Storage

Enterprise storage demands are reaching a critical point, and vendors are scrambling to develop new products to deal with the data deluge. We look at how these technologies will help manage the major pain points for storage administrators.

Tape is not dead--far from it. In fact, many enterprises depend on it for cost-effective long-term storage. Tape is also finding new applications in the virtualized and increasingly video-centric world of IT. As enterprises deal with bigger sets of data, tape will play a vital role going forward.

"The Human Face of Big Data" is an ambitious and attractive new large-format book that aims to give readers, through photography and short articles, a glimpse of how powerful new data processing capabilities are changing people's lives. Author Rick Smolan is a photographer who gained fame for his "Day in the Life" series, which included an edition focused on the Internet in 1996, "24 Hours in Cyberspace." He says that his latest work is based on the premise that "our planet is beginning to develop a nervous system."

Vendors of storage management tools are moving toward a 'single pane of glass' product that can automatically provision, resize, back up and recover storage across multiple public and private clouds, across systems from different vendors and for virtual machines running hypervisors from multiple vendors.

Forgoing features for speed has its trade-offs as these NoSQL data store shortcomings show

The popularity of flash memory has soared over the last year because flash has definite advantages over conventional media. It often isn't clear however, what distinguishes one flash offering from another. Here is a review of four common flash design implementations, each of which has strengths and weaknesses.

Google Drive raises several concerns about cloud storage. Many of these consumer-level questions -- who owns your data, how data can be used and what happens if the data is lost or stolen -- are ones enterprise IT executives should be asking, too.

Big data is fueling the need for ever-growing storage repositories. If you're looking to meet scalability concerns without breaking the bank, selecting a storage platform that can meet the needs of big data can be a challenge--but it doesn't have to be an overwhelming one.

While big data systems offer flexibilities of scale at far more affordable prices then ever before, long-time data experts are also quick to point out that these newfangled big data systems are making use of techniques and processes that were once part of the data warehousing hype that once garnered IT's attention.

The evolution of big data, Hadoop, and related technologies is interesting, but not just from a purely esoteric standpoint. Understanding how these technologies fit together will give users a better idea of which solution is right for them.

Some data comes in at a constant, and even massive, rate. How can IT systems contend with such data flows, while still analyzing that data? PostgreSQL expert Josh Berkus outlines the important guidelines.

Clouds aren't just for IT departments looking to cut costs anymore. Today, free and low-cost cloud services are available for everyone. But which is right for you?