An increasing number of storage systems are coming to market with Quality of Service (QoS) functionality that allows an administrator to guarantee and in some cases, limit the amount of storage performance that a VMware or other virtualized workloads will…
With vSphere 6, VMware is set to address one of the biggest storage management problems facing the virtualized environment, associating virtual machines (VMs) with the storage they are using. VVOLs provide that visibility and allow storage and server administration to…
A couple of years ago Storage Switzerland wrote an article “Scale Out or Scale Up? – 6 Key Considerations for the Flash Array Buyer”. The points made in that article are still relevant, but vendors in both architecture camps have…
Big Data Analytics is more than just an interesting IT initiative, these infrastructures are starting to re-shape how businesses develop new products, respond to customer needs and achieve new levels of efficiency. The problem is that most Hadoop environments, the…
“Shadow IT” is a name for the process that occurs when users self-select IT services, signing up for cloud-based services without the knowledge or approval of the IT organization. IT could take the attitude that Shadow IT is a good…
After a few year hiatus higher capacity hard drives are coming to market. We expect 8TB drives to be readily available before the end of the year with 10TB drives soon to follow. And at the rate that capacity demands…
Before hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V and KVM came to market, data centers had few options when it came to managing the growth of their server infrastructure. They could buy one big server that ran multiple applications, which, while it simplified…
Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) make a big promise to the data center manager; to substantially drive down the cost of supporting user desktops and laptops while increasing the security for them. But for a VDI project to be successful the…
IT professionals are simultaneously being pulled in multiple directions. For most, data center management is more like triage than a well-engineered series of processes. As a result, IT managers and CIOs are very careful about which projects they “own”, which…
Pushed by initiatives like high density virtualization, online database applications and low latency flash storage, fibre channel (FC) storage networking is entering a new era sooner than expected. These initiatives are forcing the move to 16Gb FC networking at a…
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