Blog Archives

Leveraging Analytics for Smarter Storage Systems

Posted on February 10, 2015 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: Analytics, Architecture, Big data, Cloudian, Logging, Metadata, performance, Reliability
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What’s causing the Copy Data Explosion

Posted on February 9, 2015 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: Catalogic, Compliance, Copy Data, Data Analytics, Data Protection, Managability
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Does Post Process Deduplication have a Role in the Future of Deduplication

Posted on February 6, 2015 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Backup, Data Protection, Deduplication, Flash, Hybrid, NAND
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Analyst Blog: Why Cloud File Sync and Share is not Backup

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Eric Slack

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…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, Data Protection, Data Retention, file sync and share, FS&S, SaaS, Software as a service
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Analyst Blog: The IOPS Gap

Posted on February 5, 2015 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cloud, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, I/O, IOPS, performance
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Copy Data vs. Snapshots

Posted on February 4, 2015 by George Crump

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,…

Tagged with: Backup, Copy Data, Data Protection, Disaster recovery, Point-in-Time, Retention, SDS, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage
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Enterprise- vs Consumer-grade Flash in the Datacenter: How to Choose

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Eric Slack

Using consumer-grade flash drives in datacenter environments is a common practice for saving money. So it wasn’t a big surprise that two-thirds of attendees on a recent StorageSwiss webinar reported that they currently use both enterprise and consumer SSDs in…

Tagged with: Backup, Flash, Hyper-scale, Metadata, OCZ, performance, Redundancy, Reliability, SSD
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Analyst Blog: If Primary Storage Protects itself, what is Backup for?

Posted on February 2, 2015 by George Crump

In our last few columns, Storage Switzerland has described a data protection solution that allows primary storage to leverage snapshot technology to protect itself. The basic design requires two storage systems, one on-premise and one at a disaster recovery location.…

Not all Snapshots are the same

Posted on February 2, 2015 by George Crump

In an upcoming webinar, Storage Switzerland will make the case for using snapshots as a primary component of data protection. For this strategy to work several things are needed from the storage infrastructure. First, it must be able to keep…

Tagged with: Backup, Copy-on-write, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Nexenta, Recovery point objective, Recovery Time Objective, Snapshots
Posted in Blog

Who’s missing from the Gartner’s Storage Magic Quadrant?

Posted on January 28, 2015 by George Crump

In my last four columns we looked at all four sections of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the popular graphic that analyzes and ranks various storage vendors on different products, this one on their ability to provide a primary storage system.…