Blog Archives

The difference between Retroactive Deduplication and Software Defined Storage

Posted on January 12, 2015 by George Crump

Short of buying a new storage system with storage efficiency (deduplication and compression) built in, it is difficult to add the technology to an existing storage array. Today there are two ways to accomplish this. First, you can wait for…

Business Outcome Driven Storage

Posted on January 8, 2015 by George Crump

The new mantra for IT is to focus the technology and services their data centers provide on business outcomes. That concept seems more easily applied to front-line and customer-facing applications, like customer relationship management, decision support and Web servers that…

Tagged with: DRAM, Flash, HDS, Hierarchical Storage Management, Hitachi Data Systems, HSM, ILM, Information Lifecycle Management, NAND, NVM, performance, SSD, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

Is your Data Protection Strategy on solid ground?

Posted on December 22, 2014 by George Crump

The EMC Global Data Protection Index, a study of the state of IT’s ability to protect and recover data, was recently released. The global index shows that 87% of businesses are rated behind the curve when it comes to protecting…

All-Flash in Real Life: CMA – XtremIO Database Consolidation Case Study

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Executive Summary When it comes to business transformation, numbers matter. For CMA, a leading healthcare application service provider for Medicaid payments systems processing and data analytics, the integration of EMC XtremIO led to a transformation of their workloads, their infrastructure,…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Consolidation, EMC, Flash, Hard disk drive, HDD, performance, Scale-Out, TCO, Total Cost of Ownership, XtremIO
Posted in Article, Case Study

What is Hybrid Cloud Backup?

Posted on December 16, 2014 by George Crump

One of the key challenges to any data protection strategy is deciding where to store data and how to get that data off-site. Initially in most environments, all backups were stored on tape. Those tapes were then packaged up and…

The Dirty Little Secret of Storage TCO

Posted on December 8, 2014 by George Crump

The average data center refreshes their storage system every three to five years. But organizations don’t start this process because the calendar tells them to. Something happens in the environment that forces that upgrade, typically the storage system failing to…

Tagged with: Dell, FCoE, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, SAS-II, TCO, Total Cost of Ownership
Posted in Article

Unstructured Data is distracting Backup Administrators

Posted on December 1, 2014 by George Crump

File based data accounts for more than 80 percent of capacity demand and backup administrators spend most of their time protecting this unstructured data. But the remaining set, structured data, will cause the organization the most harm if it is…

Tagged with: Active Archive, Backup, Capacity, Cloud, Cloud as a Service, Data Protection, Nasuni, Recovery, Unstructured data
Posted in Article

How Traditional Data Centers should use the Cloud

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Some corporate financial planners are pointing towards the use of hybrid cloud solutions as a way to reduce storage costs. The idea is to move redundant copies of information off expensive onsite primary storage to lower cost storage in the…

Tagged with: Backup, Catalogic, Cloud, Copy Data, Data OnTap, dev/ops, dr, Snapshot, Software Defined, Virtual
Posted in Article

Is Storage Management Overload making IT less relevant?

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Colm Keegan

IT administrator “overload” is becoming the new norm for many organizations. Flat or declining IT budgets combined with accelerated data growth and an increasing demand for new business application services is putting many IT organizations in a quandary: How to…

Tagged with: Archive, Disaster recovery, Exablox, Infrastructure, NAS, Object Storage, Overload, Provisioning, Scale, Scale-Out
Posted in Article

A Hybrid NAS for Unstructured Data

Posted on November 11, 2014 by George Crump

There is a small percentage of unstructured data that needs high performance, potentially even flash based storage but there is a much larger percentage that requires cost effective capacity. Premium NAS systems meet the performance demand of the first type, but there is room for improvement for the second type where cost efficient storage is so important. In this article George Crump, Storage Switzerland’s Lead Analyst discusses the need for a new type of Hybrid NAS, one that integrates disk and tape, instead of disk and flash.