Blog Archives

Flash Strategies for MS-SQL

Applications based on Microsoft SQL (MS-SQL) seem like obvious candidates for some type of flash performance boost. The high IOPS and low latency of flash storage is almost a perfect match for the high transaction MS-SQL environments. While almost any

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

EMC World 2015 – Building a Data Services Community with FAST.X

One of the challenges facing almost every IT organization is storage system sprawl, a problem that is increasing. When we visit a data center there is often a storage system for each workload; one for virtual desktops, one for virtual servers, one for

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Briefing Note

EMC World 2015 – XtremIO Achieves Data Center Scale

The most common question that we are asked by IT planners considering an all-flash array is “can the data center really become all-flash?”. The answer is yes but that requires that the all-flash array achieve data center scale. This means

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Briefing Note

Previewing EMC World 2015

EMC World has evolved into one of the largest storage events in the industry, taking second place only to VMworld. While the event clearly has an EMC bend to it (it is after all EMC World) there are plenty of

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

What are VVols?

With vSphere 6, VMware is set to address one of the biggest storage management problems facing the virtualized environment, associating virtual machines (VMs) with the storage they are using. VVOLs provide that visibility and allow storage and server administration to

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Three new considerations for Scale-Out and Scale-Up All-Flash Architectures

A couple of years ago Storage Switzerland wrote an article “Scale Out or Scale Up? – 6 Key Considerations for the Flash Array Buyer”. The points made in that article are still relevant, but vendors in both architecture camps have

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Article

Storage News and Insights for the week of 4-24

George Crump and Eric Slack join Charlie Hodges on this week’s Storage News and Insights podcast from Storage Switzerland. Huge revenues for Amazon Web Services, driving down costs for cloud storage and showing how the cloud is now as fast as

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Podcast

The All-Flash Problem… Reality

The concept of an all-flash array once seemed impossibly expensive, but now almost a dozen companies ship a storage system that has no hard disk drives inside. The bigger question is if and when the entire data center can become

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

Podcast: Understanding your Flash choices for MS-SQL

There are a lot of options for MS-SQL administrators looking to improve storage performance and most of them feature flash. Recently I sat down with George Crump, Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland and Sumeet Bansal – Senior Solutions Architect, Databases

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Podcast

StorageShort: Cost Justify Flash for VDI in 52 Seconds

In this StorageShort George Crump, Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland discusses one of the best ways to cost justify flash for virtual desktop infrastructures; use the flash array for more than just VDI. Some all-flash and hybrid systems deliver enough

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in StorageShort