IT planners sometimes consider implementing clustering within their virtual environment. Essentially where the nodes in the cluster are actually virtual machines within the VMware cluster. In this StorageShort, Tony Tomarchio, Director of Field Engineering for SIOS and I discuss this…
Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for storage. While I don’t always agree with their positioning, it is a reasoned analysis and I’m sure they can defend the various positioning of vendors they are tracking. It also gives other analyst…
One of the most common questions we get asked by customers considering a hybrid arrays is “What is my performance going to look like if there is a cache miss and data has to come from the hard drive tier”.…
We covered Hardware Convergence in a recent column, “What are Converged Infrastructures?”. Hardware Converged Infrastructures (HCI) are architectures based on independent name brand components that are pre-integrated and optimized to work together. Pure Storage has just announced a new converged…
One of the key challenges to any data protection strategy is deciding where to store data and how to get that data off-site. Initially in most environments, all backups were stored on tape. Those tapes were then packaged up and…
In recent months there has been a lot of attention given to how primary storage deduplication is being implemented; should it be implemented selectively, or always on? The problem with this discussion is that it first assumes that the existing…
Every so often it makes sense to take a step back and attempt to define the terms that we in the industry use to describe the approaches we take to solving customer problems. One of those is “converged architectures”. When…
Acquisitions are a common occurrence in the IT market. Most are predictable, but every so often one takes us off-guard. Datto’s acquisition of Backupify falls into that category. But even more rare is this acquisition actually makes sense. Datto is…
In our recent webinar, “Three Steps to Backup and Recovery Success”, we discussed service level objectives (SLOs) and how to reduce recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). Snapshots can play a key role in meeting tight RPOs…
Recently I wrote an article “Even if Disk were Free You’d Still Want Tape” which explained the advantages of using tape for cold backup storage and active archive storage. The economics behind tape are simply too compelling to ignore. The…
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