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.
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.
Virtualisation is the key technology for creating less power-hungry datacentres, according to numerous speakers at the Energy Logic symposium in Sydney.
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.
The Australian Tax Office says it will open its IT outsourcing contracts worth over AU$1 billion to multiple suppliers, ending its 10 year single-supplier arrangement with EDS.
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.
Spending time hanging out in Second Life has convinced me of one thing: very few real-world processes benefit from being replicated by a bunch of avatars -- and that goes doubly for storage.
While there's not much that's more fun than stirring up Linux and Windows zealots into a frenzy of spite against each other, we thankfully finally seem to be approaching a more measured universe in which technology choices can be made based on suitability rather than preconception.
The components that make up a modern datacentre often look disturbingly like commodity items: a server here, a rack there, spaghetti tangles of cable everywhere. But there's one item that is still something of a rarity -- and no, I'm not talking about the expertise needed to run it.
Plans by the Australian Tax Office to track the purchase and sale of investment properties might make a few money-minded Australians nervous, but they represent a potential bonanza for storage vendors and business intelligence firms.
When designing a data centre, conventional wisdom holds that servers should do the thinking while storage systems should hang onto the data. But some industry heavyweights have begun seeing things a little differently.
The average datacentre lasts between 15 and 20 years, so when the current generation of datacentres near the end of their working life, will their replacements be at all familiar?
A lot of marketing effort has been thrown at the concept of green computing and sustainable IT, but much of the advice is fairly nebulous, fuzzy and ill thought out.
When supercomputers get together, things get hot fast. Our photo gallery reveals how modern datacentres are cooled, and gives an insight into Google's secret solution to the problem.
Project Blackbox is the first virtualised datacentre to be stored in a shipping container, and according to its manufacturer, Sun Microsystems, it's fully portable -- providing you have the means to tow it.
Storage maker Quantum has unveiled two disk-based backup appliances designed as tape replacements for Australian mid-sized office and datacentre use.
Adaptec has upped the enterprise storage ante by incorporating an SSD as a cache on its 2 and 5 series controllers, calling the technology MaxIQ.
Managing data storage is just as much of a task (or greater) as managing the servers themselves. It makes sense to centralise management in larger organisations wherever possible. Enter the storage area network (SAN).
While the lack of supported online expansion and de-dupe is a concern, if you need your tape backups to go faster, Tandberg's DPS1200 VTL may deliver what you need.
SCVMM 2008 R2 is a very competent product, neatly bringing Microsoft's virtualisation management offering in line with the competition at the same time as offering management of disparate platforms in the one product. The integration with the rest of the Systems Center suite makes the overall management and monitoring experience better than its rivals.
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Having problems with complex data center? Simplify your data center now.
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