Over the last decade the art of maintaining the datacentre of a large organisation has evolved into an art form.
It's a tough field to get your head around. Just a few years ago the trend in corporate datacentres was towards banks of tiny Blade servers. However, the efficiency advantages offered by mainframes means they are as popular as ever.
Virtualisation is also playing a key role: the day of the under-utilised x86 server sitting in a corner and processing print jobs is clearly over. These days that server is likely to be running several other tasks to make maximum use of its CPU cycles.
In the storage arena, most people agree they just can't buy enough gigabytes, and increasingly terabytes, to satisfy their business needs; it's a matter of continuous purchasing just to stay ahead of the game. Storage area network technology has made that process easy by disassociating the storage from the servers that use the data.
In 2008, for many companies, it's just one big pool.
ZDNet.com.au's guide to storage and servers takes you through
the current issues, debates and products surrounding this complex area.
Features and Case Studies
ZDNet.com.au took a tour backstage to see the hardware needed to run a large conference.
The apache.org website suffered an intrusion over the weekend that resulted in the site being taken down.
Blade servers were once the saviours of the datacentre. Expandability was king. But do blade servers still make sense today? We find out if they're still worth it.
What's the best mid-range server on the market? We put machines from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Lenovo through their paces in our labs.
More Features and Case Studies »
South Australian distributed backup start-up Memory Box splits up users' data and spreads it in encrypted form across many customers' PCs. But can the company build trust amongst customers who could be worried about their data being stored on other people's hard drives?
News headlines about portable storage devices going missing are as common as muck, but the problem could be even more widespread than you suspect.
It's nice that Google says it has put an effort into making its datacentres more energy efficient, but the search giant's pledges won't mean much until it discloses just how many of the beasties it's actually running.
Managing data can be difficult, especially if you have almost 500 terabytes of storage and spend $10,000 a month on backup tapes. This case study looks at how Melbourne IT, one of Australia's biggest web hosting companies, handles storage
Pronouncing that a given device doesn't need any more storage is a near-foolproof recipe for looking stupid somewhere down the line. However, I'm sceptical that many people need a 16GB mini-SD card for their phone.
Faced with the thought of a USB drive, notebook PC or backup tape going missing, most IT managers look to some form of encryption as the first layer of defence. However, according to one storage security expert, that's largely a pointless exercise.
If you think two-thirds of your IT is mission-critical, you're either running an incredibly lean and efficient operation or you haven't got a clue how many applications you have and which ones you need to manage.
Does anyone seriously believe that Australian businesses and government agencies manage security any better than the US or UK?
For a large-scale storage project, it's not uncommon to go out to tender for the best deal — but when was the last time you had to put together a tender for a document management room?
People were
apparently switching their brains off before joining the 3G iPhone queues, so
it's somewhat surprising that considering an appropriate amount of
storage was quite a high priority for many buyers.
The issue of how best to handle large email inboxes is a perennial topic here at Snorage, and it doesn't only affect enterprise customers.
Troubled online storage start-up Omnidrive late last week said it was continuing to develop its products and was examining the potential to merge its technology with that of other companies.
Mammoth growth in storage volumes is a fact of life, but even so it's helpful to pause occasionally and try and work out whether our information strategies have fallen hopelessly out of step with the pace of technological growth and changes in costs.
Shoving everything into a hosted environment effectively creates a quick and dirty disaster recovery strategy.
Celebrity comes with its perks — free alcohol, better-looking partners, lots of holiday time — and disadvantages — constant media intrusions, being forced to appear in films with Eddie Murphy for the long-term good of your career, and having to do mindless radio interviews with angry men who've been awake since 4am.
Related News
The NSW Government has gone back to market for suppliers to provide storage and virtualisation products and services under a panel arrangement.
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship has extended its contracts with Unisys for desktop services and biometric identity management.
Tier two bank and major insurer Suncorp has consolidated and standardised its storage environment on NetApp's products, according to a statement distributed today by the vendor.
On 20 May, a brief electricity brown-out struck a Queensland Health datacentre, starting a chain of incidents that resulted in serious outages of over 20 health applications. Read our blow by blow account of an event that constitutes every CIO's nightmare scenario.
More Related News »
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) today commenced monitoring Oracle's proposed US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Fujitsu has won a five-year deal to provide Qantas with all of its user facing service for both domestic and international operations.
The nation's peak law enforcement technology agency CrimTrac has flagged plans for a major overhaul of its back-end ICT infrastructure that will deliver it a strong business continuity capability.
Melbourne IT today admitted websites belonging to a number of customers of its WebCentral brand went down over the weekend, following a data corruption issue in its storage systems.
Virgin Blue has grounded plans to outsource the maintenance of its Oracle e-business systems, chief information officer David Harvey said late yesterday.
Intel has begun shipping its 160GB solid-state drives, the manufacturer announced on Monday.
Toshiba has unveiled a 512GB solid state drive (SSD) which it claims breaks both speed and size records in the notebook SSD market.
How do you manage something that's constantly growing fast, with no end in sight? That's the question many Australian IT managers are currently asking themselves, as they size up their storage and data management strategy going into 2009. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer.
Microsoft announced the second release of its Windows Server 2008 operating system at its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles this week.
Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo has released details of its upcoming ThinkServer line, which will be available in Australia from today.
Japanese technology giant Fujitsu has unveiled plans to launch enterprise-grade storage as a service to its Australian customers, although it will cut down the number of hardware vendors it focuses on.
Servers hosting the new version of OpenOffice.org have crashed, under the weight of demand for the latest version of the open-source office productivity suite.
Hewlett-Packard announced on Wednesday in the US that it intends to buy storage specialist LeftHand Networks for US$360 million.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled its first ever hardware product — a storage server with embedded software designed to work with the company's databases and be used in a grid. The Exadata programmable storage server aims to put database intelligence next to each drive.
The email accounts of Internode users were stranded over the weekend as the internet service provider battled a major storage infrastructure failure and was forced to fall back to its disaster recovery centre to restore lost services.
VMware's forthcoming ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor update will allow users to change the amount of RAM allocated to virtual machines without rebooting them, VMworld 2008 attendees heard this week in the US.
Whitepapers
An enterprise-class storage infrastructure is essential for organizations transitioning to a virtualized data center. Dell EqualLogic PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays enable advanced integration with the robust server virtualization offered by the Microsoft® Windows Server®...
Microsoft® Hyper-V technology provides a simplified virtualization platform integrated directly into the Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 OS. This article provides an introduction to Hyper-V virtualization, discusses the overall architecture and underlying technologies, and offers guidance on best practices for deployment...
Server virtualization is one of the most significant technology trends in IT environments today, and a key enabler of the next generation virtualized data center. Server virtualization relies on hypervisors to provide the abstraction layer between the operating systems and...
This ESG Lab report examines the economic excellence of highly scalable EqualLogic iSCSI storage solutions compared to traditional direct attached storage (DAS), Fibre Channel storage area network (FC SAN), and multi-protocol solutions (defined as systems that provide FC, iSCSI, and...
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Server virtualization is a common practice is today's data centers for server consolidation, power reduction, rapid provisioning, high availability, and data protection. All of these reasons lead to lower data center costs and TCO. Virtual servers together with intelligent virtual...
As server virtualization continues to transform the data center, enterprises have some critical decisions to make. How will they migrate to a fully virtualized environment? How should the IT infrastructure be configured for maximum business benefit? Dell is partnering with...
The Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Release 2 (R2) Hyper-V platform introduces capabilities designed to deliver high availability for virtualized data centers. Integrating a Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage area network into Hyper-V virtualized environments helps organizations capitalize on new Hyper-V...
Virtualization has become a popular IT strategy for enhancing hardware utilization, helping organizations decrease power, cooling, and data center footprint costs, and enhance the flexibility of IT. While virtualization can offer a wide range of IT benefits, running multiple applications...
Should you outsource your data centre? You should if your organization has mission critical IT services, latency dependent Web services, business critical applications, or Internet centric services that need to be constantly available. Hear industry experts as they take a...
Did you miss our virtual event? No problem! You can still get the latest information for Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and more - without leaving your computer! For starters, get unique insight into market trends and technology...
These days, it's tough being part of an IT organization. Your budget's being slashed due to the downturn in the economy, but you're being told to keep service levels high. How do you balance a smaller bottom line with demands...
When looking for no-cost software development solutions, does "free" always mean "free?" Is the free solution scalable? What about support? How long will it be "in play?" Are there legal issues to consider?
In this new Quest Software technical brief, learn...
A database developer's job is a constant series of challenges - from creating and maintaining tables and stored procedures to optimizing indexes and tuning queries. It's not easy - you need to be smart, patient and have a strong understanding...
Although there are many benefits of differential backups for your SQL Server database, they're not always the right choice. In the new Quest Software white paper, "How to Achieve 40:1 Backup Compression with LiteSpeed for SQL Server SmartDiff," see how...
You know Foglight® Performance Analysis for SQL Server helps DBAs maximize performance for their SQL Server database environments. But it's also a valuable tool for developers as well!
In this Quest Software technical brief, learn more about a DBA's challenges...
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) don't have to be mysterious! In this Quest Software Pain-of-the-Week webcast, join SQL Server experts Tim Ford and Brent Ozar as they discuss the most valuable DMVs, and how to use them.
Learn about the DMVs that...
SharePoint and SQL server have much in common, and understanding their similarities will help you streamline your day-to-day tasks and help you work more efficiently. Do you know what those similarities are?
In this Quest Software Pain-of-the-Week webcast, join David Walker,...
In this Quest Software Pain-of-the-Week webcast, learn best practices to maximize your SQL Server environment performance. SQL Server experts Brent Ozar and Tim Ford reveal undocumented procedures, tips and tricks that make SQL Server do things it wasn't intended to...
This white paper outlines a sound process-based approach in protecting critical privileged accounts that are found in virtually every application, database and infrastructure device throughout enterprises. This paper will present BeyondTrust PowerKeeper as a solution to secure passwords for privileged...
This document explains how BeyondTrust PowerBroker supports the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) by limiting and tracking authorization to execute commands and programs that access servers and applications storing and using proprietary cardholder. BeyondTrust PowerBroker provides an...
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Storage and server superguide all you need to know?
I would expect at least one page stating something.
All you get is lots of other links to sideshow stories.
No advice, no comment to anything.
No story.