Blog Archives

Rethinking the Storage Controller for Unstructured Data

Conventional wisdom suggests that most business data is stored in database applications, however, unstructured data comprises approximately 70-80% of the total data in a typical environment and, according to some industry sources, is growing 5x as fast. File-based data is

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The Role Of Enterprise Backup In The Modern Data Center

Data has changed. There is more of it, it’s larger and is no longer all located on a single storage device in the middle of the data center. As a result backup, an already challenging process, is now reaching the

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Is All Thin Provisioning The Same?

Thin provisioning is a storage allocation process that improves the write efficiency of a storage system by enabling it to consume less capacity for storing a given amount of data. It is becoming an increasingly popular, almost commonplace, feature available

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Overcoming The Challenges With SSD Reliability

Articles posted on the Storage Switzerland web site that focus on SSD Reliability are consistently among the top read articles on our site. Clearly there is concern about using the technology in the enterprise and IT planners want to know

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How To Make Object Storage More Secure

Object storage is an enabling technology, one that improves scalability and performance at scale over traditional storage architectures which use RAID and replication to protect data. Using erasure coding and data dispersion within an object storage system can also greatly

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What Is A Hyperscale Data Center?

Hyperscale data centers have architectures that are designed to provide a single, massively scalable compute architecture. The architecture is typically made up of small, individual servers, called nodes, that provide compute, storage and networking. These nodes are then clustered together

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The Unknown Risk of SSD Mapping Tables

Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash Appliances use mapping tables to track where data is stored on the flash device. These tables play a similar role to iNode or File Allocation Tables (FAT) and if they get corrupted or lost,

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What is the Fate of Object Storage?

Object storage and the systems that leverage its unique data storage approach have been the subject of much hype over the past few years. If you took past analyst predictions at face value, by now all unstructured data would be

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Automated Caching for the Virtualized Data Center

Many industry observers estimate that the server infrastructure in a typical data center environment is approximately 50% virtualized. As virtual machine (VM) density increases, conventional storage platforms are wilting under the pressure of managing highly randomized storage IO patterns. Indeed,

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What Is Dispersed Storage?

Keeping unstructured data available, as data sets continue to grow, is a key challenge for today’s data center. The access requirements of unstructured data often preclude relying 100% on capacity centric tape so higher capacity disk solutions, for many organizations,

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