StorageEssentials

The storage market is thriving despite a tough economy, as exploding digital information growth has forced customers to add more capacity and upgrade to newer storage systems that are faster and more efficient, analysts say.

Enterprises are being stranded by a lack of managed storage offerings and a shortage of IT skills according to experts.

The little USB stick on your keychain and the memory in your iPod is fueling a revolution in the enterprise storage world.

IBM has quietly released the first technology from its acquisition of XIV, the Israeli grid storage start-up headed by a former EMC guru, but the product appears to lack some high-end features and is targeted at only a very limited set of customers.

With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, we decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?

Although you often find statements that seem critical of disk drives in this column, I never criticize disk drives per se, but rather how we use them. As of late, I've been interested in the innovative use of disk drives in storage arrays. The latest news from Xiotech fits right into this discussion, providing further proof that the storage industry is fast turning evolution into revolution in rethinking its approach to disk drives.

Aaron Martin likes to plan ahead. One year ago, the IT manager at Loro Piano, an Italian luxury goods manufacturer with US operations in New York, plunked down US$30,000 for a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet storage array from Nimbus Data Systems. At the time, it was one of the only iSCSI-based storage systems available that took advantage of 10G bit/sec Ethernet speeds, with most systems supporting 1Gbit/sec Ethernet.