Lots of News Traffic Going Through the Station

Man, it’s been busy around the Station lately. I think I’ve written about 10 stories or blog items in the last few days. Earnings reports, lawsuits, M&As, new products — there is certainly no lack of storage and data center material to tackle.

In fact, I was so busy yesterday chasing down a couple of stories at once — one about the pressure the San Diego wildfires are putting on telcommunications systems, and one about an IBM acquisition — that I skipped doing a blog item.

I’ve set as a goal to have at least one newsy blog item each day here at Storage Station. So I guess I’d better get busy — because this one ain’t so newsy in and of itself. Yet.

Here’s a cool news snippet:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Oct. 24 that it won a coveted Storage Networking World Best Practices Award for its new LeftHand Networks iSCSI SAN (storage area network) package.

Like many companies, the Corps was dealing with the usual-suspect problems: exploding data needs, a reduced IT budget, fewer administrative staff, aging equipment and demanding internal clients. It had an old Fibre Channel SAN that was too complex and difficult to operate, so the Corps still used DAS for most of its storage.

The LeftHand iSCSI SAN replaced the FC and DAS solutions, meeting both the budgetary and simplicity requirements of an overburdened IT department, while providing rich functionality. The results?

–23 servers were consolidated down to four servers –Available disk space tripled –Network downtime of several hours every weekend was reduced to none –The ability to scale as necessary was gained

Congrats to the Corps, Lefthand Networks, and its fine marketing guru, John Fanelli. I just love a happy storage story ending, don’t you?

Random notes: I’ve never been to a Halloween party that has been talked about in the Wall Street Journal, but I’m going to one tonight — put on by the “Witches” of Eastwick Communications, a highly successful Silicon Valley agency.

I’ll let you know how it went tomorrow. Titled “Office Halloween Do’s and Don’ts,” the story by Amy Hoak appeared on Page B4G yesterday in the Journal. You have to be a subscriber to read it online.