Data Centers are under increasing pressure to build infrastructures that are responsive to the application workloads of the organization. Understanding what a workload is and what its characteristics are is critical to creating a responsive infrastructure that can satisfy the…
In terms of storage performance, the actual drive is no longer the bottleneck. Thanks to flash storage, attention has turned to the hardware and software that surrounds them, especially the capabilities of the CPU that drives the storage software. The…
Software Defined Storage (SDS) is one of those technologies that looks great on a whiteboard. In theory it should allow you to use any storage vendor’s hardware, overlay it with a common set of software capabilities and manage it all…
Up until the past year or two, High-Performance Compute (HPC) environments and the enterprise data center have been separate domains. But now the data intensive demands of analytics, migrations to cloud infrastructures and ever growing numbers of users looking to…
Regarding backup and disaster recovery, the cloud is ideal for getting data off-site. It is also ideal for disaster recovery thanks to the many Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings on the market. The cloud is appealing because for…
At Storage Switzerland we have written up more than a few case studies about all-flash arrays. As IT professionals have successfully moved from hard disk based arrays to all-flash arrays, the results are predictable; there is euphoria over the improvement in…
Gartner recently released its 2015 Magic Quadrants for General-Purpose Disk Arrays and another one for Solid-State Arrays. Over the next few weeks we will provide our analysis of these two charts, but first we need to discuss why there are…
The bottleneck in flash storage is often the interface. SAS/SATA interfaces were designed specifically for hard disk drives not for flash media. For example, flash storage can support many more simultaneous I/O operations. The resolution to the problem is to…
The concept of an all-flash data center is very appealing, but for many data centers an upgrade to even a hybrid array is outside of their budget. Also, implementing a new all-flash array or even a hybrid array has more…
The Disaster Recovery (DR) stakes are higher than ever. No longer is being able to recover “eventually” an acceptable strategy. Users and application owners at organizations of all sizes are expecting to be back online within hours, no matter how…
