In his article “Tape Makes a Comeback in the Era of Big Data” on IT Business Edge, Arthur Cole says tape is still a viable storage option.

The need for bulk data storage at a relatively low cost has led many companies to take another look at tape, even though experts have predicted its demise for nearly a decade. Tape’s biggest drawback is the perception that it represents old technology, so how could a professional data operation rely on anything as antiquated as tape?

Well, initial deployment costs are 75 percent lower than disk, and operational costs have dropped seven-fold over the past five years. And since data is saved across all manner of virtual and cloud infrastructure these days, the type of underlying hardware has become largely irrelevant. Tape’s speed and storage space is impressive too. The latest Linear Open Tape (LTO)-5 format boasts 1.5 TB of capacity with transfer speeds now exceeding 100 MBps, more than twice that of SATA RAID-5 and RAID-6.

Since tape will only probably be just one part of the storage environment for most companies, it’s important that they choose a storage solution that can navigate across tape, disk and cloud tiers. This will help maximize cost efficiencies and keep tape alive for another decade.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Nancy Gohring discusses cloud options in the article “Private cloud vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud” recently posted on IT World.

According to the article, a recent KPMG survey of 800 senior IT executives says 41% of respondents use or are planning to use a private cloud while 30% said they are or have plans to use a public cloud. According to Rick Wright, head of KPMG’s global cloud enablement initiative, choosing a public, private or hybrid clouds comes down to several factors.

Companies have to consider the business criticality of the applications they want to move to the cloud and how integrated they have to be with other enterprise functions. Regulatory issues, required service levels and usage patterns for the workloads are also important.

Based on these factors, businesses that must comply with strict regulations and have highly critical applications should opt for internal private clouds. Companies without tight regulatory controls and those using data that doesn’t have to be integrated into with other parts of their business can go to a public cloud. Security for both public and private clouds is still a concern, but as time passes, companies will become more comfortable with cloud storage.

In the end, Wright says, most companies will end up using a hybrid cloud model. Because a hybrid cloud is made up of both public and private cloud services, a business could run applications on their private cloud, but use a public when they experience usage spikes.

If you don’t have a plan for big data, Beth Stackpole’s article “’Big data’ prep: 5 things IT should do now” on ComputerWorld will get you up to speed.

Handling big data is different from the data warehousing, mining and analysis that came before it. Blogs, social media networks, machine sensors and location-based data are generating a whole new universe of unstructured data that can help companies uncover facts and patterns they weren’t able to recognize in the past.

IT is standing at the forefront of this data revolution, and since big-data technologies are still evolving, savvy IT leaders should prep to get ahead of the transformation, says Mark Beyer, Gartner’s research VP of information management.

Here are five things tech managers should do to create a proper big data foundation:
1. Take stock
Determine what data is created internally and what external data could fill in knowledge gaps that could add insight to you business.

2. Let business needs drive data dives
IT/business alignment is critical to big data, but it’s IT’s responsibility to take charge of big data’s data sharing and data federation concepts.

3. Re-evaluate infrastructure and data architecture
Big data will require major changes in both server and storage infrastructure and information management architecture, so IT managers need to be prepared to expand the IT platform to deal with ever-expanding stores of data.

4. Bone up on the technology
IT will need to be up on technologies like in-database analytics, columnar databases and data warehouse appliances important to big-data. Managers and staffs need to familiarize themselves with these tools so they’re properly situated to make big-data decisions.

5. Prepare to hire or retrain staff
In addition to traditional skills in information management, governance and database structure, the new big-data professionals need to understand semantics and mathematical disciplines and have expertise in the new predictive analytics tools and data management platforms that comprise big data. Future IT managers will be a combination of data scientist and business process engineer, says Gartner’s Beyer.

Face it, you always need more data storage, and with that comes security concerns. Don McVittie points to directory virtualization as a way to address both issues in his article “Meeting your Company’s Storage Needs with Directory Virtualization” for Computer Technology Review.

Directory virtualization (DV) puts a strategic point of control between users and the data storage they use on a daily basis. This creates a platform that allows several things to happen.

First, resource utilization can be greatly normalized because the DV device presents a single directory tree to users, even though there are many network-attached storage (NAS) devices behind it. So while the user stores to the same place in the directory, IT can move files if necessary.

Second, file movement can be automated so they flow between data storage tiers based on the frequency of use. And if a device is near its capacity, some or all of the files can be moved to a new device.

Finally, by using a DV device that works with your cloud storage provider, files that aren’t accessed frequently can be moved out of your building, but can still be accessed by users.

An added benefit of DV is security. Since users only see the single directory tree, security can be moved from all of the different NAS devices into the DV device. In effect, all of the NAS devices are locked down, since they can only communicate through the DV device.

Evolving Solutions has been getting a lot of questions from our customers about the new VMWare VSphere 5.0 licensing model. As you may have heard, VMWare has added a memory restriction to VSphere 5.0 licensing. They call this new model  vRAM entitlements. Your vRAM entitlement depends on which version of VSphere you currently are running in your data center.  Standard edition is 32GB, Enterprise edition is 64GB, and the Enterprise plus is 96GB of RAM per socket license. Customers must remember that this is not based on the physical RAM in the server, but the RAM allocated to guests. VMWare has not yet set a hard limit to this number.  They are planning to look back at the last 12 months of usage and find the highest daily high water mark and use that to check compliance.

To aid our customers in the transition to VSphere 5.0, we have a tool we can run against your environment that will analyze what you are licensed for today; look at your environment and show you how it will translate into VSphere 5.0 licenses.

Contact your Account Executive for more information.

The days of IT workers going to the same office for work every day are apparently over, according to a new survey from Forrester Research. Brad Reed reviews the findings in his article “Office work is so last century, Forrester reports” on Network World.

Here are some highlights from the survey:

50% of information workers split time between their office and remote locations while 45% said they still worked at the office only.

87% of workers said they used desktops during the workday; 51% reported using laptops. Tablets were only used by 11% of workers.

35% use their smartphones for work. 48% chose their work smartphone “without considering what their company supports, 29% chose them from a list of supported devices and 23% used whatever was provided by their company.

42% of smartphone users surveyed said they used a BlackBerry for work, 22% used an Apple iPhone and 26% used smartphones based on Google’s open-source Android operating system.

Forrester conducted the survey online in May and surveyed 4,985 information workers employed by organizations of 20 employees or greater.

Sandra Gittlen’s article “Extend your data center’s life expectancy” on infoworld.com shares strategies that can help you get more out of your current data center.

Because of the shaky economy, Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner, says he’s been bombarded lately by large organizations looking to avoid the cost of a data center upgrade. “Any data center investment costs at minimum tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars. With a typical data center refresh rate of five to 10 years, that’s a lot of money, so companies are looking for alternatives,” he says.

Kumar finds that many companies can get an extra two to five years from their data center with a combination of strategies, including consolidating and rationalizing hardware and software usage; rolling out virtualization; and physically moving IT equipment around. Most companies don’t optimize the components of their data center and, therefore, bump up against its limitations faster than necessary, he says.

Here are more strategies from other IT leaders and experts:

• Relocate noncritical data.
• Take the pressure off of high-value applications and infrastructure.
• Standardize servers and storage.
• Virtualize whatever you can.
• Root out and retire unused or low-utilized devices and applications.
• Contain test and development sprawl.
• Look for duplicate data in your storage arrays.
• Push your developers to use effective coding.
• Rearrange the furniture.
• Analyze your energy efficiency.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

With many customers fully virtualized, it’s time to take them the rest of the way toward a true cloud solution, said Carl Eschenbach, at the Global Technology Distribution Council Summit in Newport Beach.

In the article “VMware’s Eschenbach: Six Ways To Drive Transformation Into Cloud” on CRN, Scott Campbell shares Eschenbach’s strategies on how the IT channel can take advantage of clouds.

Here are the strategies Eschenbach suggests:
1. Deploy Private Clouds
This still represents the largest opportunity, says Eschenbach.
2. Deploy/Manage Public Clouds
“We can help build public cloud and do that by leveraging the services that our partners have,” Eschenbach said.
3. Partner with Service Providers to Resell Cloud Services
VMware, and distributors can “bridge the gap” between public service providers and the VARs to sell public services back into the private cloud.
4. Assist Hybrid Cloud Migration
There is an opportunity to take applications that exist in data centers today and helping them move to public cloud, whether it’s software as a service or just a public cloud provider.
5. Buy and Resell Private Clouds
Building private clouds themselves or going to a service provider who has already built one and buying a rack.
6. Migrate/Transform/Build Applications on Top of the Cloud
“Companies have to think about selling software as a service and how to do that without disrupting the massive revenue streams they have today,” he said.

The final result will be significant adoption of cloud in the market by customers, Eschenbach said.

Are the next generation WAAS appliances announced at Interop what Cisco needs to be competitive again? In his article “The new Cisco WAAS appliances, a game changer?” for Network World, Larry Chaffin offers his opinion.

“I have been saying for years that Cisco needs to fix the software by adding features that would allow them compete against Riverbed and others. They have had I think three years to innovate the product and add features that would allow them to optimize encrypted protocols, but sadly they have not,” says Chaffin.  “They have done what networking companies do, they come out with bigger and better, faster, more powerful appliances.”

What’s missing? “There’s no encrypted MAPI, SMB2, SMB-signed CIFS or SMB2, Citrix ICA, Lotus Notes, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle Forms,” Chaffin says. “Also, it seems from what I been reading that they have not fixed the data store problem that they have and that hurts them in large deployments. Very hard to scale when you have a data store managed per peer.”

According to Chaffin, Cisco will give its normal deep discounts to gain market share, but customers will look past the discount to find a product that works for them. “Cisco had a huge chance and blew it,” he said.

In his article “Reigning in Unstructured Data” for Computer Technology Review, Ken Cheney talks about unstructured data in a virtualized world.

With the proliferation of NAS storage devices, diverse file servers running all sorts of apps (not just databases), and cloud-based services, the growth of unstructured data in businesses is unfettered.

According to Cheney, in the wild and wooly world of unstructured data it’s important for companies to think out their data management and storage plans up front to ensure all of that info is handled correctly.

As more companies (and more smaller companies) jump on the virtualization bandwagon, things will only get more complicated when it comes to securing their unstructured data like the reams of Word and PowerPoint and PDF documents stuffed into their soon-to-be virtualized servers. Of course, these companies want to reap the cost-savings associated with server virtualization, but fail to think through the security implications as they make this move.

If you need more proof that the need for good, secure management of storage in our ever-virtualizing world is only going to grow, you only have to look to IDC’s latest numbers on the storage software market. The total size of that market segment hit $3.4 billion this quarter, up 11.3% over the year-ago-quarter. Within the overall storage software category, data protection and recovery software sales accounted for more than one-third (34.2%) of the total.