For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Consolidated Backup Strategies For Remote Sites

by Stephanie Balaouras, October 30, 2009

A remote site can be as small as a branch office location with five employees or as large as a regional sales office with 50 employees. Regardless of a company's size, end users are creating and storing critical data at these sites. In some industries . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Use Deduplication To Store More With Less

Dedupe Your Backups Today, But Plan For Other Environments

by Stephanie Balaouras, July 10, 2009

While the cost of disk has declined significantly over the past five years, you still can't call it cheap at thousands of dollars per terabyte (TB). IT professionals struggle to keep up with 30% to 40% annual data growth while simultaneously creating . . .

For Consumer Product Strategy Professionals

The Convenience Quotient Of Consumer Storage And Backup

by Nathan Safran, July 6, 2009

The consumer backup and storage space has become increasingly crowded — and sophisticated — over the past 24 months. From burning a DVD to using a full-blown home server, there are a wide variety of options today, with varying features and degrees of . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Inquiry Spotlight: Backup, Q2 2009

by Stephanie Balaouras, June 26, 2009

Backup is one of the most critical day-to-day responsibilities for IT operations. You must have a recent backup of your critical data to recover from accidental deletions, system crashes, disk failures, and data corruption. But backup is complex, error . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

TechRadar™ For I&O Professionals: Green IT 1.0 Technologies, Q2 2009

Helping IT Ops Professionals Understand And Prioritize Green IT Hardware, Software, And Service Investments

by Doug Washburn, June 12, 2009

Green IT is on the rise. Even in the face of a weak economy, twice as many organizations expect to accelerate their green IT plans as expect to slow them down. Why is this? Green IT initiatives are financially motivated, exposing opportunities for cost . . .

For Technology Sales Enablement Professionals

Hardware Tech Marketers Bank On The Small Financial Services Market

by Ellen Carney, May 6, 2009

Not too long ago, IT hardware vendors banked on the business they got from financial services industry giants like Morgan Stanley, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and AIG. When the Wall Street bubble burst, hardware tech vendors like Cisco Systems, Dell, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency

Power Savings Benefits Are Limited, But Improved Efficiency Makes Good Sense

by Andrew Reichman, April 17, 2009

Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it's hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact. In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

IBM's Bid For Sun Is About More Than Just Solaris And Java

Sun's Innovations Can Improve IBM's Prospects Outside Enterprise Markets

by Frank E. Gillett, March 24, 2009

Vendor strategists are calling Forrester asking what we make of the possibility of IBM buying Sun Microsystems. The conventional wisdom is that IBM wants to capture the Solaris/SPARC customer base to boost the AIX/Power business and own Java to protect . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

SSD "Chips" Away At Spinning Disk

Options Abound For Application Acceleration Through Memory Use

by Andrew Reichman, December 10, 2008

Solid-state disk (SSD) is by no means new technology, but declining costs and reliability improvements of flash storage have reinvigorated the debate on where and how to apply memory to the effort to improve application performance. A recent wave of storage . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Q&A: The Future Of MAID Storage

by Jo Maitland, September 16, 2008

Massive array of idle disks (MAID) storage, a technology that radically cuts down on the power consumption of disk drives by spinning them down or off when not in use, has barely made a dent in the market. Despite the hype around green IT, there are several . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Market Overview: File-Based Storage

NAS Offerings And Other Approaches To Address An Avalanche Of Files

by Andrew Reichman, April 14, 2008

Firms must store more and more file data as users generate more office documents and create more rich digital content such as photos, audio files, and video files, and as applications do more with these and other forms of file-based content. With increasing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

2008 Trends In Backup And Data Protection

by Stephanie Balaouras, April 2, 2008

Backup remains as problematic as ever, but there are several emerging trends in technology and functional convergence that should address some of the biggest challenges: increasing capacities, shrinking backup windows, increasing recovery point requirements, . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Hardware Vendor Positioning Benchmark, Q1 2008

A Review Of Hardware Marketing Practices With A Self-Assessment Tool

by Norbert Kriebel, March 26, 2008

Forrester used its vendor positioning review (VPR) methodology to evaluate the positioning of eight top hardware vendors across 14 criteria to determine where they are currently positioning themselves on the continuum between information technology (IT) . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Open Systems Virtual Tape Libraries, Q1 2008

FalconStor, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, And EMC Are The Top Market Leaders

by Stephanie Balaouras, January 31, 2008

Forrester evaluated 12 virtual tape library (VTL) vendors across 58 criteria and found that FalconStor Software leads for the completeness of its product offering and strategy. Fujitsu Siemens Computers leads for its host support, architecture, and tape . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

The State Of Enterprise Hardware Adoption: 2007

Business Data Services North America And Europe

by Frank E. Gillett, November 19, 2007

How are enterprises adopting, using, and managing hardware, including hardware budgets, mobile devices, PCs and laptops, servers, systems management, storage, networks, and data centers? This document gives highlights of an extensive data set collected . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

The State Of SMB Hardware Adoption: 2007

Business Data Services North America And Europe

by Michael Speyer, October 31, 2007

How are small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) adopting, using, and managing hardware, including hardware budgets, PCs and laptops, servers, storage, networks, and services? This document gives highlights of an extensive data set collected from 1,103 . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Will Data Deduplication Finally Make Disk As Cheap As Tape?

by Stephanie Balaouras, July 23, 2007

For years, disk vendors have greatly exaggerated the news of tape's demise. While magnetic tape is certainly not a glamorous technology considered critical to C-level executives, it's a mature technology, it's low cost, and it's portable (which offers . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, Q3 2007

IT View Technographics Survey, June 30, 2007

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

North American Enterprise Storage Buyers Prefer EMC And Systems Vendors

Storage Providers Are Divided Into Generalists And Specialists

by Frank E. Gillett, May 21, 2007

Forrester annually asks IT infrastructure buyers about their storage providers. We learned that half of enterprises in North America are customers of EMC and nearly as many also buy from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. To get beyond the simple statistics . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Server/Storage Attach Sells For Systems Vendors

North American Enterprises Are More Likely To Buy Systems Vendors' Storage

by Frank E. Gillett, May 21, 2007

Are North American enterprise customers more likely to buy storage from their server vendors than from other sources? We surveyed enterprise IT hardware buyers and learned that they purchase a wide variety of combinations of server and storage gear, with . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Tapping Buyers' Growing Interest In Green IT

by Christopher Mines, May 10, 2007

Forrester's initial survey of IT sourcing and operations professionals reveal that most are unaware of vendors' efforts to design and market more environmentally responsible products and services. Many are aware, however, of IT's rising energy consumption . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Storage Buyer Profile: 2006

Business Data Services North America And Europe

by Stephanie Balaouras, Frank E. Gillett, April 18, 2007

To help storage marketers better understand storage buyers, we asked a set of storage-oriented questions about vendors, adoption of emerging storage technologies, and top storage priorities in our annual survey of enterprise IT infrastructure decision-makers. . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

Asia Pacific Storage Buyer Profile: 2006  (121 KB PPT)

by Frank E. Gillett, April 18, 2007

Asia Pacific storage data.

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Choosing A Virtual Tape Library

Selection Criteria For Mission-Critical Environments

by Stephanie Balaouras, December 15, 2006

As enterprises shift their backup and data protection strategy from tape to disk, IT operations professionals can choose from continuous data protection, rotating point-in-time snapshots, and backup to a disk target solutions. Most enterprises want to . . .

For Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals

Disk-Based Data Protection Forecast: 2006 To 2011

Enterprises Shift To Disk As The First Line Of Protection

by Stephanie Balaouras, November 17, 2006

Historically, data was backed up to tape. But with data growing at double-digit rates each year and backup windows shrinking dramatically or altogether, enterprises are increasingly incorporating disk-based data protection into their backup strategies. . . .