Blog Archives

The Unknown Risk of SSD Mapping Tables

Posted on May 16, 2013 by George Crump

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,…

Tagged with: DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Flash, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Non-volatile memory, Skyera, Solid-state drive
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What is the Fate of Object Storage?

Posted on May 14, 2013 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: Active Archive, Active Archive Alliance, ISCSI, NAS, Object Storage, Software Defined Storage, Unstructured data
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Automated Caching for the Virtualized Data Center

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Colm Keegan

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,…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash, Hypervisor, Intel, PCIe, SATA, SSD, Virtualization
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What Is Dispersed Storage?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by George Crump

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,…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Disk array, Dispersed storage, Object Storage, RAID, Storage
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Improving SSD Performance Through Better Flash Management

Posted on April 15, 2013 by George Crump

Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has become a viable performance option thanks to the advent of NAND flash devices which are making memory-based storage affordable. The performance of an SSD is not solely dictated by the NAND but by the…

Tagged with: DRAM, Flash memory, Granularity, Micron, Solid-state drive, SSD
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Power Failure and Flash Storage

Posted on April 10, 2013 by George Crump

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of power failures in flash based solid state storage systems. In various tests run by industry associations flash based solid state disk (SSD) devices, when subjected to a sudden power-loss,…

Making Storage the VDI Solution, Not the Problem

Posted on April 9, 2013 by George Crump

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has found a niche in call-center types of environments where very large numbers of workers run essentially the same desktops. But in the broader market VDI hasn’t seen the same success, a fact typically blamed on…

Tagged with: Desktop virtualization, Solid-state drive, Top10-2013, VDI, VeloBit, Virtual desktop, VirtualBox, VMware
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What Is GEN 5 Fibre?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by George Crump

Despite the best marketing efforts of various forms of IP based storage, Fibre Channel continues to gain momentum in the enterprise. The growth in large, real-time databases and the increasing VM density per physical host, as well as the proliferation…

Tagged with: Brocade, Fibre Channel, Gen 5, ISCSI, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network
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The Value of Real Time Backup Health Assessment

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Colm Keegan

Change is good…or is it? The sheer volume and velocity of changes taking place in IT environments today is staggering. While change may be good for business needs, if left unchecked, improperly managed changes within the backup environment could deal…