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
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.
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.
More Features and Case Studies »
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.
There's an argument against the usage of USB sticks which has been discussed many times in this column: they're a potentially massive security risk. But there's another case you could make against having your business life stored in 4GB or so of flash memory — it's a total support nightmare.
Being able to build a data warehouse right from the beginning of a company's life can eliminate some of the pitfalls typically associated with the project, but doesn't necessarily eliminate the most obvious one: uncontrolled data from multiple sources.
In the world of processors, attention seems firmly focused on the fast-paced desktop and mobile markets. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing going on in server-land.
Related News
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.
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.
More Related News »
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.
IBM today launched its "largest ever" range of new storage products, in an attempt to meet a market demand for storage the technology giant said would grow over the next decade.
Lenovo's global chief executive Bill Amelio this week said the Chinese hardware specialist would start offering its ThinkServer line in Australia from late September.
The Australian Law Reform Commission yesterday released a report recommending Australia introduce data breach disclosure laws — but Senator John Faulkner said that bridge would not be crossed by government at least for the next 18 months.
Whitepapers
This is the second part of a three-part paper on Data Center Power and cooling. It discusses data and disk types and how to match data and disks effectively within information life cycles. In addition, it examines data growth problems...
Virtualization changes everything!
Once you start to virtualize your servers and storage, you will find that you can enjoy a higher degree of server utilization and simpler, more comprehensive server management. But you must have the right partner and the right...
This paper examines how, over the past several years, research has shown many organisation moving mission-critical systems onto x86 servers.
Blades, Fault-Tolerant Servers, Mainframes, Parallel Processing, Virtualization ...
The current economic crisis has most companies scrambling for ways to get the most out of every dollar they spend. However, to date, many of the gains have been illusory due to high server costs, lack of effective virtualization and...
More Whitepapers »
This whitepaper looks at how Virtualization is the concept of decoupling the hardware from the operating systems and applications. This can be implemented a number of ways as we will discuss, but fundamentally it is achieved by inserting a layer...
As an instructor, I tend to assume that everyone knows all the features of an application, and I am sometimes surprised by clients and students who really don't know them. This white paper discusses five things you might not know...
There is a well-spring of features and capabilities of Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 messaging platform. The longer you use Exchange Server 2007, the more treasures you can pull up from the deep. We'll avoid some of the more obvious or...
This paper examines how Intel IT is standardizing on Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 (2.93 GHz) for two-socket servers for design computing and enterprise server virtualization. The newest high-end Intel® Xeon® processors based on Next-Generation Intel® Microarchitecture (Nehalem) can significantly enhance...
This paper examines how, over the past several years, research has shown many organisation moving mission-critical systems onto x86 servers.
Blades, Fault-Tolerant Servers, Mainframes, Parallel Processing, Virtualization ...
The current economic crisis has most companies scrambling for ways to get the most out of every dollar they spend. However, to date, many of the gains have been illusory due to high server costs, lack of effective virtualization and...
This whitepaper looks at how Virtualization is the concept of decoupling the hardware from the operating systems and applications. This can be implemented a number of ways as we will discuss, but fundamentally it is achieved by inserting a layer...
Efficiency is emerging as a major tool to extend the life of existing data centers and ensure that new data centers will deliver the highest ROI. This whitepaper looks at how The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series with Intel Microarchitecture...
This Intel whitepaper examines how server virtualization is helping IT organizations improve data centre productivity in fundamental ways. It shows how you can consolidate multiple operating systems and applications per physical server, reducing the size and costs of your IT...
Virtualization changes everything!
Once you start to virtualize your servers and storage, you will find that you can enjoy a higher degree of server utilization and simpler, more comprehensive server management. But you must have the right partner and the right...
TANDBERG, a leading visual communications company and Microsoft® Certified Partner, provides video conferencing solutions and services worldwide. The company's customers need solutions that work with their existing Microsoft infrastructure. To meet that need, TANDBERG designed its business-quality visual communications tools...
Cloud Computing is a set of IT/Business application services that companies provide for a pay-per use or rental basis. Storage, servers, and applications also fall in this realm of Cloud Computing and are available on-demand basis. Therefore procuring hardware, software...
For the most complete messaging reporting and analysis solution in the industry, nothing beats Quest MessageStats. MessageStats quickly and easily provides the critical information you need to understand and control costs and optimize your messaging environment. Supported platforms include:
Some few reasons to migrate a Microsoft Windows application to UNIX are scalability, server consolidation, customer demand and other business factors. This white paper investigates the choices available and provides a roadmap to completely migrate from Windows to UNIX and...
PCI DSS applies to those organizations that store, transmit or process cardholder information payments; encompassing service providers, merchant acquirers, third party processors and even data storage entities. Processors represent organizations of significant transaction volume making them tantalizing targets for attack....
As USB devices have evolved into useful storage media, they've also turned into a security nightmare for organizations. The usage of USB devices should be encouraged and embraced today in our tightening economy to aid in the reduction of operating...
More whitepapers related to 'Storage OR Server' »
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.