Blog Archives

Data Center Visit – Cloud Provider vs. Converged Storage

Our latest data center visit was to a Texas based cloud provider focused on providing compute and hosting services. While they are one of the largest providers in the market, what makes them unique is their security. They provide one…

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Removing the fuzzy math from VDI

One of the aspects of server virtualization that makes it so popular is the simplicity of the return on investment (ROI) calculation. An IT Manager can look at the reduction in physical servers, combined with the increase in application workload,…

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Set my Applications free – Achieving VM Mobility

Virtualization 1.0 provided an early taste of the value of application mobility by allowing the live migration of virtual machines to alternate hosts. But that mobility was confined to a single hypervisor, and for the most part a single data…

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Reader Question: Is Object Storage for Normal Data Centers?

One of the things I like about participating on the forums on Spiceworks is I get great, raw questions. One came in this week during a discussion around object storage. “I’d like to consider myself reasonably clued up, but I…

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Low cost Cloud Backup and High Availability

Is high availability an affordable option for small to medium sized businesses? Many large enterprise data center environments utilize server clustering and replication technology to protect their critical business systems from disruptive outages. And while these solutions can provide the…

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Is Dedupe Overrated?

Advanced data reduction technologies are central to the purpose built backup appliance (PBBA) market segment. They shrink the amount of data that’s actually committed to storage and help make these relatively fixed capacity devices feasible. But data reduction only provides…

Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

StorPool – A Toolkit for Cloud Application Providers

StorPool is a software defined storage solution targeted at cloud application and infrastructure providers. The software runs on a cluster of commodity servers, aggregating the internal storage of those servers into a shared volume. The solution, for now, is only…

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Is Convergence the next wave of Virtualization?

What is the next wave of virtualization? Now that many businesses have consolidated their server infrastructure, a potential next logical course is to find ways to simplify the management of other resources in the data center like storage and networking…

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

Seagate’s Kinetic Drives improve Cloud Storage TCO and Performance

In an earlier column we talked about the world’s insatiable appetite for storage and the gap between projected demand and supply of that capacity. In response to this demand disk drive companies are thinking beyond the drive, to the array…

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog

ExaGrid and Veeam team up

Recently Veeam and ExaGrid teamed up to create a joint solution that should make the jobs of virtual administrators easier by allowing them to tap into the full capabilities of Veeam without impacting backup performance. Veeam backup and replication brings…

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog