As we usher in 2014, industry prognosticators are publishing their predictions about what will be the hot trends in the New Year. While backup technology may not be towards the top of this list, there were some interesting developments that…
Blog Archives
What’s The Difference Between Tiering And Caching?
Flash storage continues to be the “go to” option for IT professionals looking to solve performance problems, but these infrastructure designers are struggling with how to best implement flash. Automated tiering and caching are becoming common answers to that question.…
Tagged with: Caching, Flash, Hard disk, MLC, SLC, Software Defined Storage, Tiering, Write-back, Write-through
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How Tape Can Fix The Unstructured Backup Problem
The fastest growing data set in just about every organization today, and typically the largest, is unstructured data. This is data that’s outside of a database; essentially file data, stored on file servers or Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems. The…
Top 5 Tape Takeaways for 2014
Most IT professionals, at least those over thirty, were probably introduced to tape as part of the backup system. For years tape drives and libraries have been the primary repositories for backup data, most recently with the LTO (Linear Tape…
Designing Enterprise-class Multi-Tenant Storage
Cloud Providers and enterprises must be able to guarantee performance to specific applications or groups of applications. They also need ways to distribute some of their storage management workload directly to the users or ‘interests’ they support. In the cloud…
Tagged with: Cloud, Cloud Providers, DRAM, Enterprise, GUI, LUN, Multi-Tenant, RAID, Zadara
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New Strategies To Control The Data Epidemic in State and Local Government
Data Centers of all sizes are facing a data epidemic, especially State and Local Governments. In fact data growth in government is potentially greater than in the private sector. Not only is there more data, there are more data types and requirements for longer retention. In this article George Crump, Lead Analyst with Storage Switzerland discusses how combating the data epidemic requires new innovation from an old source – tape. Rather than competing against disk, tape, combined with the right solution, can compliment and extend the useful life of disk storage assets.
Tagged with: Archive, Backup, Crossroads, Data center, Data Growth, LTFS, NAS, Storage, Tape
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Is QoS Enough to Ensure Virtualized Application Performance?
An increasing number of vendors are offering quality of service (QoS) capabilities for their storage systems. But the ability for these system to assure storage performance quality to mission critical applications is suspect at best. Guaranteeing virtualized application performance requires more than QoS, it requires a scalable storage infrastructure that understands specific virtual machine performance requirements.
In this article Storage Switzerland Senior Analyst, Colm Keegan provides the details on how a storage system has to go beyond QoS to provide complete application performance.
How to Prevent Noisy Neighbors
In response to my recent article, “What Is A Noisy Neighbor”, one of our reader’s asked if limiting the number of IOPS (via VSphere) on all but the most disk I/O intensive VMs would be a good approach for reducing…
How Do I Know My Virtual Environment is Ready For SSD?
The I/O Blender has reached an almost legendary status in virtualization circles. It is a term for what happens to storage I/O when in a virtual infrastructure. The I/O Blender is created when potentially hundreds of virtual machines across dozens…
Tagged with: CPU, Flash, IOPS, LUN, SolarWinds, SSD, Utilization, Virtual machine, Virtualization
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The New Normal: Software-Defined WAN Acceleration for a Cloud-Centric World
Wide area network (WAN) acceleration technology has been successfully used by many organizations for over a decade to accelerate data traffic between data centers and branch offices. Typically deployed as an appliance, WAN accelerators help to ensure the timely transmission…
Tagged with: Acceleration, Bandwidth, Cloud, Data Center Sprawl, Hypervisor, Silver Peak, Software Defined, Virtual machine, Virtualization, WAN
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