Blog Archives

A Better Answer than RAID and Replication for Cloud Storage

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Eric Slack

Cloud applications and web-based services, such photo sharing sites, create some monumental challenges for a storage infrastructure. Not only must they expand almost without limit, they also need to protect and secure data sets, typically for thousands or millions of…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Data corruption, Data integrity, Disk array, Erasure code, Object Storage, RAID, Replication
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The Cost of Over-Provisioning Flash Arrays

Posted on February 5, 2013 by George Crump

All-Flash Arrays have to overcome two key obstacles when trying to gain acceptance as storage systems which can be utilized across a wide number of use cases in the data center. First, they must be durable and secondly, they must…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Data center, Flash memory, Skyera, Solid State, Solid-state drive
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Are All PCIe SSDs Created Equal?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by George Crump

One of the more popular approaches to implementing solid state disks (SSDs) is to implement the flash memory on a PCIe card, which is installed directly into a server. This places the high performance storage directly at the point of…

Tagged with: Controller, Flash memory controller, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, performance, Serial ATA, Solid-state drive, SSD, SSDs
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Optimizing MS-SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups With Server SSD

Posted on January 9, 2013 by George Crump

Medium- to large-sized data centers count on applications like Microsoft’s SQL Server to support applications that users need to become more productive so that the business can be more competitive. As these applications move into production the businesses become dependent…

Tagged with: Business, Database, Direct Attached Storage, flash storage, Microsoft, Microsoft SQL Server, Replication, SQL, SQL Server, SSD, Top10-2013
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Assessing the All-Flash Array Market

Posted on December 27, 2012 by George Crump

All-Flash arrays are storage systems that are 100% solid state and offer a set of storage features like snapshots and replication similar to traditional hard drive based storage systems. The recent leaks of what EMC plans to do with the…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Flash, GreenBytes, Hybrid array, Solid-state drive, SolidFire, Total Cost of Ownership, VM-Aware Storage, ZFS
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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…