Holiday Gift Ideas: Storage
The more digital content that we create (music, photos, movies, etc.) and the more we want to share it with others, the more likely it is we'll need some place to store it. You might be looking at digital cameras or music players on your holiday list, but just as important is storage that helps you keep the content stored or created with those gadgets safe and sound. Here are some storage products and concepts we liked: Read more...

Veterans agency looks beyond EMC for multimillion-dollar storage deal

Cisco, EMC, VMware get joint cloud-computing venture rolling in Asia

EMC teams with Intel for power-efficient cloud storage

Sony optical disc drive unit being investigated by DOJ

PwC packs a punch

Synology offers iSCSI on the cheap

Cisco rolls out data center blade switch

Iomega unveils new Linux-based, entry-level NAS server

NetApp announces CEO switch; Georgens replaces Warmenhoven

More NAS Stories

PwC packs a punch
When PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. CIO Stuart Fulton walks through the company's spankin' new data center, opened this month, he finds "cool things around just about every corner.''

Test Center: SANs tuned for virtualization pack nice surprises
Compellent, Dell, HP, Pillar Data, and roll-your-own Pillar/DataCore bring strong storage management features to XenServer, VMware, and Hyper-V environments

Compellent Storage Center 4.0: Fully-integrated, full-featured 4Gbps Fibre Channel system
Compellent's Storage Center 4.0 offers ease of use, a great feature set, and excellent performance at a good price for a 4Gbps Fibre Channel system. Support and phone-home maintenance is also excellent.

Dell/EqualLogic PS4000: iSCSI for the common manager
Dell acquired EqualLogic in 2007, adding a strong iSCSI player to their existing Fibre Channel storage options. EqualLogic offers some very usable iSCSI systems at good prices, from a base of around $10,000, to $17,000 as tested, to well over $100,000.

HP StorageWorks 2000sa: Compact, fast, affordable; lacks some features
The HP 2000sa G2 Modular Smart Array is the first storage system we've received that uses 2.5-inch drives, fitting 24 drives into a 2U chassis rather than the usual 16-drive 3U chassis that we see on most systems.

Promise vTrak/Datacore SANMelody: DIY option for Fibre Channel or iSCSI
This is a build-it-yourself look at what can be done on a tight budget. The Promise vTrak E610f is a 16-drive enclosure that includes two 4Gbps Fibre Channel RAID controllers that offers RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1 (or 10), 5, 6 (double parity drive), 50 (two mirrored RAID 5 volumes) or 60.

Synology offers iSCSI on the cheap
While the Promise/DataCore combination offers an excellent feature set at a relatively low price, how about an 8TB RAID5 iSCSI system for $2,500? Synology makes the DS509+, a storage device intended as an SMB NAS system, but it supports iSCSI as well, and costs about $870 at Amazon.com.

How we tested midrange SANs
We focused on functional testing since performance testing between such different systems wouldn’t have been useful. We set up volumes with thin provisioning, with initial capacities of 20GB and total capacities of 100GB, then added data to ensure that the volumes could automatically expand when they reached the capacity threshold for the original volume, generally around 80% full. This worked properly for all systems tested.

Review: 3 NAS devices offer efficient backup for small offices
RAID-capable network-attached storage is no longer only for enterprises. We look at three of the latest desktop NAS devices.

Q&A: Christopher Crowhurst discusses Thomson Reuters' massive virtualization initiative
Thomson Reuters is in the middle of a massive virtualization effort involving 20,000 physical machines growing at an alarming rate. The company is increasing storage utilization through virtualization and thin provisioning and using the capital expenditure saving from that to pay for its server virtualization project, which overall will reduce its power consumption as well.

Editors' Picks

Getting to know Windows 7? Don't stop now: From speeding up taskbar thumbnails to reining in UAC, here are 20 ways to make Windows 7 act the way you want. Is Motorola's new Droid good enough to vanquish iPhone envy? To find out, we took it on a 3-day trip. Sure, you could always use Linux as a desktop OS, but Corel Linux 1.0 was the first distro designed for ordinary users. It's been a long, strange trip since then. New touch-screen laptops from Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo take advantage of Microsoft Windows 7's touch-friendly infrastructure.

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