IT in companies of all sizes is facing competition from the cloud. Based on a self-service, automated provisioning model, public clouds enjoy efficiencies and economics that few corporate data centers can match today. But internal IT has a distinct advantage,…
Network Attached Storage (NAS) has served the enterprise data center for well over two decades. Originally designed for storing user home directories, these systems have evolved to handle a wide variety of data sets including databases and virtual machine images.…
If primary data is growing, the copies made of that data are exploding, with a growth rate expected to be 10X that of primary data. These copies are most often used for data protection, test/development, compliance, archive, and analytics. Fortunately,…
Our second year of Data Protection Workshops, in conjunction with TechTarget/Storage Decisions, are underway and coming to a city near you. The theme of this year’s sessions will be breaking the rules of data protection to meet the stricter and…
Almost since their inception, storage systems have been keeping log files that track everything that is going on with that storage system. Over the years the type and granularity of data that is captured has increased, and today these systems…
Remember back when companies had copy machines in every department? Making copies was a tedious exercise that probably wasted more paper than anything else. But for the IT department, creating copies (data copies) is a far more serious problem, one…
In a recent article “The State of Deduplication in 2015” we took a look at how deduplication is impacting the data center. Deduplication continues to change how data protection is performed and it is dramatically changing primary storage, most notably…
In a recent briefing note we discussed the need for backing up cloud-based productivity applications, also called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), such as GoogleDocs, Office365 or SalesForce.com. People often assume that because these services are storing their data in the cloud, that…
At Storage Switzerland, we have the privilege of talking to IT professionals from around the world about a variety of subjects, one of the most popular of which is storage I/O performance. While IOPS is a familiar discussion point both…
As I discussed in an earlier column “Not All Snapshots are the Same”, storage systems that use a re-directed snapshot technique can typically maintain thousands of snapshots without impacting storage performance. But just because you can maintain thousands of snapshots,…
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