Blog Archives

New Strategies To Control The Data Epidemic in State and Local Government

Posted on January 8, 2014 by George Crump

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?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Colm Keegan

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.

Tagged with: Gridstore, Hyper-V, I/O, Infrastructure, QOS, Virtualization
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How to Prevent Noisy Neighbors

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Colm Keegan

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…

Tagged with: Flash, Hypervisor, I/O, IOPS, QOS, SSD, Virtual machine
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How Do I Know My Virtual Environment is Ready For SSD?

Posted on January 7, 2014 by George Crump

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

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Colm Keegan

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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Source vs Target Based Data Deduplication

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Colm Keegan

Deduplication can be deployed as either a “target” based solution, where backups are pushed over the network to an appliance where deduplication takes place or a “source” based approach, where deduplication takes place at the client or server level. Some…

Tagged with: Backup, Data deduplication, Hardware, Oracle, Storage, Top10-2013, Windows Server 2012
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What Is A Noisy Neighbor?

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Colm Keegan

The term “noisy neighbor” in the storage context refers to a rogue virtual machine (VM) that periodically monopolizes storage I/O resources to the performance detriment of all the other VM “tenants” in the environment. This phenomenon can become more pervasive…

Tagged with: Disk array, FIFO, Flash, I/O, LUN, PCIe, Solid-state drive, Virtual machine
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The 10 Year All-Flash Array – Will Your All-Flash Array Wear Out?

Posted on December 19, 2013 by George Crump

An All-Flash Array is a performance sledgehammer. It shatters the performance problems that most data centers face and will likely continue to do so for years. Unlike traditional hard disk systems, most data centers that purchase an All-Flash Array won’t…

Tagged with: All-Flash, All-Flash Array, Deduplication, Flash, Flash Array, Flash memory, Multi-level cell, SLC, Solid-state drive, SSD
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Software Defined Networking For Better Scale-out Storage

Posted on December 18, 2013 by George Crump

Leveraging Software Defined Networking For Better Scale-out Storage

Intelligently placing data within a storage system is not necessarily a new concept, but leveraging software defined networking to make decisions about data while it’s still in transit is. When software defined networking and software defined storage are combined they can overcome some of the challenges that high performance scale-out storage systems encounter. As a result these new, software defined, scale-out systems provide highly flexible, highly reliable and highly cost effective storage systems that can support a wide variety of workloads.

Learn:

– The challenges when Scale-out architectures
– How flash exposes even more challenges
– How Software Defined Networking can lead to better scale-out storage

Tagged with: Coho Data, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, ISCSI, OpenFlow, Scalability, Scale-Out, SDS, Software-defined networking, Solid-state drive, SSD
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Overcoming The Flash Storage Latency Challenge

Posted on December 17, 2013 by George Crump

The removal of latency is a critical part to delivering more fully on the flash performance promise. No matter how fast the flash technology becomes, the latency of its connection to the CPU is a key stumbling block in achieving…