Blog Archives

DevOps for IT Pros: The Key to Addressing Bi-Modal IT

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: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Solving the Ransomware Problem – Backup or Cloud Storage?

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: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Flash Strategy 2.0: Optimizing NetApp with Flash and Cloud

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: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Addressing VDI’s Fork in The Road

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: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Hitachi’s HSP Hyper-Converged Appliance makes Big Data Analytics fit the Enterprise

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: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Why Low Latency Matters

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: , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Flash + SMR = Storage Density and Performance

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: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Reverse your Cloud Strategy

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,

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Article

The Advantages of Storage Sprawl

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.

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Can you do it better? A Balanced Approach to Cloud Storage

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.

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article