We have all pondered, postulated, and probably even pouted a bit during this current economic crisis. Even so, isn't it time we just realize that the crisis might be beneficial for IT? While I don't like it, I personally think it comes at a great time. Green IT has come a long way since those Energy Star ratings on monitors. (read more)

Even in these trying times aggressive companies are looking to the future. Companies continue to grow organically through mergers, acquisitions or takeovers. While the latter might be more the norm these days, the need for a company to keep IT storage management costs under control remains constant. Growth creates problems in the form of logistics, energy and maintenance concerns as well as with the physical computing and storage resources. Companies lacking the infrastructure to support these increases in operational demands can quickly squash any growth plans. (read more)

There is no question that the recent economic uncertainty will impact organizations on a global scale. Already continents and countries as well as individual companies are being affected daily. Gartner notes that no one is immune with the United States and Western Europe being affected the worse. Examples include: Europe recently put $2.3 trillion on the line to protect the continent's banks in a unified response to the global financial crisis; Europe's largest economy, Germany, is on the edge of recession and poised to come to a halt next year; and, venture capital firms are issuing strict advisories for startups while established companies are trimming expenses. (read more)

If you ever wanted to create war within the confines of an application design meeting just bring in someone with an eye for architecture. I don't care if the person is a database, storage or system administrator or some sort of system architect. These guys will often start questioning the application in relationship to the physical requirements of hardware. How much data will there be? What does a typical transaction look like? How many updates will there be? What will be the growth pattern? (read more)

Assuming you want to eliminate your storage headache, where should you turn? Virtualization has been around for a long time, but should you immediately run out and purchase an IBM mainframe just because it's been around the longest? Surely not! Might I suggest you first look at a recipient of the 2008 Frost & Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of storage architecture? This year, 3PAR's Thin Provisioning received the award by notably "revolutionizing the storage industry and setting a new benchmark with the advent of 3PAR Thin Provisioning". (read more)

Before breaking off into a sprint, and hyperventilating with Microsoft's Hyper-V, it might be a good idea to take a slightly broader look at the purposes of virtualization and utility computing. When used properly, we can all agree that virtualization is changing the datacenter in a positive way by providing operational and economic benefits. Yet virtualization by itself does not create economic benefits. After all, virtualization is just the ability to abstract and hide the physical computing resources through the creation of a virtual machine (VM) with no initial cost benefit in doing so. In fact, in many environments virtualization may increase costs long term due to the new licensing and administration overhead that VMs create. (read more)

Several years ago when I still worked at a Fortune 500 company I came to realize that my company would need to develop the capabilities to provide information to anyone at any place at any time. What I did not fully comprehend at that time was how significantly that the corporate IT infrastructure would need to evolve to deliver on that concept. Now the type of infrastructure needed for that concept has emerged and it even has a name: cloud computing. (read more)

In an effort to provide the highest level of support and performance to end users, corporate IT has often acquired and deployed software and hardware solutions that, over time, are unable to meet the increasing demands for application performance and scalability. Issues such as vendor lock-in and high administrative overhead continue to increase costs and reduce ROI. For this reason IT departments have realized and embraced the advantages of commodity hardware and open source solutions. (read more)

We hate to admit it but the deployment of enterprise storage often parallels all too closely to the familiar "Pop! Goes the weasel" nursery rhyme. Companies know how much capacity they need; they know which vendors are the cheapest; so that is where the money goes, until one day, Pop! Goes the storage! If you followed that little rhyme you surely picked up on the fact that previously the only criteria that mattered for prioritizing how you spent your money was on storage capacity. The truth of the matter is that many organizations toil over how to efficiently pack-in data into the smallest storage unit. Then when things go Pop!, go south, or grind to a halt storage administrators, architects, programmers, DBAs, and IT management are called into action to scramble and find out why, all of a sudden, the user experience or the application run time has degraded. (read more)

The dream of storage consolidation for distributed systems is closely patterned after the model that was established early-on in mainframe environments. Companies anticipated achieving the same financial and technical benefits in their distributed environment that occurred when they consolidated their mainframe environments. Yet as these consolidations occurred, companies find a disconnect between what end-users in distributed environments expect in terms of storage management flexibility after the consolidation is complete and what those in mainframe environments expect. (read more)