Current Filter: Storage>>>>>>

   

So, another Storage Awards ceremony bites the dust - the tenth so far, and my first 'proper' awards since taking over the reins at the magazine this time last year. And what a fantastic night it was too, with over 400 industry luminaries putting aside their differences for a night that celebrates the entire sector as much as it does individual winners. Our thanks go out to all the sponsors of the night, as well of course to all of you who took the time to cast your votes. Over 50,000 votes were cast this year, an increase over previous years of around 25%, which is hugely impressive and humbling for all of us here. The winners, as ever, were a fair mix of 'big players' and niche businesses who for many on the night were completely new names - but we're confident that this won't remain the case for much longer. Among the established winners were CA, who narrowly beat off competition from IBM and Quantum to win Storage Company of the Year. For the full breakdown of winners see our list later in this issue.

The sheer scale of the 'Storries' means that we are rather strapped for space for other editorial material in this issue, but we have made the most of what we do have by focusing on hot topics. We feature a detailed breakdown of the arguments for and against the use of SSD in a SAN environment, where OCZ's Joost van Leeuwen says: "By eliminating storage bottlenecks in an enterprise environment through the use of flash-based SSD technology, IT managers can achieve an increase in server utilisation, as well as a reduction in both SAN and maintenance costs. Cost-effective HDD commodity storage can be deployed for capacity, with the desired I/O performance and storage virtualisation enabled by SSD resources. This reduces the amount of disk required as I/O performance no longer needs to be generated by many concurrently running spindles."

Elsewhere we look at the growing demand for real-time analytics: how can emerging storage technologies help? Violin Memory's Michael Bradley explains: "Analysing Big Data is essential for many organisations, but in the financial sector there is another mission-critical dimension: timing. Rapid interpretation of data, which is ever-growing in volume, the speed it is generated at and its types, requires new levels of performance unattainable with legacy technologies."

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk