Storage Networking Times

Issue 7, January 2008

Letter from the Chair
Juergen Arnold, Chair, SNIA Europe, eurochair@snia.org

First and foremost I would like to wish you all a successful and prosperous 2008. This is the time of year when we all make new resolutions so why not make it one of your goals to ensure that over the next 12 months your data storage infrastructure is going to be even more efficient than it is today? Efficiency is at the source of many benefits... read full article

Standards Update: SNIA’s New NDMP Technical Working Group
David Dale, Vice Chair, SNIA, info@snia.org

In December, the Storage Networking Industry Association announced the creation of a new Technical Working Group (TWG): “SNIA Creates Technical Work Group to Enhance NDMP Standard Through Software Development”( www.snia.org/about/news/newsroom.) This signalled an expansion of SNIA’s portfolio of software development efforts, collectively targeted at expanding... read full article

Spotlight on: Storage Management Initiative
Frank Bunn, Chair, SNIA Europe Storage Management Initiative (SMI), smi-europe-chair@snia.org

A Journey from the SMI Specification to the Management Framework

In the last few years, the SMI-S specification has established itself as THE comprehensive interface for the management of heterogeneous storage systems and is supported by all the leading providers of storage and storage management technologies. The ISO and ANSI have also certified SMI-S as a recognised standard. SMI-S provides the basis for interoperability and vendor-independence in business-critical storage... read full article

Analyst Briefing: Counting the Cost of Losing Data
Hamish Macarthur, Macarthur Stroud International, Hamish.macarthur@macarthurstroud.com

The Value of Information

The value of information is being realised and affecting everyone across the world. The impact of the sub-prime market shows that financial deals are done where buyers are not fully aware or informed of their liabilities. The packaging of debt through different financial vehicles has resulted in the global financial markets having to re-evaluate their risks and... read full article

Education: The Business Benefits of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for Server I/O Consolidation
Gilles Chekroun, Technical Chair, SNIA Europe BeNeLux Committee, beneluxtc-chair@snia.org

Data Centre I/O consolidation is quickly becoming a reality and the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is helping server administrators implement I/O convergence.

The 10 Gigabit Ethernet network connectivity is driven by the rapid evolution of server hardware with quad-core multi-socket CPUs and by the growth of server virtualisation software implementation... read full article

End User Voice: Only One Copy!
Glyn Bowden, Storage Engineer, UBS AG

Picture the scene, a large family gathered around a photograph album enjoying the many memories the pictures inspire. Now one of the children leans over and points to a picture that they like, and three of the gathering all agree. With this news, the owner of the album promptly takes out the photo, makes four copies and places them all back in the album so each person has their own copy. Sound ridiculous? Well every day, businesses are doing exactly this. The album is the shared resource of a storage pool and the photos are the files we send to each other every day, in e-mail, over instant messaging and in our home directories. The difference with the real life... read full article

Myths Uncovered: Storage Security – Who Cares?
Bjarne Madsen, Chair, SNIA Europe Nordics Committee, nordicschair@snia.org

One of the great advantages being an ‘oldie’ in the IT industry is the pleasure of being witness to the changes of focus and priority for various topics over the years. In the past, storage security was not high on the IT department’s agenda mainly because the storage was strictly attached to a single host and associated applications. Later on, storage became shared and accessed through networks such as SANs and LANs, and that was when IT administrators first realised the importance of a strong security strategy to protect their storage infrastructures. But did they follow through? Not really. Storage security was mostly still a ‘tick in the box’ feature – customers didn’t understand it or didn’t care about it much. All that mattered was that the solution could provide data storage to the enterprise while minimising the risk of... read full article

Events

2008

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