The notion of protecting the security of data as well as the integrity means the marriage of RSA and EMC makes sense. – John Halamka, CIO, Harvard Medical School and CareGroup Healthcare System It's easy to see that the cost of retaining just three weeks of data on lower-cost SATA disk storage could exceed the cost of more expensive primary disk storage that is being protected. – Dave Therren, CTO, ExaGrid Systems Encryption is a necessary cost of doing business today. Minimizing the cost while maintaining a highly secure encryption solution is the ideal approach. – Greg Farris, Senior Product Manager, Maxxan Systems By leveraging a full suite of WAN acceleration techniques, enterprises can cost-effectively support all backup/replication requirements. – Jeff Aaron, Director of Product Marketing, Silver Peak Systems, Inc. SMBs are more willing to make the capital expenditures it takes to create the technology infrastructure they need to compete on a global level. – Steve Goodman, Vice President, SonicWALL Business Continuity Division IT organizations have discovered that virtualization can simplify server management and reduce operations costs, but despite the technical and economic benefits of virtualization, its use in production environments can present a disaster recovery challenge. – Walter Scott, CEO, Acronis Inc. Organizations need to meet governance requirements for making business content traceable, secure and auditable while they invest in aligning business processes and content to optimize performance and reduce risk exposure. – Michele Kersey, Chair of ARMA International's Technology Advisory Committee More and more companies seek to consolidate the services they receive within a single vendor. – Joanne Boyd, Vice President of Marketing, Kodak Service and Support If your VoIP implementation was well designed and well architected, you have already prepared the IP network for the additional load. – James E. Geis, Director of Storage Solutions Marketing, Forsythe For organizations aiming to reduce their cost of storage, ILM may not be the best or only answer. In fact, an alternative approach called integrated Data Lifecycle Management promises to greatly reduce the expense and complexity of achieving dynamic, cost-optimized tiered storage. – Geoff Hough, Director of Product Marketing, 3PAR DPM is an essential consideration for any company that is serious about its data protection strategy. – Alan Atkinson, CEO and Co-founder, WysDM Software Our full backups went from 48 hours for 300GB to jsut four hours for 750GB, while freeing the network for end-user access. – Tony Gaeta, Director of IT Operations, Optelcom Vendors have a responsibility to develop innovative technology solutions that offer efficiency in space, power and cooling, while delivering 24x7 access to data on a global basis. – Kelly Lanspa, Director, Xyratex Storage and Network Systems In order to keep up with the competition and accommodate growth, IT managers are looking to next-generation intelligent Fibre Channel switching platforms with embedded storage services software that scale with their IT infrastructures. – Richard Bourdeau, Vice President, Product Management, Incipient, Inc. Archivas ArC has indeed performed flawlessly, meeting or exceeding our expectations in every way. – Mike Luter, Chief Technology Officer, The Cancer Therapy & Research Center Tape is the superior choice for disaster readiness because it is easily stored off-site, and its long, extremely stable shelf life meets archival requirements and data retention objectives that may be federally or state-mandated. – Kelly Beavers, vice president, product marketing, Exabyte Disaster recovery planning is hypothetical until the plan is put in action and tested. – Suzhanna Dahle, Vice President of Information Technology, Vallen Corp. In our survey, the IT managers' most significant data protection-related problems were time to restore, recovering from system failure and recovering from disaster. – Thomas M. Coughlin and Farid Neema Integrated Data Lifecycle Management promises to greatly reduce the expense and complexity of achieving dynamic, cost-optimized tiered storage. – Geoff Hough, Director of Product Marketing, 3PAR The first step on the road to efficiency and cost savings with ILM begins with the process of information discovery and data classification. – Michael Marchi, Vice President, Solution Marketing, Kazeon Systems Need a copy of data as it existed at midnight? Three mouse clicks and five seconds later, there it is. Need a copy from 2:34:57? No problem. – Michael Rowen, Founder and CTO, Revivio, Inc. Using televaulting and a Backup Service Provider, local expenses at the customer site drop dramatically as end users are able to eliminate software license fees, as well as tape technology upgrades and replacements. – Eran Farajun, Senior Vice President, Asigra iSCSI SANs provide SMB customers with a simple, affordable and effective solution to both the limitations of DAS, and the complexity of Fibre Channel SANs. – Robert Farkaly, Director of Disk-based Products, Overland Storage Compliance regulations, corporate governance initiatives and the explosive growth of unstructured digital content are driving the adoption of archiving strategies and technologies. – Enterprise Strategy Group The odds are against companies that do not have solid backup plans. – Phil Smith, FalconStor Prime Vault Director of Hosting Services A modern archive is more than a storage device—it is an organized collection of records that are being preserved so that they can be accessed and understood tomorrow and 100 years from now. – Andrés Rodriguez, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, Archivas For the most critical data, medical practices should consider an electronic medical records solution that provides replication and remote storage to ensure accessibility, quick recovery time and minimal data loss. – Girish Kumar, Founder, VP of Sales and Marketing, eClinicalWorks As we approach the end of 2005, it's clear that Fibre Channel remains the technology of choice for enterprise-class networked storage. – Kevin Burbank, Product Marketing Manager, Agilent Technologies In an event where minutes can make the difference in a life-or-death situation, we're looking to McDATA to help us get our current timeframe way down. – Keone Kali, Director of IT, City of Beverly Hills No other networking technology is produced in the high volumes enjoyed by Ethernet; therefore it has created an extreme price advantage for any network application. – James Kemp, CEO, Coraid The SNIA Interoperability and Solutions Demo provides a true experience because it’s not a smoke-and-mirrors thing. If something fails, it’s going to fail right in front of somebody. – Ed von Adelung, SNIA Interoperability Committee Chair According to IDC, 70% of DAS users have yet to deploy a SAN — amounting to 93,000 such organizations in North America alone. – Rob Peglar, vice president of technology, Xiotech Corp. The last thing you want is your name emblazoned on the front page for exposing customer data. – Daniel Chow, systems and security administrator, Boeing Employees' Credit Union Which would you prefer: living with the nightmare of .PST files or having all .PST message data managed in a central indexed repository where it can be protected and easily accessed by end users and auditors alike? – Bob Spurzem, senior product marketing manager, Mimosa Systems I think thin clients are one of the greatest, most underappreciated technologies in the world. – William Hill, director of IT, City of Dayton, Ohio The paradox is that mishandling even one small device can have devastating negative consequences, including financial loss, legal liability, regulatory sanctions and decreased brand equity due to loss of confidence from customers, partners or investors. – Thomas Blitz, president, Pointsec Mobile Technologies There isn't a wizard behind a curtain that will help you speed up your backups, but there is a formula for successfully cutting backup and recovery times. – Robert Farkaly, director, disk-based products, Overland Storage Before answering the siren call of optimization, storage professionals need to define what optimization means for their organizations. – Geoff Hough, director of product marketing, 3PAR We couldn't decrease the size of our database by deleting millions of records. That's why we chose to archive them and keep them readily accessible using LiveArchive from OuterBay. – Marcel Kuijs, director of IT, ArvinMeritor's European IT data center The benefits of fabric-based intelligence include lower management costs, better utilization of storage and automation of storage devices. – Aarohi Communications The advantages of smarter libraries have already become clear to many users who write backup directly to tape, and when disk is added to the backup, the argument for a library with better management becomes even more compelling – Bryce Hein, executive director of enterprise products, ADIC Continuous data protection captures data changes as they occur and saves them in many point-in-time restorable versions throughout the day. – Bob Cramer, CEO, LiveVault Corp. There is an immediate need for a SATA II and SAS standards conformance test bed. – Jon William Toigo, SNW Online columnist In doing our due diligence, we discovered that not many vendors were performing as promoted, were too complicated or had technical and organizational issues. – Marshall Andrew, VP and CIO, Station Casinos IP storage is becoming an increasingly viable option for enterprise storage solutions, thanks to the advent of multi-gigabit Ethernet, protocol advances for storage and server/storage platform improvements. – Alan Crouch, director of the Communications Technology Lab, Intel The trick behind eBay's functionality — or that of any large Web site for that matter — is to make it look like you're addressing a single interface. – Paul Kilmartin, director of systems administration, eBay New products are now available that enable stranded servers to access Fibre Channel SANs via tunneling techniques or iSCSI bridges. – Steve Looby, product manager, LSI Logic. NAS is a lot less costly and complex to manage, and it's easier and cheaper than SANs when it comes to increasing storage capacity. – Carlos Ortiz, director of product marketing, Procom Technology, Inc. Disk reliability is really still important. The situation is analogous to having a spare tire. Even if you have the spare, replacing a flat can be a real pain, and on the freeway, it can be downright dangerous. – Dick Benton, senior consultant, GlassHouse Technologies, Inc. When a customer calls us with a problem, and they are using our solution, we will accept responsibility until we can figure out beyond any reasonable doubt that the problem is somewhere else in the system. – Mark Lewis, executive vice president, EMC Our goal was to enhance the speed and reliability of the network, and dark fiber proved to be a ready solution. – Robert Fallon, vice president of IT, United Nations Federal Credit Union By using intelligent storage management software, IT managers can successfully maximize their investment in data storage infrastructures with existing staffs and within budget constraints while providing higher service levels. – Raymond Chew, director of product management, Computer Associates The bottom line is that a mesh of big switches is a flexible and scalable SAN topology model. – Tom Jensen, principal storage consultant, CNT We were able to implement EqualLogic's PeerStorage in a single day with a powerful set of management capabilities at a quarter to a third the cost of a Fibre Channel solution. – Mike Reed, senior director of IT, Solucient For a 512-bit hash, such as SHA-512, an attacker would have to generate 2256 hashes. That is greater than the number of atoms that make up our galaxy (about 1068, or 2226), a truly astronomical number. – Jered Floyd, vice president of technology, Permabit, Inc. The key advantage to Veritas Storage Replicator is that it delivers up-to-the-minute protection while decreasing the amount of data traveling across the network. – Mike Haske, vice president of technology, BankAnnapolis About 70% of backup cost is labor. That's what we're addressing with Data Protection Server. – Jeff Price, senior director, Microsoft Windows Server division Predictive change management software frees nearly half of our SAN administrators to become business analysts with more productive things to do than set their hair on fire every time a SAN change is made. – Robert Shinn, principal, State Street Global Advisors As IT leaders take the first step toward ILM by classifying their data, they run into the biggest obstacle to effective ILM — dealing with unstructured data. – Jeff Erramouspe, co-founder, chief marketing officer, Deepfile Corp. Now there is an intermediate solution available to fill the void between DAS and SANs — switchless SAN technology, which can be implemented within storage systems to support multiple servers without external switches. – Omar Barraza, director of marketing, Dot Hill Systems Corp. For Fibre Channel storage systems that employ RAID technology in which information is read from and written to multiple disks for high availability, the ability of a fabric switch to communicate with multiple drives can double the overall throughput of comparable-speed loop switches. – Michael McDonald, senior director, Broadcom Corp. CNT's tools, in the hands of their expert consultants, made all the difference for our Tivoli Storage Manager implementation. – Christopher Nelson, Director of Global Technical Services, H. B. Fuller In order to manage the burgeoning volumes of data created in today's business world, magnetic tape must continue to march toward terabyte capacities. – Subodh Kulkarni, director of research and develoment, Imation Regardless of the type of replication agent employed, vendor lock-in is a feature of all forms of replication. – Peter Hunter, product marketing manager, EqualLogic Translating from SCSI to SATA poses significant challenges because SCSI has a richer command set. – Nathan Marushak and Roger Jeppsen, Intel The recent introduction of agent-less solutions has created confusion for some customers. The key is understanding the pros and cons of agent-less and agent-based methods and then selecting a flexible ESRM platform. – Ed Palmer, director of business development, Storability Software If you like the idea of ILM, you'll have to wait — no vendor has the smart solution in its bag of tricks yet. – Mario Apicella, Infoworld columnist If I lose my data, I'm toast. – Dan Bowser, president, Value Insights Cisco's storage vision was deceptively simple: offer cost-efficient storage as a consolidated, utility-like service based on a tiered, networked infrastructure and mutually agreed-upon service levels. – Bill Williams and John Nelson, Cisco IT The network sees all. It's there whether we like it or not, so why not let it make some decisions on its own? – Steve Duplessie, SNW Online columnist When a true disaster occurs, the technology for failover and disaster recovery is well-understood and generally reliable. But there are new tools that address the more likely, more murky scenarios in which the storage network is merely sick. – Kent Christensen, senior product manager, CNT The challenge for IT pros is ensuring the effective management and protection of increasingly valuable data and software automatically and in real time, and this includes desktop and laptop computers. – Steve Sussman, product manager, Storactive Storage consolidation is a sure-fire way for an organization to sustain competitive operations in an information-driven world. – Sandy Lake, senior director of storage consolidation solutions, Network Appliance Most business continuity plans now recommend long-haul SANs for replicating business-critical data and applications between data centers that may be located hundreds and even thousands of miles apart. – Elaine Bird, director of marketing, Enterprise Solutions Group, CIENA Corp. 2004 is the Year of the End User at the SNIA, and the organization's End User Council is now behind much of the end user involvement in the storage networking industry. – Joseph Goins is an EUC governing board member and an End User Advocacy Committee member. The separation of servers and storage, along with the further decomposition of the array itself, has resulted in a dizzying number of technologies promising to restore the simplicity of DAS environments with all the benefits of networked access. – Wayland Jeong, vice president of engineering, Troika Networks Today, virtualization solutions are promising freedom from vendor lock-in by migrating storage intelligence away from the server or array to the center of the network. – Michael Maxey, senior analyst, Progressive Strategies 53% of companies have experienced business interruption or monetary loss related to e-mail downtime. – Meta Group Business continuity is not an insurance plan against which claims are never made. Instead, companies that have pursued business continuity in earnest have been more nimble at dealing with and recovering from the unexpected outages. – Gil Rapaport, vice president of marketing, XOsoft. Midrange storage has evolved into the most important segment of the storage market as the industry has shifted its focus from monolithic, high-end arrays to midrange devices in response to shrinking budgets. – Michael Maxey, senior analyst, Progressive Strategies If there is anything that the past few years has taught us, it is that disasters can hit any business at any time. – Jim Ellis, director of business strategy, Imation Data Storage and Infomation Management Using active archiving to manage and retain vital legacy data reduces database size, improves the performance and availability of critical applications and reduces operational and storage costs. – Jim Lee, vice president, Product Marketing, Princeton Softech Intelligence at the network level is the next logical step in the storage networking evolution. – Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of storage infrastructure software, EMC. Industry experts predict the midrange storage market will explode to $13 billion by 2005, and for good reason: The industry is raving about SAN consolidation. – Peter J. Hunter, product marketing engineer, EqualLogic The prerequisite activities of storage strategy are straightforward, executable internally or externally and can be political at times. – Ian McClain, senior director of professional services, strategic consulting, CNT It all comes down to synchronous vs. asynchronous replication. – Gary Johnson, Vice President of Solutions, CNT The bottom line is that when properly engaged, third-party consultants and software suppliers are often the best means to resolve storage optimization problems. – Brian Bailey and Randy Corke, Signiant, Inc. When it comes to iSCSI products, users should review performance, high availability, manageability and scalability to ensure that current and future needs are met. – Mike Strickland, director of product marketing, Silverback Systems, Campbell, CA Trunking brings the benefits of multiplied bandwidth and inherent failover while offering design architects the flexibility to create new storage system topologies. – Thomas Hammond-Doel, director of technology marketing, Vixel Corp. With a small amount of planning, IT managers can stretch their existing budgets to cover DR for more applications, thereby increasing service levels. – David Scott, president and CEO 3PARdata, Inc. Successful file management requires content visibility and efficient, proactive file control. Any failure compromises the effectivenes of HSM and life cycle data management practices. – Jeff Erramouspe, CEO, Deepfile Corp. Until recently, disaster recovery plans were difficult to implement and provided little ROI. – David Purdy, director of Business Continuity, EMC Inrange offers innovative infrastructure products that connect, switch and extend information, while protecting customer investments through a continuous upgrade path from entry-level to enterprise-class. – SNW Online columnist Barb Goldworm Companies are realizing that key data assets are residing outside the company on laptops and that employees without a lot of technical competence are responsible for safeguarding them. – Ken Dulaney, vice president of Gartner Group’s mobile computing group. After all the ups and downs of the past two years, storage and storage networking budgets are starting to loosen up. – Barb Goldworm, SNW Online columnist Without the reliance on shipping flat-file SQL backups every few days, customers can now access mission-critical data from an online backup or a mirrored filer – Mark McCullough, IT director, Classroom Connect Information lifecycle management is not a technology — it is a combination of processes and technologies that determine how data flows through an environment – Steve Duplessie, SNW Online columnist After reviewing all the issues caused by the fact that the intelligence and applications are residing on the periphery, centralization of storage resources and applications at the network level is the natural choice. – Ravi Chalaka, director of marketing, MaXXan Systems, Inc. We don't see it as disk vs. tape. We see it as disk and tape. – Jeff Laughlin, director of strategy, StorageTek Savvy consumers are already leveraging the fact that the economy has put vendors over a barrel in the hopes of regaining control of their storage spending. – SNW Online columnist Jon William Toigo Strip every IT organization to its essence, and one mission takes precedence: providing defined levels of service to internal and external customers. – Chuck Hollis, vice president, platform marketing, EMC Corp. IT storage users are vexed more by people-to-people issues than by interoperability issues. – SNW Online columnist John Webster Companies attracting the greatest investor interest will be those who can target specific pain points, address the costs and complexity of managing escalating data volumes and maintain business continuity by eliminating downtime. – Ilan Carmi, partner, Kodial Venture Partners End users should not take SANs lightly, but a SAN doesn't need to be a science project, either. – Greg Beutler, senior systems engineer, Gadzoox Networks Storage utilization rates average a pitiful 30% of disk space in NT environments. – Larry Cormier, vice president of marketing and business development, CommVault. Hey IT guys, keep on acting this way and we're going to have real problems. The whole tech sector is getting mauled and you won't spend any money. – Steve Duplessie, SNW Online columnist The entire Fibre Channel industry is nothing more than a rounding error to Cisco. – Steve Duplessie, SNW columnist There are some marvelous, marvelous things going on right now within both the shops of established vendors and start-ups. – Jon William Toigo, new SNW Online columnist SRM has always been a catchall term that refers to a broad spectrum of storage-related functions. – Jon William Toigo, new SNW Online columnist I think that the storage vendors trading APIs is a good short-term technical move, as long as they don't get too engrossed trading APIs to support Bluefin. – Marty LeFebre, vice president of technology strategy, Nielsen Media Research IP SANs enable companies to deploy efficient e-business solutions using well-understood and supported IP and Gigabit Ethernet technology – Gary Orenstein, director of marketing, Nishan Systems Overcoming distance limitations is a key to successful SAN implementations.. – Greg Schultz, director, Storage Networking Solutions, INRANGE Technologies Expectations set during the purchasing phase of a SAN project should line up with an honest assessment of the projected outcome of the project. Otherwise, danger lies ahead. – John Webster, SNW Online columnist Fibre Channel and iSCSI are almost universally perceived as complementary technologies. – Wayne Rickard, chair, SNIA Technical Council The world wants utility-class storage, but the vendors that survive and thrive will have to deliver more than PowerPoint presentations. – SNW Online columnist Steve Duplessie IBM's ability to field a full solution is one of the things that helped it reclaim market share in 2001. – Eric Shephard, senior research analyst, IDC Applications and users could greatly benefit from having storage management know-how built into the applications themselves. – SNW Online columnist John Webster When companies move to NAS or SAN environments, both the media and the transport mechanism have to be protected. – Mike Karp, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates Linux performance is great. We're getting 200M byte/sec. sustained read-out on each server, with an aggregate performance of greater than 2G byte/sec. – Scott Studham, technical group leader, Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest Laboratory By reducing the cost of developing and implementing an in-house solution that would have taken thousands of hours, Archive for DB2 from Princeton Softech has paid for itself already. – John Ebner, Innova consultant and project leader, National Steel The reliability of a system using switched bunches of disks (SBODs) is demonstrably superior to a system based on just a bunch of disks (JBOD). – Tom Hammond, director of technical marketing, Vixel iSCSI will have to deliver a convincing value proposition in order to attract a critical mass of implementers. – Robert Passmore, research director, Gartner Group We chose storage on demand because this solution combines an optimum cost-benefit ratio with high-availability storage capacity, easy integration into existing business processes and more efficient adaptation into future requirements. – Thomas Gebhardt, division manager for Application Hosting, TDS Informationtechnologie AG SNW allows me to share war stories with other users — people that face the same problems that I face. – Jerry Lynch, director of operations, Online Computer Library Center Fibre Channel is very well suited for carrying the SCSI protocol while delivering very low latency and zero frame loss by using flow control. – Brian Mason, Storage Area Network Product Manager, Spirent Communications For the first time, companies of all sizes are investing in up-to-date disaster recovery plans. – Walt Hinton, CTO, and Rob Clements, integration specialist, Managed Storage International We're going to see quite a few solutions coming forward. – Diane Akin Chairperson of the Supported Solutions Forum's Cooperative Support Subgroup We felt that going with SAN technology was a better way to limit costs. – Michael Polito SCorporate vice president New York Life I believe virtualization will be beneficial at all levels: Device, host and network infrastructure. – Barb Goldworm SNW Online columnist You'd be hard-pressed to find a large number of customers who have put virtualization into production for networked storage. – Arun Taneja senior analyst The Enterprise Storage Group We have seen a 1,000% increase in requests for business continuance services. – Art Zeile CEO Inflow, Inc. If I were a customer trying to deploy a SAN, I'd be grilling vendors on how they are addressing open, multi-vendor SAN management. – Jamie Gruener senior analyst The Yankee Group The challenge for any startup these days is getting enterprise customers to pay attention to them. – Jamie Gruener storage analyst The Yankee Group The world has changed, and we have to respond to those changes. We are now making changes in areas with holes that we didn't consider important before. – Patrick Wise vice president of e-commerce Landstar Holdings I'm in favor of anything that lets me send storage traffic over IP and manage SCSI devices using an existing network infrastructure with off-the-shelf products. – Craig Vogel Director of Infrastructure and Technical Operations Measurisk Outsourcing would free up some resources. It would help the IT staff become more rounded and robust because staff members could focus on more exciting IT projects. – Peter Martin product marketing manager BMC Software Here in Europe, we have every level of storage networking implementations, from big strategic SANs to small, departmental applications. – Darren Mace director of IT HomePortfolio.com Plugfests are like square dances. Partners are continuously changing, and the music never stops. – John Webster SNW Online columnist and analyst with Illuminata Right now, the storage industry is where the networking industry was maybe 15 years ago. – Harald Skardal senior consulting engineer with Network Appliance Inc., and a member of the SNIA Technical Council We're waiting for storage management tools to evolve to the point where we can manage the SANs we have in place today as a single entity. – Donald Fike technical director FedEx Having a consistent group of end users around who can hit vendors in the head with a two by four every once in a while would be a good thing. – Steve Guzzi strategic alliance manager Plasmon Inc. There is a tidal wave of external storage coming at us. – Grey Reyes chairman and CEO Brocade Communications Systems Brocade provides a robust solution with a proven track record that solved our connectivity problems. – Don Ecklund VP of engineering Sony Pictures Deploying a SAN has allowed us to centrally manage customer data and greatly reduce our ongoing operational costs. – Alex Gorbansky product manager for storage solutions Loudcloud Storage users are simply not able to absorb the incredible mass and diversity of storage stuff at the pace with which it is being generated. – John Webster SNW Online columnist and analyst with Illuminata Inc. Implementers should make sure they are targeting applications whose storage networking benefits are clear-cut and significant enough to justify the cost and the time. A likely candidate is backup. Storage networking makes a backup environment far more efficient, so total TCO is reduced significantly; and your backups get done more reliably. – Tony Prigmore senior analyst Enterprise Storage Group Feedback: feedback@snwonline.com Questions: questions@snwonline.com Technical difficulties: webmaster@snwonline.com