Users urged to move on beyond SAN.

This article reports that data compliance and management issues have brought storage technologies to the fore at this year's CeBit exhibition in Hanover, Germany. Analysts are recommending that visitors consider emerging storage virtualisation and grid-based storage technologies as ways of moving beyond their storage area network setups. Analyst firm IDC will hold a breakfast briefing for CeBit conference attendees on Friday morning. Claus Egge, programme director for European storage systems research, who will chair the meeting, said that although storage hardware was considered a commodity product, user organisations still spent an awful lot of time dealing with storage. Dave Reinsel, programme director for storage research at IDC, will talk about how storage virtualisation can help not just corporate users, but also small and mid-sized firms, which face increasing storage and archival demands from compliance regulations, data protection, and specialised applications such as medical imaging.