If technology vendors don’t agree on what generic industry terms mean, how in the world are customers supposed to compare similar products? Wait. Maybe that’s the plan. Consider the terms backup, archive, & continuous, for example. The terms backup and…
Like a lot of technologies that are past their prime, RAID will continue to serve a function for a very long time. It’s an inexpensive way to string together multiple drives and protect yourself against the loss of one or…
The news is out; I’m joining George Crump and the team at Storage Switzerland. If you know our history, that may leave some of you scratching your heads a bit. George and I don’t agree on much. In fact, when…
World-renowned blogger and writer W. Curtis Preston is now a member of the Storage Switzerland team of storage analysts. Preston joins Lead Analyst George Crump and Senior Analyst Joseph Ortiz in providing Storage Switzerland readers the best education and insight…
All-Flash Array Vendors are now releasing systems with 3D TLC SSDs. They claim that they have reached price parity, without data efficiency, to mainstream data center hard disk arrays. 3D TLC NAND does bring the price per GB of flash…
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) projects evaluate well. During “test mode” there are a limited number of users, making it easy to meet their demands with a cost effective, hard disk-based storage array. User counts increase as these systems move from…
Flash storage is making an enormous impact on the data center. Armed with a flash storage system, IT professionals are creating virtual environments with much higher VM to host ratios and are designing databases to support many more users and…
Many vendors present all-flash arrays (AFA) as the cure-all for virtual desktop infrastructures. Indeed, AFAs can dramatically increase the number of virtual desktops that an infrastructure can support. AFAs also eliminate almost all performance problems; users love their lightning fast…
In a recent entry, “What Killed Archive?“, I discussed why most data centers don’t move inactive data from expensive storage to less expensive storage, despite a very compelling return on investment (ROI). The number one killer of the archive process…
In a previous article, “What is Tape? – A History and a Future”, we examined some of the basics of tape technology, past and present. We saw how new developments in the electromagnetic coatings used on tapes has resulted in…
