Blog Archives

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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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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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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The Role Of Enterprise Backup In The Modern Data Center

Data has changed. There is more of it, it’s larger and is no longer all located on a single storage device in the middle of the data center. As a result backup, an already challenging process, is now reaching the…

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Overcoming The Challenges With SSD Reliability

Articles posted on the Storage Switzerland web site that focus on SSD Reliability are consistently among the top read articles on our site. Clearly there is concern about using the technology in the enterprise and IT planners want to know…

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