Blog Archives

The Hard Disk Autopsy

Posted on August 26, 2015 by George Crump

The Violin Memory Systems “Disk is Dead” campaign says what needed to be said; disk, at least for the production use case, is dead or it least it should be. An autopsy done on the technology will find that it…

Tagged with: Archive, Backup, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, Hard disk, HDD, SSD, Violin Memory
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Can HPC Storage Solve Enterprise Data Management Issues?

Posted on August 25, 2015 by George Crump

High-Performance Compute (HPC) and the storage infrastructure that supports it has long been considered a realm unto itself. Enterprise IT would have nothing to do with it. However, in the past decade, massive I/O bottlenecks have emerged throughout IT infrastructure…

Tagged with: Backup, Clone, DataDirect Networks, DDN, HPC, Recovery, Replication, Scale, Snapshot, Virtualization
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Containers vs. Virtual Machines

Posted on August 24, 2015 by George Crump

Which is Right for Windows Applications? Virtualization has allowed the data center to become more responsive to the needs of the business. As it has moved into production, however, virtualization has hit several walls and the scalability of the “one…

Tagged with: Availability, Container, DH2i, Efficiency, Hypervisor, QOS, Scale, Sprawl, Virtualization, VM
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Why Storage vMotion hurts and how to stop the pain

Posted on August 18, 2015 by George Crump

VMware’s Storage vMotion is an invaluable tool to enable the migration of a virtual machine’s (VMs) datastore to another storage system. It is similar in concept to how regular vMotion migrates a VM to another host in a VMware cluster.…

Tagged with: All-Flash, CPU, Flash, Hybrid, NexGen, QOS, Virtual, Virtual machine, VM, VVOL
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Securing High-Value Data in Mid-Tier IT

Posted on August 13, 2015 by George Crump

Despite its name, high-value data is often mishandled in many organizations. Often the backup process is counted on to secure and retain this information, but while some of the software has basic archive functionality it was neither intended nor designed…

Tagged with: Compliance, Data Protection, High-Value Data, Imation, Nexsan, Recovery, Retention, Scale, Unstructured data
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Refreshing to an All-Flash Array

Posted on August 4, 2015 by George Crump

Every few years the time comes to update and refresh a data centers storage infrastructure. As part of this process many are considering all-flash arrays (AFAs). Vendors have flooded the market with AFA products, and for the IT professional sorting…

Tagged with: Acquisition, AFA, All-Flash, All-Flash Array, FalconStor, FC, HDD, SDS, Software Defined Storage
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What are the Requirements to Consolidate Storage?

Posted on August 3, 2015 by George Crump

In the perfect world, a data center would have a single storage system. One that would provide high performance and high capacity in a single platform that doesn’t take up much data center floor space. Ideally, this system would be…

Tagged with: Consolidation, DRAM, Flash, Hypervisor, Infinidat, NAS, Storage Sprawl, Virtualization, VM
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Copy Data Management: In-Place vs. Rip and Replace

Posted on July 27, 2015 by George Crump

Copy Data are the copies of production data made for various business functions. It is growing at an alarming rate as IT and business processes beyond data protection demand access to versions of production data. Copy Data Management (CDM) has emerged to manage this data, creating two sub-categories reflective of their approach; “in-place CDM” and “replace CDM”. In this article StorageSwiss explains the differences in these approaches and how to select the one that is best for your data center.

Tagged with: Archive, Catalogic, CDM, Copy Data, Data Protection, Dev/Test, Snapshot
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Hadoop Storage: DAS vs. Shared

Posted on July 23, 2015 by George Crump

As Hadoop scales and the data center begins to count on it, the extra expense required to maintain DAS performance, reliability and scalability often end up being more expensive than the shared storage alternative. In this article we discuss how the multi-faceted capabilities of a scale-out, distributed storage software end up being less expensive than DAS.

Tagged with: CIFS, DAS, Hedvig, Metadata, NFS, Shared Storage, Software Defined
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How to decide if Software Defined Storage is Right for you

Posted on July 20, 2015 by George Crump

Software Defined Storage (SDS) can bring value to almost every data center that has multiple storage systems to manage and that are rapidly expanding. Once those value points are understood and verified, deciding which of the available SDS implementation types is right for your data center is the next step. In this article we provide guidance on how to determine if SDS is right for you, what type of SDS is right for you and when you should make your SDS move.