Storage capacity requirements are growing in almost every data center causing many IT managers to look for ways to ‘bend the growth curve‘ and keep the IT budget from being consumed by the storage budget. In fact, a small bend…
Storage capacity requirements are growing in almost every data center causing many IT managers to look for ways to ‘bend the growth curve‘ and keep the IT budget from being consumed by the storage budget. In fact, a small bend…
It used to be that mid-range data centers could buy a storage system designed for that market and never worry about growing beyond that system’s capacity and performance capabilities. Now however, thanks to server virtualization, “big data” and cloud initiatives,…
When the subject of application or data availability comes up in IT meetings the focus of the discussion is what to do when an application fails or the storage system that holds that application’s data fails. Occasionally with a savvy…
Other than the obvious people issues, when a disaster strikes what’s most important for the data center? Given the time to think about it, most IT managers will answer the question correctly. The most important thing is to restore access…
The fog around solid state storage is lifting. Most storage and database administrators are convinced that solid state technology is the most practical next step in storage performance. The challenge is that solid state performs so well that now there’s…
Virtualization stall usually occurs in a server virtualization project when business-important or mission-critical servers are targeted for virtualization. There is risk associated with virtualizing these servers and this risk can cause IT managers to move slowly or put off their…
Storage resource monitoring (SRM) technology has evolved from networked systems which communicated with dedicated software installed on the individual host elements, to architectures which largely eliminated these ‘agents’. This “agentless” technology consolidated these dedicated pieces of software into a ‘collector’…
In a recent article, Storage Switzerland discussed methods for protecting an application from a storage system failure. Storage hardware, along with server hardware, is increasing in its reliability. The growing culprit of application downtime is the application itself either through…
Part I – Protecting Applications From Storage System Failures When most IT professionals think of a disaster recovery plan, they think big, really big, like an earthquake, fire, flood, etc., where the data center is totally inaccessible. To protect against…
Over the past few years disk as a backup target has become a key enhancement to most backup infrastructures. Disk is believed to be faster, almost as cost-effective and more resilient. In reality tape has its own unique value in…