Blog Archives

Hyper-Converged Architecture vs. Software Defined Storage

Hyper-Converged Architectures (HCA) and Software Defined Storage (SDS) are two of the most talked about trends in the data center, and both are gaining traction. For IT planners sifting through the deluge of vendor claims about these two technologies to

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Unifying Data Protection with Software-Defined Storage

One of the promises of software-defined storage (SDS) is the unification of storage services and the management of those services. The result should be a reduction in the cost to provision and manage storage resources. But some SDS solutions can

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The Top 3 Deduplication Trends

When combined with compression and thin provisioning, deduplication makes a backup disk a cost effective strategy and now makes considering a primary storage tier consisting only of flash reasonable. In our on demand webinar Permabit CEO, Tom Cook and I

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Managing Storage Sprawl, Instead of Consolidating it

At Storage Switzerland we write a lot about storage consolidation. While consolidation can simplify management the initial requirement of refreshing and potentially replacing legacy storage is a show stopper for many data centers. SDS provides a viable alternative if it can be used on existing storage assets so that the management and operation of those devices can be consolidated. In this article we discuss how SDS can provide simplification while being more cost-effective.

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The Difference Between High Performance and QoS

Since the introduction of flash, two primary methods for addressing application performance have emerged. First, the Hybrid Array that, using algorithms based on a dataset’s frequency of access, caches active data. The challenge with any algorithm that predicts future access

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Recovering from a Storage System Failure

The Bad Day Begins A message arrives on your smart phone indicating that the organization’s primary storage system is offline. All the applications that you were counting on it are down, and users can’t get their work done. Further investigation determines that this

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The Storage Challenges of Desktop as a Service

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and has the potential to reduce the upfront costs and scaling issues associated with deploying virtual desktops. But these cloud hosted users still need to be able

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The easy button for OpenStack Swift gets better

Early this year we compared the work involved in building a storage infrastructure around OpenStack Swift versus using SwiftStack. While the names OpenStack Swift and SwiftStack are similar, the process of getting to the point where you can write data

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Server Side Flash in a Shared Flash World

Server side flash, in its various forms, served as a precursor to shared flash arrays. It allowed IT planners to surgically address specific application response time issues caused by storage without having to implement a flash based array. This saved

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StorageSwiss Adds New Analyst

FORT WORTH, Tx. – Experience and knowledge of the storage industry are hallmarks that have made Storage Switzerland one of the world’s leading storage analyst firms. The company is adding to its depth of experience and knowledge by adding Joseph

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