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Featured Peer Review

Apple iPhone - call waiting
From a hardware perspective, our Wikibon community tells us that the iPhone is equal (perhaps even superior) to the standard of consumer-gadget excellence set by the iPod. However, the catalyst of success for the iPod was iTunes, which for the first time provided a truly simple mechanism for managing personal, digital media across multiple devices. By suggesting that Apple will recast the concept of phone, CEO Jobs had better have something much more than a piece of hardware up his sleeve. If Apple pulls this off, the key will be "iCall" or even "iMedia": the iTune-like services that turn the iPhone into a universal mechanism for digital participation. About that mechanism, we still know nothing -- except that it's been promised by phone companies for more than a decade. Stay skeptical, Wikibonners! PBurris

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Featured How-To Note

Storage Virtualization Design and Deployment
David Floyer

Virtualization Milestone Analysis <graph>

[ Virtualization\n Design ]

-> { start: front, 0; } 
 [ Architect ], [ Source ], [ Redesign\n Procedures ]
-> { end: back, 0; }
 [ Deploy\n Virtualization ]
-> {start: front, 0; }
 [ Build ], [ Test ], [ Integrate ], [Apply\n Compliance ]

</graph> How To
Storage virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single logical storage device that can be managed from a central point of control (console). Storage virtualization is commonly used in a storage area network (SAN), but is also applicable to large-scale NAS environments where there are multiple NAS filers. The management of storage devices takes significant storage administrator time and is error-prone. By hiding the complexity of the storage network, storage virtualization helps the storage administrator to perform the tasks of copy services, backup, archiving, and recovery with less effort, reduced elapsed time, and with fewer errors.

The main impediment to storage virtualization is the lack of multiple storage vendor (heterogeneous) support within available virtualization technologies. This inhibits deployment across a data center. The only practical approach is either to implement a single vendor solution across the whole of the data center (practical only for small and some medium size data centers) or to implement virtualization in one or more of the largest storage pools within a data center. read more