Blog Archives

Server Side VMware Caching Gets Smarter

Posted on May 6, 2013 by George Crump

Increasing virtual machine (VM) density is critical for organizations looking to continue to reap the ROI benefits of virtualization; the more VMs per server the more cost effective the virtualization project becomes. There is one primary roadblock to increased VM…

Tagged with: Cache, OpenVMS, Proximal Data, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, Virtual machine, VMware, VMware ESX
Posted in Product Analysis

Unstructured Data Storage For The Mid-Market

Posted on April 26, 2013 by George Crump

Unstructured data (data that’s outside of databases), is growing at an out-of-control pace in organizations of all sizes. Large cloud service providers and some larger enterprises have dealt with this challenge by embracing object storage. For smaller data centers and…

Tagged with: Data center, Exablox, Hardware, OneSystem, RAID, Storage, Unstructured data
Posted in Briefing Note

Tape is More Than The Backup of Last Resort

Posted on April 25, 2013 by George Crump

As we discussed in a recent webinar, “Why Tape is Making a Comeback“, data centers of all sizes are seeing the wisdom of renewing the role of tape and tape libraries in their backup and archiving environments. With the release…

Tagged with: Backup, Dataspan, LTFS, LTO, Tape
Posted in Blog

What Is Dispersed Storage?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by George Crump

Keeping unstructured data available, as data sets continue to grow, is a key challenge for today’s data center. The access requirements of unstructured data often preclude relying 100% on capacity centric tape so higher capacity disk solutions, for many organizations,…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Disk array, Dispersed storage, Object Storage, RAID, Storage
Posted in Article

Improving SSD Performance Through Better Flash Management

Posted on April 15, 2013 by George Crump

Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has become a viable performance option thanks to the advent of NAND flash devices which are making memory-based storage affordable. The performance of an SSD is not solely dictated by the NAND but by the…

Tagged with: DRAM, Flash memory, Granularity, Micron, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article

Power Failure and Flash Storage

Posted on April 10, 2013 by George Crump

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of power failures in flash based solid state storage systems. In various tests run by industry associations flash based solid state disk (SSD) devices, when subjected to a sudden power-loss,…

Making Storage the VDI Solution, Not the Problem

Posted on April 9, 2013 by George Crump

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has found a niche in call-center types of environments where very large numbers of workers run essentially the same desktops. But in the broader market VDI hasn’t seen the same success, a fact typically blamed on…

Tagged with: Desktop virtualization, Solid-state drive, Top10-2013, VDI, VeloBit, Virtual desktop, VirtualBox, VMware
Posted in Article

What Is GEN 5 Fibre?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by George Crump

Despite the best marketing efforts of various forms of IP based storage, Fibre Channel continues to gain momentum in the enterprise. The growth in large, real-time databases and the increasing VM density per physical host, as well as the proliferation…

Tagged with: Brocade, Fibre Channel, Gen 5, ISCSI, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network
Posted in Article

Video Review of Sonnet Tempo And Samsung 840 Pro SSD

Posted on March 22, 2013 by George Crump

Next up in our lab is a review of the Sonnet Tempo PCIe SSD Card and the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Once again we leveraged the OWC Helios as part of the test exchanging the OWC Accelsior with the Samsung…