Blog Archives

The Benefits of Software-defined Server-side Storage

Hyperscale Data Centers, Managed Service Providers, Cloud Service Providers and large Enterprises all face a similar challenge; how to cost effectively scale their cloud/virtual infrastructures so that maximum return on investment can be achieved. The answer is to build scale-out

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Are Flash Devices Putting Sensitive Data At Risk?

Flash based storage systems are now the “go to” option for improving the response time of performance sensitive applications. Some applications that require high performance are also storing extremely sensitive data that needs to be completely sanitized if the flash

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Good Migrations – Moving Data from SAN to SAN

Either as part of a normal storage refresh cycle or when consolidating storage assets after a merger, almost every data center will eventually need to migrate data from one storage system to another. The problem is that data migrations are

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Bringing Cloud Storage to the Tier 2 Data Center

Unstructured data is file based data that is most commonly associated with user productivity applications like word processing, spreadsheets and presentation files. But unstructured data also includes rich media from training videos, photos, CAD-CAM drawings etc., plus the data created

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Should Your VMware Backup Use Agents?

Initially most VMware projects start off by leveraging the backup applications that were in place prior to the virtualization effort. Then, IT Planners realize that they need something more and they turn to VM-specific backup applications. But then they are

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Webinar – Improving the State of MS-SQL Backup

Organizations of all sizes are delivering mission critical applications to users and customers that are built on Microsoft SQL. But many of these organizations lack the time, skill sets and tools required to develop a capable data protection strategy. Instead

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Webinar – Bringing Cloud / Object Storage to the Tier 2 and SMB Data Center

The object storage systems used by cloud storage providers (CSPs) are designed to bring scalability, reliability, and near zero management to their data centers while significantly reducing storage acquisition costs through the use of commodity drives. These attributes are in

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Server Side Caching vs. Raid Controller Caching

Caching is an ideal way to maximize an investment in solid state disk (SSD), especially in virtual environments where massively random I/O patterns are the norm. Caching provides an automated way to make sure that the most active data is

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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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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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