Disk Technologies And Tiered Storage:

Disks have two main parts - the hard drive assembly, consisting of the disk drive, the motor, and the head; and the drive interface. For each of these, there are lots of options, each with various trade-offs. What is going to be important in future will be a tiered storage approach - matching storage technology to class of data. Disk-To-Disk Data Protection: There are things that drive us to make copies of our data - mistakes, disasters, and lawyers! Historically, these are problems for which people have used tape, or even paper. Over time, disks have started to replace this. In the case of disaster recovery, fast replication and quick recovery is critical — and this is driving the move towards using disk-based data protection technology.

How important are effective disaster recovery solutions in the current scenario?

As organisations continue to generate and store exponentially increasing amounts of business critical data, the costs of data loss are very high - including lost productivity, missed sales opportunities, loss of customer loyalty and loss of critical operational data with a long-term impact such as financial records. Data protection is therefore a primary area of concern for IT managers. While data protection and disaster recovery planning are imperative, many IT managers and administrators are concerned with preserving data integrity while backing up data and restoring backed-up data within a time-frame that meets business and end-user requirements.

What does data management include?

Data management covers the systems and processes an organisation deploys to manage the creation, back-up and recovery, archival (with security) and removal of enterprise data. Data management, at the most fundamental level, is the consolidation of information in a way that is easy to manage, retrieve and maintain. Data here refers to not only structured data, or databases, but also semi-structured (home directories) and unstructured data (word or excel files).

What are the current trends in storage solutions globally?

CIOs today are increasingly being called upon to maximise return on investment by improving asset utilisation, increasing operational efficiency and simplifying the deployment of new technologies. In addition, the need to rapidly adapt the infrastructure to changing business requirements, managing information securely and delivering 24*7 service to end users are other key requirements. We see four key trends in storage:

The industry has increasingly seen the convergence of technologies like NAS and SAN; and storage infrastructure today needs to support multiple operating systems like Unix, Windows and Linux.

Evolution Of Storage Management: Traditionally, IT infrastructures were built based on a business problem that was addressed by a particular application. Servers were chosen based on what worked best with the chosen application and storage was chosen based on what worked best with the chosen server. In this model, the storage provisioning was owned by the servers. Today, dedicated storage is moving to a scalable storage infrastructure, that is tiered based on criticality of data — primary, secondary, archival.

Microsoft Corp will charge $239 (186 euros) for the version of the Windows Vista operating system it hopes most consumers will buy, according to prices listed on Internet retailer Amazon.com’s Website.

Amazon.com, which has begun taking pre-orders for Microsoft Vista, also reveals list prices for two other versions. Those prices will be similar to what MS currently charges for comparable versions of Windows X. According to Amazon.com the version of Vista geared towards work use, Windows Vista Business, will cost $299.The consumer version, Windows Vista Home Basic, will cost $199 (155 euro), the same as Windows XP Home.

But Microsoft is hoping most consumers will embrace Windows Vista Premium, which offers entertainment capabilities such as the ability to record live television. That version is listed at $239 (186 euro). Similar functionality is available in the Media Centre edition of Windows XP, but that is only available pre-loaded onto a computer