Links to Upcoming and Recent Webcasts and Videocasts

August 10, 2008 – 10:45 am
Here are links to several recent and upcoming Webcast and video casts covering a wide range of topics. Some of these free Webcast and video casts may require registration. Industry Trends & Perspectives - Data Protection for Virtual Server Environments Next Generation Data Centers Today: What's New with Storage and Networking Hot Storage Trends for 2008 Expanding your Channel Business with Performance and Capacity Planning Top Ten I/O Strategies for the Green and Virtual Data Center Cheers Greg Schulz - StorageIO

Posted in Data archiving and preservation, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Data protection, Data security, Education, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Performance and Capacity, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

Green, Virtual, Servers, Storage and Networking 2008 Beijing Olympics

August 9, 2008 – 9:04 am
How about those opening 2008 Beijing Olympic ceremonies on NBC last night? If you were like me, I had my DVR capture the event while out enjoying the nice August evening with some friends doing some relaxing and fishing (we did catch and release fish!) on the scenic St. Croix river. Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics Fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics A young bald eagle seen during fishing while DVR records 2008 Olympics The reason I bring up the Olympics, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and green topics are a couple of themes. One being all the news and content available to keep track of what is happening with the games taking place all of which is being stored on servers, storage and relying on networks to access the rich media and unstructured data via the web or traditional media. The 2008 summer games are also being described as the on-line and virtual olympics. ...

Posted in Data and Information Management, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Green, IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Site related, Travel | No Comments »

SMB capacity planning; Focusing on energy conservation

August 4, 2008 – 6:38 am
Here's a link to a new tip I wrote that is posted over at SearchSMBStorage pertaining to Capacity Planning and energy conservation. Here are some additional links to other recent tips I wrote and also posted at a SearchSMBStorage: Improve your storage energy efficiency Data protection for virtual server environments Data footprint reduction for SMBs Is clustered NAS for SMBs? Cheers Gs

Posted in Data and Information Management, Data archiving and preservation, Data footprint and proliferation reduction, Data protection, Data security, Green, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Performance and Capacity, Power and Cooling, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

Data Proteciton for Virtual Environments

August 2, 2008 – 7:16 am
Server virtualization continues to be a popular industry focus, particularly to address IT data center power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues commonly referred to as green computing along with supporting next generation virtualized data center environments. There are many challenges and options related to protecting data and applications in a virtual server environment. Here's a link to a new white paper by myself that looks at various issues, challenges and along with various approaches for enabling data protection for virtual environments. This in-depth report explains what your organization needs to know as it moves into a virtual realm. Topics include background and issues, glossary of common virtual terms, re-architecting data protection, technologies and techniques, virtual machine movement, industry trends and much more ... The report is called Data Protection Options for Virtualized Servers: Demystifying Virtual Server Data Protection, Have a look for yourself. Cheers gs

Posted in Data protection, Education, Green, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management | No Comments »

Brocade to Buy Foundry Networks - Prelude to Upcoming Converged Ethernet and FCoE Battle

July 21, 2008 – 11:08 pm
The emerging and maturing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Ethernet, aka Data Center Ethernet, Converged Enhanced Ethernet, Enterprise Ethernet among others marketing names activity is picking up. Today Brocade took a major step to shore up its already announced FCoE and converged Ethernet story which includes new directors and converged host bus adapters by announcing intentions of buying Ethernet high performance switching vendor Foundry Networks in a deal valued around $3B USD and some change. Not a bad deal for Foundry, some would say an expensive deal for Brocade, perhaps paying to much, however given some of the recent storage and networking related deals. For example IBM spending around $300M for a startup called XIV who claims to have shipped a few storage systems to a few customers, or, Dell spending about $1.3B to buy EqualLogic who had a few thousand customers (Could be the deal of the century ...

Posted in IT Industry Activity, IT Infrastructure Topics, Infrastructure Resource Management, Storage Architecture and Access, Storage and Storage Management Tools | No Comments »

My How Time Flys By…

July 12, 2008 – 10:18 am
Here it is July already and the time just seems to be flying by as is often the case during the summer months. It’s been a few weeks, well, ok; a month since I last posted anything here and I hope to get back to a more regular schedule soon. So, what have I been doing over the past month of so that has kept me from more regular postings? Some travel around the US and Europe for both business and personal, doing speaking and keynote engagements, round table forums and discussions, consulting and research activity, working on various projects for clients, developing new content among other activities. Summer time is also a good time to catch up on some reading which I have been able to do some of, however it’s also a time to be working on new material for others as well. In addition to developing new content including industry trends ...

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Missing Dedupe Debate Detail!

June 10, 2008 – 5:02 pm
The de-dupe vendors like to debate details of their solutions, ranging from compression or de-dupe ratios, to hashing and caching algorithms, to processor vs. disk vs. memory, to in-band vs. out-of-band, pre or post processing among other items. At times the dedupe debates can get more lively than a political debate or even the legendary storage virtualization debates of yester year. However one item that an IT professional recently mentioned that is not being addressed or talked about during the de-dupe debates is how IT customers will get around vendor lock-in. Never mind the usual lock-in debates of whose back-end storage or disk drives, whose server a de-dupe appliance software runs and so forth. The real concern is how data in the future will be recoverable from a de-dupe solution similar to how data can be recovered from tape today. Granted this is an apple to oranges comparison at best. The only ...

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Comfort Zones - Stating What Might Be Obvious to Some…

May 26, 2008 – 7:58 am
Over the past couple of weeks I have been talking with many IT professionals who work in IT data centers of varying size from different locations around the world. A couple of interesting patterns or trends if you prefer I have noticed are that while IT and storage professionals in general see disk based backup as the future and for some instances, a good tool today, there is still very much a comfort factor with magnetic tape. The most cited reasons for continued use of tape being affordability, low power requirements, portability (assuming media is encrypted and secure) and familiar or comfort and confidence with the technology. A related trend or pattern is that while many IT professionals see the value and benefit of SSD including FLASH and RAM, there is also a concern or lack of confidence in the initial so called enterprise class FLASH based SSD technology. A related trend ...

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The Differences Between Singapore and Houston in May

May 17, 2008 – 10:56 am
In addition to participating at the Techtarget (TT) spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago this past week, I was also briefly in Houston Texas this week to do a keynote talk on the “Wide World of Archiving – Life Beyond Compliance” at the Omni Hotel . Between the venue, temperature and humidity, I thought I was in Singapore with a sudden craving for pepper crab at Jumbo’s Seafood in the East Coast Seafood Center . While the Houston venue and those in Singapore were similar as was the temperature and humidity, the real difference was that I remind in the central time zone with a 2.5 hour flight vs. 25 hours of flights and changing planes. Both locales have nice people who speak English and have great food as well. If in Houston, check out the Omni Hotel and ...

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Spring 2008 Storage Descisions Wrap-Up

May 17, 2008 – 10:39 am
Once again the Techtarget (TT) folks put on a great event at the spring 2008 edition of Storage Decisions (SD) event in Chicago, tip of the hat to the whole TT crew. SD is known as an IT consumer/user event as opposed to industry events like SNW that are known as a vendor to vendor networking event. TT has added a new form over the past year that occurs the day/night before SD focused on the channel and var audiences with a dinner networking seminar called StorageStrategies . While SD continues to be focused on the IT consumer aka user, the TT channel program is a means for vendors to get in front of perspective channel partners to tell their story and value proposition of why they should be partnered. It’s a fun and growing event that I have been involved with for over a year ...

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