Deni Connor

Christopher Black immediately saw the attraction of IP transport for his storage applications. Black, network operations manager for investment and portfolio management company Effron Enterprises Inc., was looking to protect his data by replicating it from headquarters in White Plains, N.Y., to New York City, about 30 miles away.

A string of recent news announcements from major storage vendors highlights the industry's ongoing rush to consolidate and automate the management of heterogeneous storage devices.

Veritas Software Corp. announced the next step in its automated storage area management strategy Tuesday, adding policy creation and management, provisioning and reporting to its SANPoint Control 3.5.

EMC Corp. next week plans to announce the next phase of its AutoIS strategy, which will enable the policy-based provisioning of capacity from a pool of storage devices.

Hewlett-Packard Co. has introduced new multiprocessor blade servers designed to help users support Web and streaming media applications.

What once was old is new again with policy-based storage management software. It could change the way companies think about how they store, archive, back up and recover corporate data.

Hewlett-Packard Co. watchers were unfazed last week by the company's posting of a US$2 billion quarterly loss in what was its first financial report to include results from the recently acquired Compaq Computer Corp. Eyebrows were raised, however, by a slippage in revenue attributable in part to sluggish enterprise computing sales.

When you think of storage vendors, the first name that comes to mind isn't likely Microsoft Corp. But the software behemoth wants to change that.