Blog Archives

Overcoming The Challenges To All-Flash Arrays

Posted on December 20, 2012 by George Crump

All-Flash arrays are storage systems that are 100% solid state and give a complete set of robust features like snapshots and replication, similar to traditional hard-drive based storage systems. While their performance enhancing potential is very appealing, All-Flash arrays have…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Computer data storage, Data center, Flash, Hard disk drive, Pure, Solid-state drive, VMware
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What Is Hybrid Storage?

Posted on December 17, 2012 by George Crump

Hybrid Storage is a term used to describe storage systems that are designed with a blend of flash-based solid state disk and hard disk drives to provide high performance at an affordable price. They try to address the dollar-per-IOPS vs…

Tagged with: Data deduplication, DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Hybrid array, IOPS, Solid-state drive
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VM Aware Vs. ZFS Storage

Posted on November 13, 2012 by George Crump

Server and desktop virtualization has given IT the flexibility to respond to the needs of the business rapidly while at the same time reducing costs and improving efficiency. These abilities though have created a greater challenge for the supporting storage…

Tagged with: Tintri, Virtualization Aware, VMware, ZFS
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VM Recovery In Place vs. Changed Block Recovery

Posted on October 22, 2012 by George Crump

One of the benefits of virtualization has been the ability to recover applications and servers more rapidly. Recently some backup software vendors have added the ability to recover a virtual machine directly from the backup image. A technique commonly called…

Tagged with: Avamar, Changed Block Recovery, EMC, Recovery in Place, Virtual machine, Virtualization
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The Benefits of a Flash Only, SAN-less Virtual Architecture

Posted on September 20, 2012 by George Crump

Shared storage using either a storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) device enables many key features of the virtual server environment, such as virtual machine (VM) migration, distributed resource management and site recovery management. As a result…

Tagged with: Flash, Flash memory, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, Virtual machine, VM, VMware
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How to Solve the SSD Endurance Problem

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Eric Slack

As the storage medium for main memory DRAM is where the processing work gets done in application servers. It’s generally the fastest mass produced data storage area available and can support the nearly unlimited cycle of writes and overwrites that…

Tagged with: DIMM, DRAM, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, NVDIMM, PCI Express, Solid-state drive, SSD, Viking
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Preparing For Virtualization 3.0

Posted on August 27, 2012 by George Crump

Virtualization 3.0 is the eventual end-game for the data center. In this environment the host will become the ‘atomic’ element of the data center, with applications, storage and networking all centered on this single element, for the most part. Clearly,…

Tagged with: Consolidation, Hypervisor, Nutanix, Virtual machine, Virtualization
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Rack Density – The Key to Maximum Virtualization ROI

Posted on June 11, 2012 by George Crump

Data center floor space is an increasing concern for IT managers. Once the walls of the data center have been reached, the only options are to either decrease the amount of devices in the current data center or to build…

Tagged with: Density, Nutanix, PCIe, RAM, ROI, SSD, Virtual machine, Virtualization
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What is Backup Appliance Sprawl – and how to stop it

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Eric Slack

Appliances have arguably become the de facto product format for new technologies in IT for a number of reasons. They’re complete systems that typically don’t require other components and their ‘plug and play’ implementation is simpler than the software and…

Tagged with: Appliance Sprawl, Backup, Deduplication, ExaGrid, Scalability, Scale-Out, Sepaton
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