Matt Prigge

I can think of a lot of words to describe small-business data protection -- "painful" and "expensive," to name two. But "cool" and "sexy?" Generally not.

Those last terms apply, however, to Symform's distributed peer-to-peer online backup architecture. This wildly innnovative approach has the potential to reduce the pain of small-business backup, provided it can win enough hearts and minds to stand the test of time.

At long last, after a couple of years of obsessive coverage by trade rags and analyst firms, I think "the cloud" has jumped the shark. We've been inundated by stories declaring that cloud infrastructure will mark the end of cap ex for IT -- and almost as many articles labeling the cloud as an unreliable, underpowered security nightmare. Is anyone listening anymore? If you ask me, this dog has had its day.

Frankly, I've never seen what all the fuss is about. When I first started hearing rumblings about cloud infrastructure a few years ago, I actually thought I might have missed some huge technological development. It didn't take me long to figure out that at a very basic level, cloud infrastructure isn't new at all. It's the marketing and spin that's new.

Tracking and cracking network performance problems is no easy task. More than a matter of identifying often mystifying bottlenecks, ensuring network efficiency requires an almost preternatural understanding of your organization's IT operations, as well as a thick skin for withstanding the heat when problems inevitably arise.

To keep your network humming, we've outlined 10 areas where tweaking and moderate investment can lead to significant performance gains. After all, as more and more organizations seek to conduct business at wire speed, making sure your systems blaze is essential to the competitive edge your organization needs.

In my last post, I talked about our increasing dependence on huge, rapidly growing piles of data that must be backed up and duplicated in turn -- compounding the data explosion problem. An astute reader posed a question I think all of us have asked in one way or another, but rarely tried to answer: Why is our data growing so rapidly?

It would be easy to respond to that question by trotting out the usual suspects. For example, high-definition technologies such as medical imaging, document imaging, and video certainly eat up lots of space. And who can deny that compliance regulations have forced us to retain more and more documents and messages?

The proliferation of huge, cache-laden SATA disks in the consumer market has led to an ever-expanding array of very inexpensive networked storage products for business. More often than not, these devices offer both NAS and iSCSI SAN functions that, until recently, were found only in enterprise-class storage products -- at a fraction of the cost. Are these ultracheap alternatives right for you? That depends on who you are and what you do.

A huge range of performance variables separate true enterprise-class storage products from their inexpensive pretenders. The most glaring is transactional performance. Most low-cost storage devices are based on a small number of very large SATA disks rather than larger numbers of SATA or higher-speed SAS/FC disks. These types of configurations will yield extremely anemic transactional performance, which would generally make them poor choices for hosting a busy database or mail server.