F5 Networks announced that it has launched the File Virtualization For Dummies program with Wiley Publishing that offers the For Dummies guide along with a supporting webinar. Keeping in line with Wiley's For Dummies guides, this program offers a pragmatic approach to a pervasive issue. The guide and webinar outline the problems created by today's storage deployments, along with the information that IT staff needs to help manage and solve the associated problems. The overall goal of the program is to help enterprise IT staff get a grip on storage growth and reduce costs.

In 2006 IDC released a study showing that the costs associated with data center management escalate at an alarming rate - in large part because of rising software management expenses. Virtualization has many definitions and uses in today's computing world, but three instances of virtualization are of key importance to solving the problems remaining in the data center after the implementation of state-based management and automation.

Enterprises of all sizes are building flexible storage infrastructures using Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and advanced virtualization technologies that let them allocate and shift SAN resources dynamically in response to the demands of their virtualized server environments.

The Belgian Post Office collaborated with NetApp for its data backup and archival. To manage this data, the post office is switching to a virtual infrastructure developed by NetApp in combination with conventional physical tape. In doing this, the post office is keeping pace with the current trend of virtualization in the storage environment, minimizing risk, and maximizing its return on investment in IT spend.

Violin Memory announced it has successfully tested the Violin 1010 memory appliance with the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) from FalconStor Software. The Violin 1010 memory appliance and the FalconStor NSS can be integrated within a solution to meet the high performance, virtualized data storage demands of enterprise data centers.

DataCore Software announced that DDI Health in Australia has selected, deployed and is realizing notable benefits from DataCore's SANmelody virtual SAN software to manage its storage and support its software development servers and VMware systems. DDI Health produces a range of solutions across the diagnostic health services sector. The company was grappling with wasted disk space, 'out of disk space' warnings that force systems and applications to be shut down to add more disks and constant disk provisioning issues. Whereas one set of servers would be full, another set would have disk space to spare, thereby making the provisioning of disk space between systems an on-going and fairly labor-intensive undertaking. With SANmelody in place to allocate disk space to physical and virtual servers as well as workstations, the administration team's disk management headache has disappeared. Now there is very little wasted disk space. Not only had disk administration been labor-intensive, it was also fairly problematic and the resulting downtime was very disruptive to daily operations.

Data storage in the surveillance world is undergoing a major revolution. With an increased focus on capturing and managing digital information, some of the old methods of storing and archiving video footage can?t address the new business requirements imposed by changing times. When planning storage implementations, the high-end surveillance market requires optimal digital storage characteristics.

Companies today are very aware of the high costs associated with managing stored data and keeping this data available to business-critical applications. These management costs are escalating at a time when corporate IT organizations are looking to streamline operations to ensure that infrastructure investments lead to increases in productivity and profitability.

Trimble announced that it has acquired privately-held Quantm International, Inc. and its subsidiary Quantm Ltd. of Australia in an all-cash transaction. Quantm is a provider of transportation route optimization software used for planning highways, railways, pipelines and canals. The innovative software system enables infrastructure planners to examine and select route corridors and alignments that simultaneously optimize construction costs, environmental restrictions, existing feature avoidance and legislative obligations. The improved solution for the proposed route results in significant reductions in project planning time and cost.

It's often said that IT administrators in general, and storage administrators in particular, are highly risk-averse. Clearly that's the case today. Look for a moment at any one of the surveys that seeks to understand the most pressing issues on the minds of those are tasked with the stewardship of enterprise data. These surveys point to data protection, security, system reliability and availability, and responsiveness to regulatory agencies and corporate governance as top priorities. Hot products these days are continuous data protection (CDP), disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T), and e-mail archiving solutions. Storage-based data encryption solutions are now getting a thorough examination as well. Managing risk is a prime mover in the storage industry.

Ever since the introduction of Open Systems into the data center, a problem has been brewing. Too often, the storage environment isn't seen as an area with security considerations. Until recently, corporate security policies rarely considered the data center storage environment; sometimes there was no real link between the two. Security was managed at the operating system level or within applications, and a storage location was seen as purely a physical hardware issue with little bearing on user access or security controls.