Blog Archives

Build your DRaaS

Posted on June 8, 2016 by George Crump

DRaaS is the future of disaster recovery, but leveraging cloud backup may be an expensive way to implement it. Cloud replication, because it is operating on the working set, keeps cloud storage costs contained. The cloud replication software also enables organizations with an IT ready secondary site to leverage that site and create their own DRaaS. In either case, the organization is in control of when and how recovery happens. DRaaS built on replication also enables organizations to use the replication software to enable other cloud initiatives like bursting and test/dev. In this article Storage Switzerland explores the various methods to go about creating and implementing a DRaaS solution.

Tagged with: Baas, Backup, CSP, dr, DRaaS, Hypervisor, MSP, Replication, RPO, RTO, Virtual machine, Zerto
Posted in Article

Heterogeneous Storage Analytics Difficult to Gather

Posted on May 24, 2016 by wcurtispreston

Knowledge is power. But knowledge in a heterogeneous storage environment can be difficult to come by. Modern data centers often have a mix of software-defined storage, traditional proprietary storage, all-flash or hybrid storage arrays, and even cloud storage – all…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cloud, FalconStor, Flash, HDD, Hybrid, Hyperconverged, SSD, Virtualization
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DevOps for IT Pros: The Key to Addressing Bi-Modal IT

Posted on May 23, 2016 by wcurtispreston

DevOps can deliver a strong return on investment (ROI) for those environments choosing to invest in it. Environments adopting a DevOps mentality move from merely supporting operations to truly enabling better, more efficient operations. IT moves from merely changing the…

Tagged with: Agile, Catalogic, Cloud, dev/ops, Infrastructure, LUN, NFS, ROI
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Solving the Ransomware Problem – Backup or Cloud Storage?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by George Crump

Given the “success” of its initial wave, the ransomware problem is getting worse. Backups seem to be the “go to” solution but really they should represent the last line of defense. The problem with backups are that they are not…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, Global File System, NAS, Nasuni, Ransomware, Recovery, Snapshot, Unstructured data
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Flash Strategy 2.0: Optimizing NetApp with Flash and Cloud

Posted on March 2, 2016 by George Crump

For most organizations, databases are the heart of the data center. Not surprisingly, its IT infrastructure revolves around those databases. But there are market segments like Media and Entertainment, Life Sciences, Financial Services and Technology where unstructured data is at…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Avere, Capacity, Cloud, Cold Data, Flash, Latency, NAS, performance, Replication, Snapshot, Unstructured data
Posted in Article

Addressing VDI’s Fork in The Road

Posted on February 4, 2016 by George Crump

Organizations embark on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) projects to drive down end-user operational costs and to enhance infrastructure security. These projects often evaluate well. During “test mode” there are a limited number of users, making it easy to meet their…

Tagged with: AFA, All-Flash, Caching, Cloudistics, Hard disk, I/O, NAS, Performance Sprawl, VDI, Virtualization
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Hitachi’s HSP Hyper-Converged Appliance makes Big Data Analytics fit the Enterprise

Posted on February 3, 2016 by George Crump

Big Data Analytics uses distributed computing architectures, on platforms like Hadoop, to run large processing jobs on even larger datasets. Since data being processed in a Hadoop environment usually needs to be resident on the compute nodes themselves, this can…

Tagged with: Analytics, Big data, Data Lake, Hadoop, HDS, Hyper-convergence, Infrastructure, Scale-Out, Unstructured data, Virtual machine
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Why Low Latency Matters

Posted on February 2, 2016 by George Crump

Enterprise Applications and Dynamic Business Workloads Demand Faster and Faster Response Times Applications are driving the enterprise, whether it is a relatively simple application used by millions of customers or a complex, scalable database that drives an organization’s back end.…

Tagged with: CPU, DataCore, Flash, HDD, IOPS, Latency, SSD
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Flash + SMR = Storage Density and Performance

Posted on February 1, 2016 by George Crump

Cloud and traditional data centers face two competing challenges. The first is meeting the ever-increasing demand for performance. Flash, in its various forms, can meet these requirements. On the other end of the spectrum is meeting the demands of storing all the data we create. The answer to these environments has not been as simple. Flash, by itself, is not the answer due to its higher cost per GB. SMR hard drives improve the ability to meet capacity demands, but have limited random write performance. By coupling SMR drives with flash, these two technologies can create a very practical solution which enables adoption without significant change to the existing infrastructure. In this article we will discuss how SMR drives work and how they can be coupled with flash to meet both of these challenges

Tagged with: Density, Flash, HDD, I/O, performance, Seagate, SMR, SSD
Posted in Article