| Storage Services news |
Front Porch Digital Bucks
Broadcast Equipment Trends
Editor:- March 1, 2010 - Front Porch Digital
today announced that the company's 2009 sales bookings were the best in its
11-year history, representing a gain of more than 30% over 2008.
Front
Porch Digital's success is more striking, according to Mike Knaisch,
the company's president and CEO, because a recent industry research study
indicates some 97% of
broadcast
vendors experienced declining sales in 2009.
Expect 16GFC by 2011 - says FCIA
Editor:- October
20, 2009 - the Fibre
Channel Industry Association announced its has completed the technical
work on
16Gb/s
Fibre Channel (16GFC) - which provides a natural value migration from 8GFC.
Product
roll-outs are anticipated in 2011 according to FCIA Chairman - Skip Jones.
Editor's
comments:- I first published a directory of Fibre-channel adapters way back
in 1994. The first FC connected storage array product listed in that
was the
SPARCstorageArray
from
Sun Microsystems.
It's reassuring that users in the FC market can anticipate another
level of performance evolution - but FC is no longer a growth market. So this
could be the last post for FC - just as
15K RPM
was the end of the road for hard disks.
For dispersed systems
ethernet based storage (NAS)
long ago became the dominant network storage connect - while for local use and
higher performance InfiniBand
and PCIe have taken
hold in distinct functional pockets.
EMC Acquires Kazeon
Editor:- September 1, 2009 -
EMC today
announced it has
signed a definitive agreement to
acquire privately-held
Kazeon Systems.
Core to Kazeon's
eDiscovery
attractiveness is its ability to handle data that resides anywhere in the
enterprise environment - including content on laptops, desktops, content
management repositories, email archives and file shares.
Vembu Aims at US Online Backup Market
Editor:- May
28, 2009 - Vembu
Technologies today announced the appointment of Randy J. Whitehead
as VP of Strategic Business Development.
Reporting to Vembu's
President,
Lakshmanan Narayan, Randy will
primarily be responsible for growing Vembu's business in the US and Canada,
with a focus on channel partnerships.
"Our StoreGrid software
solution powers the
online backup services
business of more than 1,250 service providers worldwide, and more than 850 of
these service providers are based in North America," said Sekar Vembu, CEO
of Vembu Technologies. "Randy's deep experience in operations and sales,
coupled with his years of experience in the online backup market, will help to
further catalyze our rapid growth in the service provider market."
Prior to Vembu, Randy was co-founder and COO of
Arsenal Digital Solutions.
Randy has more than 20 years experience in outsourcing solutions and operations,
system integration and business development. He was also at
StorageTek, where he
was responsible for the industry's first implementation of a storage utility
solution and the structuring of large outsourcing/utility deals, as well as the
operation and delivery of managed storage services. He has also held senior
positions with IBM, BT, Data General and AT&T. Storage People
AFN Manages Video Content with Front Porch Digital
LOUISVILLE, Colo. - March
2, 2009 - Front Porch Digital today announced that the American
Forces Network broadcast center has implemented the company's systems to
support management, retrieval, and long-term preservation of video content.
From its Riverside, Calif., facility,
AFN provides radio and television
programming to approximately 900,000 U.S. service men and women, Department of
Defense civilians, and families stationed outside the United States. By means of
12 full-time television channels, AFN offers entertainment and information to
personnel located in 177 countries and on Navy ships at sea.
"AFN's
mandate is to provide 'a taste of home' to U.S. personnel and dependents the
world over," said Mike Knaisch, president of Front Porch Digital. "Front
Porch Digital's content storage management solutions constitute a flexible,
scalable, and cost-effective way to manage video programming content in support
of that important mission."
...Front Porch Digital
profile, Storage
Services, Military &
Rugged Storage
SalvationDATA Offers Better Hope of Data Recovery for flash SSDs
Sichuan,
China - February 6, 2009 - SalvationDATA announced it has developed a
new new technology for flash SSD data recovery.
The company says
its methodology will work with all commercial devices (excluding military and
industrial SSDs which have inbuilt secure erase). The new tools are expected to
launch in May 2009 - and will be priced at about $1,300.
...SalvationDATA
profile
Editor's comments:- I didn't think this would be
feasible - and even wrote an
article explaining
why it would be very difficult.
It is difficult! - and does need a
new approach. But this is one prediction about which I'll be glad to be proved
wrong. Lack of an affordable flash SSD data recovery industry could have
triggered a backfire, damping enthusiasm in the consumer SSD revolution - and
such a setback could have been a reactionary market differentiator favoring
notebook HDDs. (Most consumers and SMBs don't do effective
backups - a trend which
hasn't changed in all the many years I've reported market research on this
subject.)
Article Suggests - You Wash Backup Cares Right Out of Your Hair
Editor:- January 13, 2009 - AjaxWorld
magazine has published an article called - "Taking Backup and Recovery
Management off IT's To-Do List."
Author Bill Watson argues that outsourcing the responsibility for
recovering data is a better idea for many organizations than doing it in-house.
Coincidentally this is just the kind of service his company (Symantec
Managed Backup Services) sells.
See also the classic (2001)
article:-
Developing a Disaster
Recovery Procedure - by BakBone
Software which concluded "A Disaster Recovery Plan usually cannot be
written by the IT Deparment alone and should not be created for a given computer
or data center. Typically, effective Disaster Recovery plans are a long-term
project... "
A contra argument I suggest is that
backup and
data recovery are too
important to entrust to a single external service provider. In the interests
of data survivability you need diverse providers of this service (internal as
well as external) just as you need diverse backup locations and media types.
Where did my headline come from? - Listen to the song on
I'm gonna wash that man
right out of my hair
US National Archives Selects Front Porch Digitization
LOUISVILLE, Colo. - December
15, 2008 - Front Porch Digital announced that the U.S. National
Archives and Records Administration has selected its SAMMA Robot to digitize
thousands of hours of videotape records accumulated by the federal government.
The pilot project will rely on a
SAMMA 4-stream U-Matic
Robot to migrate the records to digital files, thus preserving them and
facilitating future access to them.
"This is the initial phase of what we anticipate will be a huge
project - bringing the video collection of the National Archives into the 21st
century," said Mark Gray, executive V.P. and general manager of Front Porch
Digital Americas. "...As it grows and expands over time, this project will
become an outstanding example of how our SAMMA solutions can migrate the world's
largest videotape archives."
The NARA audio/video preservation
laboratory stores videotape made by almost every agency of the federal
government. Front Porch Digital is also engaged in migrating the audio/visual
archive at the U.S. Library of Congress.
...Front Porch Digital
profile
Brocade Enhances SAN Monitoring
SAN
JOSE, Calif. - December 2, 2008 - Brocade announced today
enhancements to its Network Monitoring Service.
Brocade
NMS now provides 24×7 expert
end-to-end monitoring about the health and status of data center fabrics to help
maximize network efficiency, availability, and uptime. Moreover, Brocade NMS
provides organizations with valuable information and rules-based business
intelligence to maximize application availability and optimize data center
resources. ...Brocade
profile, storage
reliability
Sun Enters the Disk Sanitizer Market
Santa
Clara, Calif - November 25, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
entered the Disk Sanitizer market.
Sun Data Protection
Services, Data Erasure, is a new on-site service to help enable customers to
remain compliant with internal corporate data erasure policies during the
removal, redeployment or relocation of equipment containing sensitive data. The
service also empowers customers' to become compliant with the ever increasing
policies of regulatory agencies for the removal or destruction of data, by
providing a global, audit-ready solution that erases data at the platter level.
Sun has been using the same data erasure service internally to prepare company
assets for reassignment and redeployment.
Industry research (from
IDC) indicates that most
midsize to large corporations replace about 25% to 33% of
their IT equipment on an annual basis. Each event in the equipment life cycle
can expose sensitive corporate or customer data to possible breach or
compromise. ...Sun
Microsystems profile, Storage
Services , Disk
Sanitizers
New Service Takes Pain Out of Archiving Camcorder Hard Drives
Duluth,
GA - November 3, 2008 - The Photo Archival Company has launched a new
service to help users archive video trapped inside today's generation of no-tape
camcorders that record to internal hard drive or flash memory.
The Photo Archival Company is able to preserve video footage
directly from the customer's tapeless camcorder,
external USB hard drive or
flash memory to produce long-lasting
DVDs or Blu-ray Discs.
This solves the practical problem faced by users of high capacity camcorders
that when the disk is full - they may be facing 40 to 120 hours of elapsed time
to get the data off the camera and archived onto optical media.
"The
recurring theme from a typical customer is that it is impractical for them to
archive their digital footage first hand," said Charles Laughlin, President
and founder of The Photo Archival Company. "For the average household, it
can be a daunting task to spend the necessary time to tend to the successful
creation of several DVDs or Blu-ray Discs just to continue filming."
...Photo
Archival Company, Storage
Services
Editor's comments:- an alternative solution - if you don't want
to waste days uploading data and burning DVDs yourself - is to train the
starlets of your home movies to do this for you. Of course it works better if
they are children - rather than dogs. (Unless
Cesar
has already done this in an episode I missed.)
Seagate Services Renamed i365
Editor:- September 23, 2008 -
Seagate today announced a comprehensive rebranding of its EVault,
MetaLINCS, and Seagate Recovery Services companies into a single new brand -
i365
i365, a Seagate Company, focuses on the unique needs
and expectations of small, mid-size and enterprise companies. The "i"
in the name represents information and "365" for commitment to be
reliably available and accessible to customers.
renamed storage companies,
Data Recovery
AmeriVault Offers Off-Site Restart & Data Recovery for
iSeries Servers
Waltham
MA - August 26, 2008 - AmeriVault today announced the availability of
an advanced, hardware-free, hosted disaster recovery service for iSeries servers
(also known as AS400 or System i) that allows remote access to a virtualized
recovery environment following a disaster.
The foundation of
RestartIT-VDR for iSeries consists of
online backup and
virtualized standby recovery servers hosted at one of AmeriVault's secure,
world-class datacenters.
Should a client encounter an outage or suffer a disaster, rapid
recovery commences: the backup data is recovered to AmeriVault's standby
iSeries server – all achieved remotely for the client. With iSeries'
compression and with GbE connectivity in AmeriVault's datacenters, the recovery
process to AmeriVault's recovery servers can take just a few hours. End users
can then VPN-in to resume operations while the primary systems are rebuilt.
Full recovery is typically achieved in 10 hours or less.
RestartIT-VDR for iSeries allows clients to remotely access
AmeriVault's virtualized iSeries environment for up to 30 days following
the declaration of a disaster – for no additional charge – providing
plenty of time for a company to rebuild its primary systems following a
disaster.
...AmeriVault
profile
Editor's comments:- sounds like a realistically designed service.
In fact many online backup companies offer engineering assisted data recovery as
part of their high end services. For example
CRC Data Protection
has an
enterprise
package which includes shipping media for a bare metal restore - if the
amount of data would take too long to recover online. | |
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- Customers
Search Differently - customers (who want to find suppliers and buy
stuff) search differently to marketers (who want to promote their companies and
sell stuff). That's why most search marketing misses the best targets.
- What's a
Good Click Rate for a Banner Ad? - what you learn from testing banner
ads - often results in you having to change the way you talk about your company
in other places... your web site, your PR. Leaving this important task in the
hands of graphics designers is lunacy. ...Later:- in 2010 - I updated this
popular article to compare how banners compare to Google ads.
- Think of Web Ads
as Signposts - they can lead the right people to your destination. But
give them a credible message so that the brain follows the mouse click for
sound business reasons. Ideally the ad should also signal to the wrong type of
customer they can filter themselves out at this point and not waste their
time and yours by following this path.
- Rethinking the
Banner Ad - remember it's a guaranteed communication and doesn't have
to be an ad. There are 2 sets of viewers who see you banner ad, and you should
cater for both. The most important are the 94% to 99.5% who are
going to see the banner, but not click on it (at that moment in time). What
impression are they left with after seeing the banner?
- Press Release
Errors I see every day - as an editor - I have to disregard zillions
of press releases, which vendors have paid good money to their agencies to
write and distribute. Here's why.
- Market research & storage
analysts - This directory includes every market research company
cited by a storage company in the past 11 years on StorageSearch.com. Some are
better than others. I classify them privately into Storage Clairvoyants
(predict the future), Terabyte Talliers (tell you what's just happened) and
SoothSayers (make your press release sound more credible)...
- Time to
Rewrite the Business Books? - 2009 didn't turn out so bad after all -
but as the year started - this article wryly commented on the fact that most IT
marketing books have been written assuming a backdrop of high double digit
growth.
- The Golden Keys of
E-Commerce - Domain names are no longer small issues to be handled by the
booming logo-centric-slogan-happy-agencies or web-tech-teams.
- Smashing the Myth of the
Press Release - Publicity "gurus" are springing up all over the
Internet touting the press release as the answer to all marketing ills. Just
knock out a release, mass e-mail it to journalists, sit back and wait for Oprah
to call. It's a cruel joke. Here's the reality:
- The Mysteries and
Future of Websites - Either your customers can find you easily or you're
simply lost. No amount of money can create a bounce to your expensive websites
or your big budget branding in these times, except your alpha-structure of your
URLs.
- Venture Capital Funds in
Storage - If you're starting a new storage company where can you go to get
money? - I was asked that question so many times that in 2000 I started a list
of which VCs were giving how much to whom. It lists the failures too. It's
important to have a good story for your prospective VC if your business idea
sounds similar to an earlier one that tanked.
- 7 laws of direct marketing
- The late Isaac Asimov managed to write volumes of entertaining stories which
revolved around his three fundamental laws of robotics... The stories showed
that complex behaviour can result from apparently simple origins.
- Aspects of Web
Advertising - This classic article from 2000 outlines the theoretical
framework behind the major types of online ads.
- After SSDs...
What Next? - Predicting the storage market's next obsession... looks beyond
the next 3 years of hoopla in the
SSD market and forecasts
what will be the next "big thing" in storage after that.
- The harder-working eshot
- 13 guidelines to improve the odds of your email marketing messages getting
through. Classic article from an expert in enterprise server marketing.
- PR Strategies:
Remember, the web has no memory! - Can you remember what your home page
looked like back in 1996? Maybe you think that's not important right now. Like
global warming, you suspect there may be some problems accumulating somewhere
because of all this web stuff, but it's only when your house gets flooded, you
really start to believe in it.
- The 4 Seasons of Publicity
- Building an All-Year Publicity Machine - In this age of immediacy (only a
few seconds separate a Matt Drudge or a CNN from writing a story and putting it
before millions), it's easy to forget that, for many print publications and TV
shows, it can be weeks -- and sometimes months -- before a completed story sees
the light of day.
- Poor
Market Research by IT Vendors Means They Go Bust Faster - I often get a
sense of deja vu when seeing press releases which claim that a company is the
first to ship a certain type of technology or product. A quick bit of research
in the news archives reveals that another company did exactly the same thing
maybe 6 to 10 months before
- Is Your Company
Below the Visibility Horizon? - My experience as a web directory publisher,
suggest that most of the companies below the visibility threshold eventually
join our acquired, dead & merged companies list. It's a very good indicator
of a company whose marketing is in deep trouble, although sometimes the
marketers in those companies (who are not externally focused enough) are the
last to know.
- Where B2B IT Web
Advertising Works Best, and Why - I often talk to B2B computer advertisers
who after disappointment with search-engine advertising ask me why advertising
in a portal should be any better? They get hits, from their key word
advertising but not much business.
- Classic Web Marketing
Resources - I first published this list in the late 1990's, and from time to
time it gets a small update. That's why I've renamed it "Classic" Web
Marketing Resources.
- Writing an Electronic
Communications Policy - An electronics communications policy acts as a
guideline for employees in the use of a company's electronics communications
system. As such it provides an important safeguard for companies against
liability due to misuse and abuse of electronic communications resources by its
employees. A good electronic communications policy should also provide
guidelines for dealing with employees who abuse the policy.
- Why Batching Up
Press Releases is a Bad Idea for the Web - When it comes to delivering
physical goods, it's a good idea to batch up several items and send them in one
package. It saves time and money. However when it comes to issuing press
releases, this is almost always a bad idea.
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