An increasing number of storage players are showing up at Linux-related trade shows, which certainly makes sense as Linux transitions from being an operating system for wonks, hackers (in the old, good sense), scientists and aficionados, and becomes an operating environment for mainstream commercial computing.

Storage management vendors were scattered all about the show floor. Many of our old friends from the commercial world were there, including Computer Associates' BrightStor and Veritas; in addition, we saw many smaller players such as Arkeia, Avamar, BakBone, Ibrix, Steeleye and Yosemite Technologies. 

For those of you looking for Linux storage management tools, here is a quick overview of some of what I saw from the smaller vendors (I know some of these are not really small at all, but compared to Veritas and CA, sometimes everyone seems small).

* Arkeia (http://www.arkeia.com) offers network and server back-up solutions, plus bare-metal restore for disaster recovery. At LinuxWorld, the company announced that Silicon Graphics is bundling Arkeia software in SGI's Itanium 2-based Altix 350 server.

* Avamar (http://www.avamar.com) provides back-up and restore solutions in three versions. Its Axion E is a back-up and restore appliance aimed at distributed workgroups and remote offices. The Axion M is a larger appliance for enterprise data protection, while the Axion S is a software-only version of the Axion M.

* BakBone (http://www.bakbone.com) provides data protection solutions for everything from small and midsize businesses through the enterprise. Its NetVault back-up and recovery product won the show's award for "Best Data Backup or Storage Solution".  Increasingly, BakBone seems to be part of the mix when IT managers create their purchasing shortlists.

* Ibrix (http://www.ibrix.com) builds a parallel file system for environments that are shifting away from massively parallel supercomputers and moving toward clustered systems that take advantage of commodity Intel hardware. Right now, Ibrix's Fusion software suite seems to be aimed at the engineering and scientific community, but clearly commercial applications that can take advantage of parallelization techniques (financial modeling and data warehousing are likely examples) will start to avail themselves of clustered Linux systems soon, as well.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.