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…
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…
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.…
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
Organizations of all sizes are trying to develop a cloud strategy, both in terms of applications and storage. Most of these organizations are finding that the promised cost savings of the cloud are not as great as they had hoped,…
Fighting storage sprawl may sound like the right thing to do but for some data centers storage sprawl is a reality that they can’t stop. There are too many moving parts. Instead of fighting it, it may make more sense to face reality. Learn how second generation software-defined storage enables IT to embrace sprawl.
For most organizations, public cloud storage is a great place to start but not where they should end. While there is an initial operational advantage to the public cloud, the long-term cost of renting TBs of capacity may be too expensive even after you factor in storage management costs. A private cloud storage solution can leverage similar concepts of public providers to keep the hard and soft costs under control while gaining the advantages of owning vs. buying, increased security, and localized performance.
Users and application owners expect that the systems they use will never go down, and if they do they will be returned to operation quickly with little data loss. In our article “Designing Primary Storage to Ease the Backup Burden”…
For an increasing number of organizations, the traditional file server may have outlived its usefulness. File servers were designed in an era where most employees were in a single location; road warriors were a rare breed and the only files…
A top priority for IT professionals in 2016 is deciding on a cloud storage strategy. Of the available options, most consider using the public cloud for secondary storage purposes, like backup and archiving, to be the most obvious path to…
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