Blog Archives

Tuning the Cloud for Primary Storage

TwinStrata Test Drive Part 2 – Cache Intelligence One of the biggest concerns for IT managers considering cloud storage for primary data is how to make sure that the inherent latency of an internet connection does not impact the required

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Posted in Product Analysis

Faster VMAX and Isilon Performance

Another key theme coming out of EMC World Day 1 was a focus on providing a performance boost to EMC’s core storage platforms, beyond just adding solid state disk. The EMC Symmetrix family, the EMC VMAX, and their scale out NAS offering,

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Posted in Briefing Note

What is a Flash OS?

Flash-based Solid State Devices (SSD) are more than just a collection of memory cards. They’re also not created equally. Components like the controller, backplane, and internal interconnect all are important differentiators when accessing Flash-based storage solutions. As these products have

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Posted in Article

Feature Rich NAS for the SMB

One of the first, if not the first server that a growing business will get is a network attached storage server. As we discussed in our recent article “SMB NAS Requirements”, these systems should be able to provide several important

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Posted in Lab Report

High Performance Storage For The SMB

As the Small to Medium Size (SMB) data center continues to increase its level of virtualization, it is being faced with performance demands – not unlike the enterprise – that result from multiple virtual machines per physical host. In fact,

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Posted in Briefing Note

Overcoming The All Flash Cost Challenge

If all storage were the same price, all storage would be solid state storage. We would end data tiering, there would be no performance tuning and the discussion of storage performance problems would be a thing of the past. Of course all

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Posted in Article

Two horses in the Cloud race

The final theme to come out of EMC World Day 1 was EMC’s attention to the cloud. Cloud providers typically need one of two things from their storage. Cloud Compute Providers are often more concerned about scalable performance and Cloud Storage Providers

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Posted in Briefing Note

How Big Backup Impacts Deduplication

“Big Backup” is an enterprise challenge where millions (or billions) of files have to be processed each night so they can be safely and cost effectively stored on backup devices. These kinds of backup jobs not only have large numbers

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Posted in Article

Comparing LTO-6 to Scale-Out Storage for Long-Term Retention

Thanks to the requirements of Big Data, compliance and regulatory controls organizations are now faced with the daunting challenge of storing a much larger amount of the data they create for a significantly longer period of time. Also, the need

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Posted in Article

The Challenges with SSD Caching and Tiering

It is universally accepted that for most applications, adding flash to the storage infrastructure will greatly improve storage performance and offer a productivity return on the investment. The controversy in the industry is deciding where the flash storage should be

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Posted in Article