David Morgenstern

For most of us, the exact details of hard disk evolution is a mystery. So we find it difficult to understand why a feature like jumpers still exist. Perhaps they are a vestigial organ, much like the tails and webbed feet that occur with surprisingly frequency in the human population. However, for ordinary users and […]

As much as we decry mediocrity, we seem to have no trouble integrating it into our lifestyle. In education. In government. And in storage. Like CDs. In my previous column, I declared that CDs stink for both data and audio storage. For technological and market reasons, the formats have entered obsolescence; but like overprotective parents […]

The old saw tells us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Recently, weve seen one moldy technology—the floppy drive—finally begin to head out the door, still to the dismay of many. Now in the CD and DVD formats we can see the same market dynamic that kept the floppy firmly […]

With a nod to the infamous moment in the 70s classic Soylent Green, there come times when we want to holler, “Storage is people, too!” Or so I was reminded this week when speaking to an enterprise storage vendor about a new product. The genesis of this epiphany was this weeks announcement of an alliance […]

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Transitions can be trying, whether they affect personal lives or computer lines. Changes of the latter sort were on the minds of attendees at last weeks Intel Developer Forum here, especially when it came to storage. Discussion of new hardware standards dominated many panels at the conference, and products that incorporated them cropped […]

Enterprise Storage Veritas Looks Beyond the Storage Horizon Storage management software vendor Veritas Software said it plans to expand into other IT management technologies, to better compete against more diversified rivals such as EMC, Computer Associates International and IBM. Veritas announced three acquisitions since November, adding products in areas such as server provisioning and application […]

For some of you, the floppy has passed into history now that Dell Computer has removed it from its standard configuration. Accordingly, a good number of readers suggested a variety of successors, including optical technology, teeny-weeny hard drives, memory cards and more, each offering its own goodness. But are any of these suggestions on the […]

The word that Dell Computer will pull the plug on built-in floppy drives drew a howl from some in the support community. The response had nothing to do with good data-storage practices, like backing up or transferring files without benefit of a network. Instead, its a more fundamental reason: the boot sequence and reviving a […]

Dell Computer last week announced that it will phase out the built-in floppy drive on its high-end models by the end of the month. And while only the most retro customers will actually miss the venerable format, the alternatives cost may take some getting used to. The whole deal highlights the missing link in the […]

Frequent flyers are well aware of the principal of force majeure: the so-called “acts of God” that relieve airlines from their obligation to schlep us to the destinations on our tickets. Should the same expectation hold for our data as it passes over the Internet? In the aftermath of the SQL Slammer, I wondered how […]

In my previous column, I voiced concern that fallout from last weekends SQL Slammer worm assault—only the latest in an increasingly severe string of attacks—might shake the already wavering confidence of consumers in the reliability of the Internet. This dip, I argued, could hurt the market for Web services and especially for remote storage of […]

Stories of the SQL Slammer worm have disappeared from the front pages of news sites, just a couple of days after its attack. “Out of sight, out of mind,” some may conclude with a sigh of relief. Still, folks in the remote-storage business should be concerned about market fallout from the Slammer worm. As ably […]