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In a previous entry I wrote about the importance of moving data from primary storage to another platform. The roadblock is how to move that data from expensive storage to secondary storage. The traditional approach of deploying an agent on every server that monitors all the files and then moves files that haven't been accessed to a lower class of storage hasn't worked well in the enterprise. There are a variety of reasons, but most of the issues are the deployment and management of that many agents, plus the challenge of leaving stub files (files that point to where the actual file was moved) and managing those files.

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A few years ago it was easy to divide IT organizations into haves and have nots. The haves used Fibre Channel SANs and array replication to dedicated disaster recovery sites over high bandwidth dedicated links or dark fiber. The have-nots used SCSI DAS (Direct Attached Storage) on their servers and, if they did real time replication at all, used server-based replication solutions like Double-Take or CA's WANsync.

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Will NFS become the predominant storage deployment method for VMware implementations?

NFS didn't need to be saved, but because of VMware its use has been broadened beyond the traditional Unix implementations. Instead of creating a LUN for each VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK), with NFS you manage multiple VMDK files on a single NFS Volume. This makes sense because VMDK's are files, not actual disks.

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Your servers are probably bloated with data that is years old and yet despite your retention policy, if you have one, you keep it all. The relatively inexpensive price of disk capacity has made it easier to keep everything on primary disk storage. When you think of primary storage, you think of active data, databases, current documents, e-mail, etc. -- but because of the affordability of storage, it basically also has become the archive. Data is kept on disk, "just in case." It seems easier to simply add more disk space to primary storage than to force users to manage it; as a result, "Data Keepage" begins.

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With stimulus checks on the way, the question I'm sure you're asking is how you can use yours to help out the storage industry. You are, aren't you?

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As data deduplication matured last year, the constant question I was asked by industry analysts was "Isn't this just a feature?" The question implied that anyone that was specifically in the data deduplication space was going to be erased by the larger manufacturers as they added deduplication to their offerings. It seemed logical, but hasn't occurred. The major manufacturers have struggled putting together viable strategies for data reduction and, to some extent, it's really not in their best interests to reduce the amount of storage required.

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Your storage has holes and the data is leaking right out of it...

Lost tapes continue to capture headlines. Recently I meet with a client that had 300 GB of data worth $500K stolen. How did they know it was worth $500K? That's what they paid for it. The disk was encrypted and the network was pretty well locked down. So how did the master thief hack into the network and steal the data? Through the front door -- with a USB hard drive in his pocket.

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Welcome to the Storage Blog at InformationWeek. As I take over the reins from Terry Sweeney, who has moved on to be editor in chief at TechWeb's Internet Evolution site, the first order of business is a quick introduction. I am a veteran of the storage area from the late '80s. I have worked at almost every angle of the storage space, from customer to supplier to integrator and now finally as analyst and writer. As founder of Storage Switzerland, I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with storage administrators and end-users as well as suppliers from around the world. Part of what we learn during those conversations will make it into this blog.

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When was the last time you got a call from a headhunter? Have those calls cooled down lately? Think it's due to the weak economy, or do you think it's possible that you're just not that "hot" anymore?

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Their success is no guarantee of success for other vendors, but dismal results from these two companies would augur poorly for the rest of the storage industry, to say the least. And quite apart from my glass half-empty outlook, I'm not sure how much weight to give the recent positive financial performance from EMC and IBM.

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If storage were an audio receiver, we'd be flirting with that "9" or "10" mark on that big black dial. But we're talking capacity here (and maybe speed), as vendors appear to bend the rules of physics by cramming more bytes than any space or drive should be able to accommodate.

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Data Domain and Quantum get smacked around pretty good over how "in-line" their products really are. IBM bought Diligent. And deduplication-come-latelies ExaGrid and FalconStor add new gear to the mix. Geez, maybe there really is a market here.

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When thinkers of big thoughts talk about the democratizing effect of technology, they needn't look a whole lot further than Wikileaks or LiveLeak. Incendiary anti-Muslim video, copies of documents from Guantanamo –- this stuff leaves the Huffington Post and other Web 2.0 "news" sites in the dust.

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As an IT professional, which one worries you more? And what do you do about a technology like RFID that splits the difference between those two conditions -- stationary, yet traveling across the airwaves, and god knows where else?

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I missed something that was staring me in the face. It wasn't something huge or important, like, "Oh, look, Hillary Clinton's really trying to be nice this week." No, what I happily missed were online ads served up by Evite alongside the "Come to dinner" verbiage. This offense apparently is enough for the New York Times to proclaim the site as the ruination of parties in our modern e-times. But what if we forget to notice?

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Why can't I look away from the morning weather report, or just turn the page when I come across the odds-makers' lines on the sports section? Maybe it's the control freak in me. Or that I want to believe some mere mortal really knows how this will all turn out. Maybe I just want information, even if it's deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

I try to remember all this as I read the temperature taking going on in the storage industry, against a backdrop of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and record energy prices.

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I haven't seen the storage blogosphere this atwitter since Dan Warmenhoven's testy exchange with some analysts or EMC blindsided the industry with its support for solid-state drives. But Atrato and Xiotech have generated real buzz this week over something potentially game changing for storage.

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If the measures of effective protest include chaos and noise, then yesterday's anti-Chinese demonstrations in San Francisco were modestly successful. I inadvertently waded into the mayhem late Wednesday morning trying to make my way to the RSA Conference going on at the Moscone Center this week.

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By now you've read the news reports that EMC bought Iomega for $213 million. I can't help but wonder what they got that was worth it. Back in the days when 100 MB Zip disks were the easiest way to move more than a floppy's load of data from one place to another, Iomega was a force to be reckoned with. Today it sells USB hard drives, low-end NAS boxes running Windows Storage Server, and the REV removable media hard drive. Why would EMC, king of the services sale, want to enter the low-margin consumer market where it will compete with Seagate and Western Digital? Even if it does, is the Iomega name worth $200 million? I really can't believe it was desperate for the REV technology. What do you think?

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With the RSA conference on the West Coast competing with Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla., this week, there are just a couple of vendors big enough to straddle both realms. Any guesses? Both have figured prominently in the tech headlines in the last 48 hours.

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I'm not a native Californian, but after eight years of residency, I often find myself in the position of having to defend or explain aspects of life in the Golden State: the improbability of Gov. Schwarzenegger, the unnatural obsession with Britney Spears, or the latest woo-woo, crystal snorting trend, to name a few.

But here's one I recently fielded that I didn't see coming: Why is Yahoo playing hard to get with Microsoft?

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Just as the arrival of the first robin -- the bird, not Dick Grayson, fanboy -- is a harbinger of spring, adoption by three-letter vendors is an indication that a technology is moving from the revolutionary land of the startup to the mainstream. Sun's announcement today that it's adding deduplication to the StorageTek VTLPrime is just another indication that deduplication is mainstream, if not overdue.

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Just a few days before the RSA show begins in San Francisco, it's HP and not EMC that's talking loudest about storage and security. Why is that odd? Maybe because EMC owns RSA.

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Stop me if you've heard this one: What do you get if you try to board a flight to China while carrying confidential documents, a thumb drive, four external hard drives, 29 recordable CDs, a videotape, and $30,000 in cash?

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Which is better (and less cliché) than a paradigm that shifts, in my opinion. But based on public and private comments from readers, it's well past time to do away with these fault-prone spinning platters called storage arrays. Here's why.

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Anyone who has ever worked in an organization of, say, more than 50 people is aware of the phenomenon of mission-creep. It's always clear that it has occurred when the person whose initial job was ordering Post-its finds himself handling quality control, handling "external relations" (whatever that is), and traveling two-thirds of the time to make sure branch offices are using the right copying paper. Does any of this ring a bell for today's storage professionals?

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Who says old molecules can't be taught new tricks? Japanese researchers have concocted a new molecule that reverses cirrhosis damage -- at least in lab rats. So as you contemplate the wisdom of that next beer, let us marvel at other small-scale breakthroughs in storage.

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Enterprise users and consumers alike have been scared straight about data protection, given the regular headlines about laptop theft or misplaced hard drives. But as users rush to secure the desktop, are their good intentions making the jobs (and lives) of storage pros more difficult?

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Yes, every night. Because in this age of federal bailouts of brokerages, record mortgage defaults, and a stock market that doesn't know which way is up, it's time to indulge. At least that seems to be a piece of the logic behind this report, encouraging would-be videoconferencing customers to go HD.

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"The toughest job you'll ever love," according to Lillian Carter, a tagline used for recruiting by the Peace Corps in the '70s and '80s, herself a volunteer in India at age 66. A forward-thinking IT vendor has picked up on this international service model and here's why it makes great sense.

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Here's a hypothetical based on a lot of ifs. If you had a bunch of money to invest, if you had access to the smartest brokers around, and if the economy were on firm ground, which of these ideas would you invest in?

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How long do you hang on to decommissioned hard drives and storage devices? Do you at least wait to make sure your new drives or backup applications are functioning properly?

If you answered yes to that last question, there might be a job at the White House for you.

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I'm trying to work up a head of steam over the presidential candidate passport snooping. But my contract with TechWeb limits my self-righteousness to certain decibel levels, which, frankly is quite smart when the subject is data privacy.

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What if Microsoft decided to get really serious about server virtualization? Yeah, yeah, I know Hyper-V is coming this summer. But especially now that they've made such a hash of Vista, virtualization's a natural place for the company to regain a bit of momentum and stature, at least in the data center.

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I'm not sure if you need a dance card or a scorecard to keep track of the pairings in the data deduplication market. One thing's abundantly clear: this storage app must have more commercial appeal than most everything else that's come down the pike lately, given the scramble for partners.

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Government officials' seeming inability to manage information has led me to conclude they don't need a backup and archiving policy so much as they need a virtual Roto-Rooter turned on their servers and tape drives and cardboard boxes. And here are three cases in point.

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Don't get me wrong -- I think Chris Crocker would make a crap spokesperson for HIPAA. But the medical staff of the UCLA Health System facing discipline or dismissal for snooping in Britney Spears' medical records deserve everything coming to them.

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Back when I covered storage networking a lot more closely, I learned to anticipate the industry's rhythms. If any one of EMC, HP, IBM, or NetApp introduced something, one of the other three would frequently contact me on the QT to let me know why their solution was still superior.

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And what doesn't in the startup world doesn't appear to have much to do with technology. Like in sports, whoever can deliver on the fundamentals -- in this case, basic business fundamentals, stands a better chance of thriving in the market.

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Geeky? Unsociable? Does this sound like you? It's how the European Union's top technology official summed up the current lot holding down jobs in IT. Her prescription for change isn't likely to win her tons of support, either.

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While we contemplate the wisdom of locking Eliot Spitzer and Geraldine Ferraro in a room together for all eternity, let's take a deep breath and give thanks for some positive economic news (Go, Dow, go) and wonder what in the world they're smoking over at the freshly renamed NetApp.

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Security's never been an afterthought in storage, but it wasn't exactly a major cornerstone as stored bytes moved beyond the mainframe and into storage networks. Lost or stolen hard drives, laptops, and backup tapes have made big headlines in recent years, and prompted state and federal lawmakers to horn in on the act.

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"No effort to control greenhouse-gas emissions or to lower the carbon footprint ... can succeed unless those emissions are priced properly," writes Michael Specter in the Feb. 25 issue of The New Yorker. "There are several ways to do that: they can be taxed heavily, like cigarettes, or regulated, which is the way many countries have established mileage-per-gallon standards for automobiles." Exchanges where entities buy and sell rights to pollute are another way.

While Specter's article is largely about the cost of greening up our food supply, there's no reason why some of the solutions he discusses couldn't be applied to IT.

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And public Wi-Fi hotspots, texting galore, and the iPhone are the tools of this seduction. But with more applications and wireless spectrum (and YouTube clips) on the way, where exactly are we going to store all this new content?

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Given the variety of ways that stored data gets sliced and diced these days, it's hard not to imagine that Ron Popeil of Veg-o-Matic fame didn't have a hand in there somewhere along the way. Here's what I mean.

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In Vendor Land, it's a short hop from capacity planning to storage resource management (SRM). A couple product guys from IBM volunteered to explain why this makes good business sense (even if it blows your budget).

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You know, the kind where you want to decide where to go for dinner, and suddenly your significant other/spouse/soulmate is off and running on the past, present, and future of the relationship and why you never ... well, you get the point.

This is actually good practice for when you try to talk to a vendor or reseller about storage capacity planning. Why? Because this very specific function you want help with snowballs quickly into a referendum on the future and sanctity of your enterprise's data -- maybe its very existence.

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OK, so you can't take yourself public like Visa. But how much thought have you given to that big, fat check coming your way in May? You know, the "Spend our way out of this nonrecession" check?

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The "greening" of IT is very à la mode right now, especially in storage. But this umbrella term suffers from overuse, and near as I can tell, is a euphemism for using less electricity. It's also a "feature" that enables some vendors to bump up their prices. So what exactly is the fuss again?

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The little do-si-do between Congress and the White House over missing e-mails is apparently over. Cynics might predict the next steps will be a digging in of heels, followed quickly by threats to launch (and bungle) an investigation, or worse, appoint a special prosecutor.

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