Henry Baltazar

Big and fast may be two of the biggest requirements when choosing a storage system, but another key consideration is manageability. Manageability is inherently harder to quantify than capacity or throughput, and it will get harder as convergence technologies become more prevalent and vendors race to build heterogeneous management tools. Standards, such as Common Information […]

EMC Corp.s new Clariion CX600 storage system brings 2G-bps Fibre Channel performance to midtier and high-end networks. Compared with the Clariion we tested about two years ago, the FC4500, the Clariion CX600 has benefited from the evolution of hard drives and other storage hardware components, as well as from the improvement of Intel Corp.s 32-bit […]

This past week I have gotten a fair amount of letters that suggest I was wearing rose-colored lenses while writing my iSCSI package. Oddly enough, Im usually seen as more of a pessimist than an optimist in the eyes of most of the people I work with. That said, I will focus this column on […]

Last spring, Wireless Retail faced a problem that is all too common with todays networks: Data was growing at a rate faster than the companys direct-attached storage could support. The solution? A SAN that bets on the performance and management promise of iSCSI. After deciding that a block-level storage system would best fit its data […]

It would be an exaggeration to say the fate of the iSCSI storage market rests on the Cisco SN 5428 Storage Router, but the success of this product will surely act as a barometer for the rest of the industry. From both a symbolic and functional standpoint, Cisco Systems Inc.s SN 5428 bridges the gap […]

The release of the iSCSI specification is just around the corner, and, based on eWeek Labs tests of iSCSI-based products and analysis of the evolving specification, iSCSI will offer organizations an inexpensive, effective means to a SAN end. iSCSI is an IP-based protocol that enables the block-level transfer of data over a network. From a […]

Nexsan Technologies ATAboy2 (click here to see the ATAboy2) is an inexpensive RAID solution that small and medium-size businesses with large storage appetites should welcome with open arms. The ATAboy2 takes advantage of the lower cost and high capacity of ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) drives to create RAID units with impressive cost efficiency. In tests […]

Imperial Technology Inc.s SANaccelerator quenches the thirst for high-speed storage access. In eWeek Labs tests, the SANaccelerator delivered phenomenal performance—numbers that cannot be approached by standard SCSI and Fibre Channel hard drives. The SANaccelerator is a great buy for sites that need high performance and have deep pockets. The 6GB SANaccelerator unit we tested (which […]

From a strict name-association point of view, the word “Auspex” has always been related to “big black box” in my storage-crazy mind. Auspex Systems Inc. has been around since 1987 and is widely seen as a pioneer in the NAS space, for the most part providing Unix servers with high-speed file shares. During my visit […]

One of the first servers based on the Itanium 2 processor, Hewlett-Packard Co.s HP Server RX2600 illustrates that the Itanium 2 will be a boon for database and security applications, among other computation-intensive tasks. However, its too early to predict whether the architecture will be a commercial success. While the initial 64-bit Itanium chip was […]