E-business is raising the profile of storage technology in the minds of IT managers, and storage technologies continue to provide ever-greater capacity and faster throughput to meet the growing demand. Unfortunately, incompatibility between vendors' products is still a problem in areas such as storage area networks, which means packaged solutions from a single supplier are still considered the safest option.
However, most packages are in fact amalgams of technologies from different suppliers.
For the foreseeable future, the direction for removable media looks set to be optical rewritable Digital Versatile Disks (DVDs). These are perfect for holding the audio, video and text data that e-business applications will generate, although there are still standards issues to be resolved.
There are vendors, however, who are still working to increase the capacity of magnetic disks. Tapes continue to grow in capacity  to 200GB or more at the high end.
In the realm of 8mm tape units, new entrants are pushing price/performance, though sometimes at the expense of industry standards.
This supplement examines developments in removable storage media, networked storage systems, and tape's continuing role as the principal corporate backup technology.
