Stories by Mario Apicella

Hunting down dark fibre

The speed of optical-grade broadband is beginning to reach our homes, at least those lucky enough to live in areas covered by Verizon's FiOS (fiber-optic service) or similar offerings.

Fueling faster file transfers with RocketStream

The data that we send over wires travels between two-thirds and three-quarters the speed of light, depending on the medium. Within the LAN, transfers from point A to point B appear to be immediate, with less than a millisecond delay.

FTP: New tricks for an old dog

Not only has the multimedia revolution increased our appetite for storage, but it has also beefed up our portions, as average file sizes just keep getting bigger every day.

The SMB backup dilemma

Every time I hear a pitch for an SMB backup solution it comes complete with a chilling statistic that suggests smaller companies are tone-deaf to data protection.

Built-in encryption is key to ending data leaks

It hasn't happened to me so far (fingers crossed), but I imagine there are very few things more disturbing than having your personal information put at risk because someone lost or misplaced a tape cartridge or a laptop.

Raising the storage bar

Are you satisfied with your storage gear? If not, you might find what you need from two vendors not normally associated with storage: NEC and Stratus.

A small step to improve disk reliability

The storage industry isn't necessarily known for being a fast mover. Take for example <a href="http://www.idema.org/_smartsite/modules/local/data_file/show_file.php?cmd=download&data_file_id=1263">this memo, dated October 2003</a> (it's in Microsoft Word format), in which Seagate made clear the need to move the physical block size of disk drives to 4,096 bytes instead of 512 bytes.

Will virtual servers end the FC-iSCSI debate

Let's take a trip to the future this week. Imagine that we travel forward in time -- say, 100 years from now. How will the technological landscape of storage change in one century? What will our descendants think of the state of our technology?

Will SAS 2.0 grow greener storage?

FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA ... the alphabet soup of different connectivity protocols for disk drives can be confusing. Why do we have so many? The simple answer is because new technologies like SATA and SAS pop up fast, old technologies like SCSI do not disappear as quickly.

A single protocol in your SAN?

A newly proposed standard, dubbed FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), aims to bring together the efficiency of the FC (Fibre Channel) transport and the ubiquity of Ethernet.

Storage Insider: The upcoming data deluge

Have you read "The Expanding Digital Universe"? It's a study, commissioned by EMC and put together by IDG analyst group, IDC, on the amount of digital data that we can expect to see in the next few years.

LeftHand boosts its SAN/iQ

Many companies would embrace the superior performance and enhanced reliability of clustered storage were it not for the fear that adoption would cost a fortune and lock them into proprietary hardware.

Storage Insider: Benchmark in the making

No other storage topic is more sensitive for vendors and more important for potential customers than performance measurement. I've had vendors refuse to send me a product for review because of disagreements on which speed benchmarks to use during the evaluation.

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