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Who’s up for a heated debate?

Editorial Type: Comment     Date: 03-2014    Views: 1424   




Never let it be said that Storage magazine likes to stir up trouble, but I must admit that I do very much enjoy featuring editorial in our pages that suggests, shall we say, 'strong opinions' on a topic.

I am convinced that our readers would far rather hear some genuinely held beliefs, even if they are occasionally controversial, rather than corporate marketing-speak from people in the industry. This issue then, should be fuel for several fires!

The ever-voluble John Greenwood of NCE kicks things off with an opinion piece that suggests none-too-gently that storage admins tend to fall into one of two camps: dinosaurs, or apprentices. He manages to bring in the Antiques Roadshow and Sky+ as well, for good measure. Elsewhere John Scaramuzzo of Sandisk takes issue with the idea of a 'silver bullet' approach to solving data centre strain: "I have never seen a single solution that could solve all data centre challenges. What I do see is organisations spending money on multiple HDDs and SSDs without understanding their application needs, leading them to either spend more for 'bells' they don't need, or buying something cheap and not getting enough 'whistles,' creating a budget sinkhole as drives burn out."

We've an interesting piece too about email archiving from C2C's Peter Mullens who lays into PST files: "(PST) appears a good solution for the end user because these files are easy to create and use, but it causes a significant number of problems for IT administrators as well as the wider organisation. PST files can be located almost anywhere on end-user devices or network drives, and being under end-user control they are effectively unmanaged. They often contain business-critical data, but they may not be backed up and are liable to be lost or misplaced. Finally, the PST format itself is not robust, so files can get corrupted."

We also speak to Fujifilm's Roger Moore, who wants to see a new approach to 'deep archives': "The traditional in-house approach has no solution to the problem of what we call 'cross-generation compatibility'; i.e. what happens when you move to a new generation only to find that your two- or three-generation old tapes can no longer be read - unless you retain expensive legacy drives in an library that, in all likelihood, will very rarely get used."

And there's plenty more besides in this packed issue - that's one point on which I hope we can all agree!

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk

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