Yearly Archives: 2013

How Does Shutterfly Keep 80PB of Pictures Safe and Available?

Shutterfly is the market leader in digital, personalized photo products, currently serving millions of customers who benefit from unlimited, secure (and free) storage, plus a 100 percent happiness guarantee. They help customers turn their pictures into lasting keepsakes, such as

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Posted in Case Study

How NVDIMM Can Protect Flash SSD Appliances

As Storage Switzerland discussed in two articles recently flash based appliances are particularly vulnerable to power failures. This vulnerability is related to the way these appliances use DRAM to buffer writes and to store meta data tables. DRAM is volatile,

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Posted in Article

Any-to-Any Hypervisor Image Recovery

Hypervisor server diversification is becoming a key initiative for many businesses. In an effort to lower licensing costs by introducing competition for their hypervisor footprint, many organizations may be unwittingly taking on the potential burden of added infrastructure management, higher

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Posted in Article

White Paper – Defining Enterprise Archive

Archiving is the process of moving inactive data from primary disk-based storage to an easy-to-access secondary storage tier. The objective of archiving is to gain cost and operational efficiencies while reliably protecting information for the long-term. An Enterprise Archive is

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Posted in White Paper

The TCO of Meeting a Backup Window

Backup is a budget area that’s considered an expense, one for which investment is typically minimized. When money is spent it often goes to short-term fixes for the most essential parts of the process, like meeting the backup window. This

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Posted in Article

How to Make Reliable SSDs – Reliable NAND Flash

“Reliability” in a storage context means that the storage infrastructure can be counted on to keep data safe and to produce that data in a reasonable timeframe when called upon. While it’s true that storage systems have redundancies built in

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Posted in Article

What Does EMC Want With ScaleIO?

Storage Switzerland just received confirmation from one of our more trusted sources that EMC is actively in discussions to acquire ScaleIO. This makes some sense; EMC has a tendency to buy early stage Israeli based companies (XtremeIO and Kashya) and

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Posted in Blog

VMware Server Side Caching – Flash SSD or DRAM

Server virtualization has a well-documented problem; it creates an I/O blender that can bring storage networks and storage systems to their knees. The I/O blender vs. the desire to design increasingly dense virtual machine (VM) architectures has created a new

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Posted in Article

Next Generation Scale-Out NAS

The use cases for Network Attached Storage (NAS) have changed dramatically in the 20 years since the first NAS appeared. NAS hardware architectures have also changed. So have the capacities and performance levels that NAS systems are asked to support.

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Posted in Article

Rethinking the Storage Controller for Unstructured Data

Conventional wisdom suggests that most business data is stored in database applications, however, unstructured data comprises approximately 70-80% of the total data in a typical environment and, according to some industry sources, is growing 5x as fast. File-based data is

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Posted in Article