Mario Apicella

Getting top performance from a storage system and making applications faster and more resilient are two critical and challenging aspects of computing. Unfortunately, many products focus on just one side of the problem or require massive, costly infrastructure changes.

I am not going to join the misguided gang cheering the death of tape

Anyone who has considered moving to a storage area network (SAN) has faced a fundamental choice between two technologies: the established, but pricey FC (Fibre Channel) and the more af- fordable but still emerging iSCSI (Internet SCSI) transport.

Troika has packed some unique features into its Accelera NSS (network storage services) appliance, including resilient hardware acceleration for both FC (Fibre Channel) and I/O traffic and the ability to integrate with a variety of third-party applications such as backup, mirroring and snapshots. These advantages position the Accelera as a prime candidate for adding intelligence to your SAN.

What do you need to properly manage storage across a large enterprise? Different companies will respond differently to this question, but regardless of how you define storage resource management, Veritas CommandCentral will probably meet your requirements.

Virtualized storage is hardly new, but it has been reinvigorated by interesting solutions from major vendors, such as Hitachi

A convergence of support of network-centric services on the Cisco MDS 9000 by many major vendors, including EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp., is good news for customers. Customers will be able to choose between competing storage applications that run on the same platform, much as they do with business-oriented applications such as ERP and CRM.

Many companies -- either by design or because of a merger -- end up managing multiple SANs. But merging two SANs can be a...