Blog Archives

What Does It Mean When A Startup Changes CEOs?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by George Crump

In almost every instance the first CEO of a storage startup is the guy with the brilliant idea. When a start up changes CEOs it generally means one of two things; either the company is in trouble or things are…

Tagged with: Business, Cleversafe, Disk array, Network-attached storage, Object Storage
Posted in Blog

Does ViPR Eliminate Vendor Lock In?

Posted on May 7, 2013 by George Crump

In a recent entry we covered a quick analysis of EMC’s first big announcement at EMC World 2013; ViPR. As we discussed this is EMC’s official entry into the software defined storage market. Potentially the biggest claim is EMC’s statement…

Tagged with: EMC, Software Defined Storage, Storage virtualization, Vendor lock-in, VMware
Posted in Blog

Analyzing EMC’s Software Defined Storage

Posted on May 7, 2013 by George Crump

Yesterday at EMC World 2013 EMC announced ViPR, their software defined storage product which abstracts the storage controller and the data services from the physical storage. Unlike other software defined storage it does not totally replace the data services available…

Tagged with: Apache Hadoop, EMC, EMC Isilon, NetApp, Network File System, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Storage virtualization
Posted in Blog

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,…