Blog Archives

Dell Brings Advanced Backup and Disaster Recovery To The SMB Market

Dell today announced its first entrance into the disk backup target appliance market in the form of the new Dell DR4000. Targeted directly at the medium-size business, the DR4000 comes with built-in deduplication, compression and replication as part of a

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Posted in Briefing Note

Online Analytics Company Leverages Isilon’s Scale Out Storage for Big Data and Virtualization

One of the big challenges faced by today’s data center is dealing with the mixed workloads that applications like analytics, back-office operations and server virtualization present to the storage infrastructure. In many instances IT professionals are faced with having to

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Posted in Case Study

Falling Backward – Disaster Recovery Plans have to Include Fail Back

When creating or testing a disaster recovery (DR) plan most IT professionals tend to focus on getting the data out of the building and safely stored in a remote location. Much of the success or failure of a DR plan

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Posted in Blog

Integrating PCIe SSD Into The Storage System

The NexGen storage system is designed from the ground up to take advantage of solid state storage and is the first system that we know of that integrates storage tiering from the first release. It is also the first storage

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Posted in Blog

Highly Available Solid State Storage Performance

Getting the absolute maximum performance from Flash-based storage and providing shared access across multiple servers typically requires a solid state storage appliance. These systems are designed specifically to eliminate bottlenecks and latency to deliver extreme performance. However, most of these

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Posted in Product Analysis

The Downsides to Array Based Data Replication

Array based replication is the ability to have data automatically copied to a remote site creating the foundation of a solid disaster recovery strategy and as a result many storage arrays have a replication option. In fact many vendors provide

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Posted in Blog

What is a Storage Controller?

Storage arrays all have some form of a processor embedded into a controller. As a result, a storage array’s controller is essentially a server that’s responsible for performing a range of functions for the storage system. Think of it as

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Posted in Article

OCZ SSD Keeps Shining

This is going to be one of those blog entries where “no news” is “the news.” Storage Switzerland started testing the OCZ Deneva 2 MLC based solid state disk (SSD) drives backup on July 25th and it has been working

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Posted in Lab Report

AKiTio Taurus Super Mini S

A new addition to the Storage Switzerland Lab is the AKiTio Super Mini S. This is a small, somewhat portable dual drive storage device that can either stripe or mirror two 2.5″ hard drives. While some assembly is required I

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Posted in Lab Report

The Big Data Archive

“Big Data” is often thought of as a specialized use case involving machine generated data, typically associated with web search logs, satellite imagery or other sensor data, on which analytics are performed to enable some sort of decision support application.

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Posted in Article