tech dossier
Beyond the Basics: Differentiating
Unified Storage Appliances
Predicting computer-industry trends is a notoriously difficult and
error-prone endeavor. in the early days of mainframe computing, few prognosticators foresaw the rise and rapid proliferation of
personal computers. during the 1980s, when people where thrilled to upgrade their modems from 2,400-bit-per-second devices
to 19.2 Kb/sec machines, not many observers grasped the coming ubiquity of broadband networks or the ramifications of how
those networks could be exploited (think Youtube). And even as the
commercial internet and the World Wide Web took hold in the late
1990s, the early focus was more on easy-to-grasp concepts such as e-mail and electronic commerce. Most of us failed to anticipate the rise of
the social networking phenomenon and other Web 2.0 applications that
would materialize during the next decade.
in such a sea of forecasting uncertainty, it’s nice to come across some
solid ground every now and then. As it turns out, there is at least one
