Blog Archives

Enterprise All-Flash – HP StoreServ 7450 All-Flash Array

Posted on August 15, 2014 by George Crump

The all-flash market is full of startups that have captured the attention of IT planners in data centers of all sizes. Now HP is out to get that attention back with their 7450 All-Flash Array. Many of these startup companies…

Tagged with: 3PAR, All-Flash Array, Availability, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, HP, Next Generation, Tiering, VDI
Posted in Briefing Note

StorageSwiss Take on the HDS Acquisition of Sepaton

Posted on August 14, 2014 by George Crump

Yesterday, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced they had acquired Massachusetts-based Sepaton, an established manufacturer of purpose built backup appliances (PBBAs) that use advanced de-duplication to shorten backup times and minimize backup appliance “sprawl”. The company will become a wholly-owned subsidiary…

Tagged with: Acquisition, Backup, Deduplication, disk backup, Disk Based, HDS, Hitachi Data Systems, PBBA, Sepaton
Posted in Blog

StrongBox brings integrated Data Archiving to NetApp, Windows & Linux Storage

Posted on August 12, 2014 by George Crump

Overwhelmed by unstructured data, like images, video and files not in a database, enterprises are struggling to keep up with storage capacity needs, especially since budgets are flat. As we discussed in a recent article, “The 3 Problems With Adding…

Tagged with: Archive, CIFS, Crossroads, Efficiency, LTFS, Metadata, NAS, NFS, Unstructured data
Posted in Product Analysis

Controlling Storage Network Link Speed

Posted on August 11, 2014 by George Crump

Data center initiatives, like server and desktop virtualization, as well as the introduction of flash enhanced storage, have motivated storage managers to upgrade their storage networks sooner than they might have planned. But those storage managers would be wise to…

Tagged with: Brocade, Fibre Channel, QOS, Quality of service, VDI, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VM, VM Density
Posted in Blog

XtremIO update at Flash Memory Summit

Posted on August 8, 2014 by George Crump

One of the headlines at this years Flash Memory Summit was the much broader participation of the traditional storage vendors. Dell, IBM, Hitachi and HP were all there. Not to be left out, EMC also had a presence and we…

Tagged with: Compression, Deduplication, EMC, Latency, Scale-Out, Snapshots, Thin provisioning, XtremIO
Posted in Briefing Note

Dell – Delivering Flash the way customers want

Posted on August 7, 2014 by George Crump

Flash consumption by the enterprise data center is typically done as a response to a specific performance problem. The flash purchase that often results are typically either an all-new flash array or it is added to an existing array. The…

Tagged with: Compellent, Data migration, Dell, Flash, Hard disk, HDD, Hybrid, MLC, SLC
Posted in Briefing Note

Tegile takes a Reverse Hybrid Approach at Flash Memory Summit

Posted on August 7, 2014 by George Crump

Hybrid arrays vendors were out to get some respect at the Flash Memory Summit. Tegile was one of them, but their approach to hybrid systems has a distinctive all-flash feel. Their recently announced T3800 is an all-flash array that can…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Capacity, Compression, Data efficiency, Deduplication, Hybrid, IOPS, Replication, Reverse Hybrid Array, Tegile
Posted in Briefing Note

Application Centric Caching

Posted on August 7, 2014 by George Crump

At Flash Memory Summit, we sat down with the team from CacheBox, an emerging provider of server-side caching software. Their software CacheAdvance is a software-only, hardware agnostic, server-side caching solution. What makes the CacheBox solution unique is that it does…

Tagged with: Application Cache, Block Level Acceleration, Cache, CacheBox, Flash, I/O, MS-SQL, Server-side
Posted in Briefing Note

Enterprise Backup or VM Specific Backup Software?

Posted on August 5, 2014 by George Crump

Most vendors seem to think that selecting which backup solution to use in the data center should be a choice of either an enterprise backup or virtual machine-specific backup solution. Enterprise backup provides legacy, multi-platform protection, but often only spotty…

Tagged with: Backup, Capacity, Data Protection, Dell, Hyper-V, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Article

Adding Deduplication and Compression without impacting performance

Posted on July 31, 2014 by George Crump

IT professionals expect a lot from their storage systems; they want volume management, thin provisioning, snapshot, clones, automated tiering, replication etc. Increasingly today, they want deduplication and compression as well, so they can squeeze every ounce of capacity out of…