

Adecco replaces 120 TB of Fibre Channel storage with an iSCSI SAN from LeftHand, including storage for large production databases; Exanet adds search; NetApp unleashes Topio.
June 24, 2007 24 Jun'07
First in, best dressed?

Telephony company Link Communications Group bought storage from EqualLogic before the vendor had opened its doors in Australia. The company's Vice-President of Global Engineering explains why the organisation took this risky-looking move.
June 12, 2007 12 Jun'07
LUN management at the heart of SAN configuration

Disk drives are the foundation of modern data storage, but operating systems cannot use physical storage directly. The physical drive must be translated into a logical space that an operating system sees as a linear address space comprised of ...
June 12, 2007 12 Jun'07
Symantec wants your disks

NetBackup 6.5 is being pitched as the one tool you need to manage all your disk, no matter what kind of hardware you own
June 04, 2007 04 Jun'07
Sensis replaces EMC with NetApp?

Has NetApp pulled off a coup in one of Australia's largest storage users?
May 29, 2007 29 May'07
Brocade buffs WAFS, virtualisation

Brocade has previewed a range of enhancements to its products that should become available in June
May 28, 2007 28 May'07
EqualLogic banks on simplicity, price to make local inroads

EqualLogic arrives in Australia hoping to shake up the SAN scene with easy adminstration and low prices for mid-tier businesses
May 20, 2007 20 May'07
Moonwalk's plans to float over the chasm

Australian storage company Moonwalk has big plans. Simon Sharwood explains how it hopes to take over the world!
May 17, 2007 17 May'07
Australia's Moonwalk takes on the storage world

Australian company Moonwalk has come from nowhere to become one of the worldâ€™s hottest storage management companies. Simon Sharwood tells how it has achieved that status.
May 15, 2007 15 May'07
COMMENTARY: What EMC didn’t say at ‘Inform’

EMC's Inform event hit Sydney yesterday. But what did it really mean for storage professionals?
May 08, 2007 08 May'07
ISCSI TCP/IP TOE card specifications

One means of improving iSCSI traffic performance is to include TOE (TCI/IP Offload Engine) capability on the Ethernet card itself. An iSCSI TOE allows the network adapter to process iSCSI traffic (often all Ethernet LAN traffic) locally -- relieving...
April 26, 2007 26 Apr'07
Spectrum Data shoots for the stars

In Part Two of our profile of Perth storage leader Spectrum Data, Simon Sharwood learns how about the work the company is performing for NASA.
April 26, 2007 26 Apr'07
UPDATE: Storage Networking World cancelled

The decision to move Storage Networking World to a one-day format - and resulting drop-off in sponsor interest - seems to be behind the cancellation of this year's event.
April 25, 2007 25 Apr'07
Spectrum Data digs a whole new niche

Perth's Spectrum Data has become a world leader in the storage industry, thanks to its understanding of how to extract data from near-extinct tape drives. Today, Simon Sharwood explains the company's origins and services.
April 10, 2007 10 Apr'07
Capacity planning tools require serious purchase consideration

Capacity costs money, and new disk acquisitions stand out as a notable part of every IT budget. The trick is to match new capacity with actual storage needs. Gauging storage needs over time is one of the biggest challenges faced by IT administrators...
April 10, 2007 10 Apr'07
Capacity planning software specifications

Gauging storage needs over time is one of the biggest challenges faced by IT administrators, and a new generation of capacity planning tools is emerging to help forecast growth and utilization of storage resources, and even perform predictive ...
April 02, 2007 02 Apr'07
Quantum boosts SAN virtualization

Quantum has enhanced its SAN file system to aid virtualization.
March 25, 2007 25 Mar'07
EMC prepares storage 2.0

EMC is developing new types of storage suited to the needs of Web 2.0 companies and says the technology involved will differ from the approach used in its current products.
March 22, 2007 22 Mar'07
EMC CEO Tip hat on future storage plans

At a media event in Sydney, EMC CEO, Joe Tucci said the company is working on storage tuned to the needs of Web 2.0 apps and also plugged the company's deduplication product.
March 18, 2007 18 Mar'07
Sun gets hot about 'Storvers

Sun thinks the mutant offspring of a server and NAS device could be the next big thing in storage!
March 06, 2007 06 Mar'07
EMC Australia creates new IP storage team

EMC Australia believes medium-sized organisations are ready for a new tier of infrastructure to unlock access to unstructured data.
March 05, 2007 05 Mar'07
SAN and WAN means happy holidays

Resort operator Voyages has installed three new SANS as part of a storage consolidation project aimed at improving your next holiday.
February 26, 2007 26 Feb'07
How to buy continuous data protection

Continuous data protection is a new and powerful concept, expressed in more and more products each day. This exclusive guide offers advice on how to shop for those products.
February 22, 2007 22 Feb'07
Google ups mailbox size

Google has increased the online storage for its Gmail to 10G for the new enterprise version of its hosted applications service.
February 22, 2007 22 Feb'07
Remote backup: Plan for your WAN

Our remote backup feature concludes with a look at one important tool you may overlook when you plan to protect your off-site data.
February 21, 2007 21 Feb'07
Queensland school recovers in real time

Ferny Grove High School in Queensland has adopted recovery solutions from StorageCraft, with impressive results.
February 21, 2007 21 Feb'07
Remote backup Day Four: What hardware?

Your remote offices need storage hardware. But how to decide what hardware? Part four of our series offers some options.
February 20, 2007 20 Feb'07
Remote backup: Software secrets

In day three of our series on Remote Backup, we examine software's role in ensuring your data remains safe.
February 19, 2007 19 Feb'07
WAFS helps with weightier matters

Online backup has its limits. Wide Area File Services blows them away, as we explain in part two of our series on remote office backup strategies.
February 18, 2007 18 Feb'07
CDP platform purchase considerations

Busy IT organizations are employing continuous data protection (CDP) technologies to guard data on the fly, essentially eliminating the backup window and allowing granular file and system restoration -- sometimes down to the individual disk write ...
February 18, 2007 18 Feb'07
Watching your remote back(up)

Your corporate headquarters has all the big iron needed to secure your data. But what about your remote offices? In this new series, we explore the different techniques you can use to keep your remote office securely stored.
February 18, 2007 18 Feb'07
CDP platform specifications

Continuous data protection (CDP) products track changes to files and data -- typically in real time -- recording activity and allowing recovery to an extremely granular level. This effectively reduces backup windows and restore points, allowing busy...
February 11, 2007 11 Feb'07
NAS appliance purchase considerations

NAS appliances are frequently touted for bringing convenience and simplicity to network storage. Appliances include their own dedicated disks for storage and RAID, and most NAS appliances can be upgraded with more or larger disks for additional ...
February 07, 2007 07 Feb'07
Archives overview

When a file is lost due to user error, or data is corrupted because of system problems, the affected data can be restored from a backup. An archive is different from a backup because the data may not be used for months, even years, but must be ...
February 05, 2007 05 Feb'07
EMC CEO postpones Australia visit

EMC Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Joe Tucci has postponed his first-ever visit to Australia.
February 02, 2007 02 Feb'07
Trio targets midrange with new arrays

EMC, IBM and Dell have all hit the market with new storage arrays aimed at mid-sized users.
January 24, 2007 24 Jan'07
ISCSI SAN grows in the midmarket and enterprise

ISCSI SAN carries SCSI commands and storage traffic over existing IP networks to address traditional SAN problems. Transporting "SCSI over IP" leverages ubiquitous Ethernet networks that translates to lower cost, easier maintenance and simpler ...
December 17, 2006 17 Dec'06
NAS gateway purchase considerations

NAS gateways overcome the inherent limitations of scale and flexibility by utilizing externally connected storage as external standalone disk arrays. NAS storage capacity is typically expanded by simply adding more disks to the appliance, but this ...
December 14, 2006 14 Dec'06
NAS gateway specifications

A NAS gateway offers file-based accesses to external storage on a disk array -- or a SAN, where users can take advantage of superior performance and reliability while maintaining a level of simplicity. Since storage is moved off of the NAS device, ...
December 07, 2006 07 Dec'06
NAS management software specifications

Network attached storage (NAS) appliances and gateways must be configured and managed using NAS management software that allows administrators to allocate space, manage RAID and storage behaviors, perform routine maintenance, and other tasks. ...
December 07, 2006 07 Dec'06
NAS management software purchase considerations

Typical NAS management software might automatically discover a vendor's storage resources in a network, manage and adjust RAID configurations, back up NAS contents to standard backup software, track storage utilization and offer capacity growth ...
November 30, 2006 30 Nov'06
Gartner: Existing business continuity plans will fail in a pandemic

Existing business continuity plans will not protect a company during an avian flu pandemic, says a Gartner analyst. Business continuity plans assume a geographically specific disaster, while a pandemic will strike everywhere nearly simultaneously.
November 28, 2006 28 Nov'06
HP enters Australian storage as a service market

HP has launched a storage as a service offering in Australia, promising to reduce recovery time objectives to as little as eight hours.
November 27, 2006 27 Nov'06
Virtualisation buying guide [Day Three: Building a virtual SAN]

SANs have proven invaluable in enterprise storage deployment; however, administrators must frequently overcome scaling, managing and troubleshooting issues. Large SAN architectures are often broken down into one or more virtual SANs (VSAN), which ...
November 26, 2006 26 Nov'06
HBAs prop virtualisation

N_Port ID Virtualisation enables you to determine which applications run on specific hardware and even when they run.
November 26, 2006 26 Nov'06
Virtualisation buying guide [Day Two: Virtualisation software examined]

Deploying software on a server or dedicated appliance is often easier for smaller organisations, but the actual product choice demands careful consideration. Now that you've reviewed the essential issues involved in any virtualisation product, this ...
November 23, 2006 23 Nov'06
Virtualisation buying guide [Day One: Why virtualise]

Virtualisation alleviates traditional storage growth problems by implementing a layer of abstraction between applications and physical storage, allowing storage to be combined and treated as a ubiquitous resource, regardless of location. This ...
November 23, 2006 23 Nov'06
Commentary: We've never met a "thought follower"

A couple of days back, a vendor tried to convince us that their new security consultancy services should be of interest to you, our readers.
November 08, 2006 08 Nov'06
NetApp emphasizes software, security

Network Appliance has updated its product line, but only one of its new announcements describes a new hardware product.
November 05, 2006 05 Nov'06
Backup apps -- How newer storage backup products compare, page 3

Newer and not-so-familiar backup products may offer some functional and operational advantages over the big three backup programs.
October 31, 2006 31 Oct'06
HDS pushes virtualisation benefits, citing Vic health win

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has won a contract worth nearly $10 million with The Victorian Department of Human Services (DHS), which will use the company's Universal Storage Platform to manage, data across its heterogeneous storage systems.
October 23, 2006 23 Oct'06
EMC revamps hardware line

Tired of being asked about its software strategies, the storage giant fires back with a massive refresh of its hardware lines.
October 19, 2006 19 Oct'06
EMC to bake security into everything, boost consulting efforts

In a TechTarget Australia Exclusive, EMC's President for Asia-Pacific and Japan reveals the company's plans to release the first products using RSA technology in Q1, 2007.
October 17, 2006 17 Oct'06
What can providers do? Online storage dissected Part 5

Analyst Forrester suggests that storage service providers are on the way back. But what can they do for your business? In the last of our series exploring online storage, we explore the services to expect from your online service provider.
October 16, 2006 16 Oct'06
The return of outsourcing? Online storage dissected Part 4

Demand for online storage from has meant a resurgence among external service providers which, as we discover in part four of our series, can now meet customers needs as never before.
October 12, 2006 12 Oct'06
The reseller's friend? Online storage dissected Part 3

IT services organisations have their eye on online storage as a way to save time and money for their small business customers. Part three of our online storage report explains why.
October 11, 2006 11 Oct'06
Breaking up is easy to do? Online storage dissected Part 2

What can online storage do for your business that your own kit cannot? In part two of our exclusive report on this new technique, we offer some online storage scenarios.
October 09, 2006 09 Oct'06
Home in the cloud? Online storage dissected Part 1

The idea of storing your precious data in a giant data centre where multiple redundant facilities provide more protection than you could ever hope to afford is surely tantalising. And that's the promise of online storage. In this exclusive ...
October 04, 2006 04 Oct'06
ISCSI gains strength from servers

More powerful servers are helping ease some performance concerns for users considering IP SANs, but others say they still want to see more improvement.
September 16, 2006 16 Sep'06
Universities lean on each other for better disaster recovery

As another school year begins, colleges and universities are opening their doors to each other in order to get enterprise-level disaster recovery plans working.
July 31, 2006 31 Jul'06
Real life experiences: Lessons learned in disaster recovery planning

Debbie Schwartz shares the lessons she has learned in keeping disaster recovery implementations up-to-date with new and changing business needs.
July 31, 2006 31 Jul'06
Disaster recovery, security drive financial firm to Private IP

A Florida financial firm picked a Private IP line to connect its 43 branch offices, build a disaster recovery site, and secure customer information. Also, the company will now have fewer management headaches.
July 26, 2006 26 Jul'06
Archiving made uneasy by lack of metadata

Lack of metadata standards makes it hard to create and retrieve archives.
July 24, 2006 24 Jul'06
Disaster recovery report card: Measuring your company's disaster recovery profile

Disaster recovery planning is challenging because you don't know what you're planning for or how well your disaster recovery plan will hold up in the face of an emergency. Use this report card to measure your disaster recovery plan and identify ...
June 07, 2006 07 Jun'06
CDP overview

Storage volumes are growing at an alarming pace, and tape-based backups are not always possible within an available backup window. Today's businesses are increasingly focused on tighter RTO and RPO. Faster restorations and more recent recovery ...
May 15, 2006 15 May'06
Tape and disk encryption product roundup

With tape and disk encryption products becoming more popular, storage administrators have more options in how to protect sensitive information at rest in the data center and in flight across public networks.
June 26, 2005 26 Jun'05
Remote backup services get affordable

Remote backup services, traditionally reserved for major banks and cash-rich Fortune 500 companies, are now available to small and midsized businesses.
June 06, 2005 06 Jun'05
NAS buying Tip: Common sense approach to buying NAS

I am often asked by end users what NAS they should buy? My answer always surprises them. The answer is usually the same with minor variations: "It depends."
March 17, 2005 17 Mar'05
Pros and cons of remote mirroring for DR

Remote mirroring takes place over MAN or WAN distances. It's usually between storage arrays or storage appliances, and can be synchronous or asynchronous.
December 30, 2004 30 Dec'04
Archive: Bits & Bytes column library

Bits & Bytes column library archive -- 2003 to 2004
June 24, 2003 24 Jun'03
HP unveils five new storage services

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled services designed to assist clients with the management and implementation of storage systems.