Blog Archives

A Step-by-Step Path to Full Cloud Utilization

Posted on September 20, 2018 by George Crump

The Use Cases for a Cloud Data Fabric The cloud data fabric (CDF) allows organizations without a cloud pedigree to take full advantage of cloud storage and compute resources. The CDF also enables the organization to move to the cloud…

Tagged with: CDF, CIFS, Cloud Bursting, Cloud Data Fabric, Encryption, Hybrid, ISCSI, Migration, NAS, NFS, Replication, SMB, SoftNas
Posted in Blog

Using the Cloud Data Fabric for Migrating Applications to the Cloud

Posted on September 18, 2018 by George Crump

A key component of most organization’s cloud strategy is migrating applications to a cloud provider to reduce dependence on on-premises infrastructure. The organization may want to host the application entirely in the cloud, use the cloud as a failover point…

Tagged with: CDF, CIFS, Cloud Bursting, Cloud Data Fabric, Encryption, Hybrid, ISCSI, Migration, NAS, NFS, Replication, SMB, SoftNas
Posted in Blog

Designing a Cloud Strategy for the Real World – SoftNAS Briefing Note

Posted on June 25, 2018 by George Crump

The path to Hybrid IT is messy. The on-premises data footprint continues to grow at an alarming rate. On-premises applications also continue to sprawl, and the number of critical workloads only increases. Moving an application to the cloud often requires…

Tagged with: CIFS, Cloud, Hybrid, ISCSI, Migration, NFS, SMB, SoftNas
Posted in Briefing Note

Overcoming Backup Appliance Conventional Wisdom – ExaGrid Briefing Note

Posted on March 7, 2018 by George Crump

There are two key assumptions when it comes to purpose-built backup appliances. First, they must have inline deduplication and second, they will all be replaced by backup software solutions as they add deduplication functionality to their software and start selling…

Tagged with: Backup, CIFS, Deduplication, ExaGrid, Instant Recovery, NFS, NoSQL, Purpose Built, Recovery in Place, Redundancy
Posted in Briefing Note

Briefing Note – SUSE Enterprise SDS Version 3

Posted on June 29, 2016 by George Crump

This past January, Storage Switzerland provided its analysis of SUSE Enterprise Storage 2, a hardened version of Ceph designed to address enterprise concerns over the open software defined storage solution. That release saw SUSE add capabilities like heterogeneous OS access…

Tagged with: Capacity, CEPH, CIFS, NFS, Replication, Scale-Out, SDS, Software Defined, SUSE
Posted in Briefing Note

What are Cloud File Services?

Posted on June 2, 2016 by George Crump

Most IT professionals think of cloud storage as storage at the end of an internet connection that, because of the inherent latency, is for data that doesn’t need instant access. As a result, IT uses it mostly for backup, archive…

Tagged with: CIFS, Cloud, Cloud File Services, ISCSI, NFS, SMB, SoftNas
Posted in Blog

The Rise of the Machines – The Challenge with High File Count Environments

Posted on May 16, 2016 by George Crump

It is a well known fact that unstructured data is growing. But there is an aspect of its growth that may take unsuspecting IT professionals off guard; the number of individual files storage systems need to store today and the…

Tagged with: Caringo, CIFS, Metadata, NAS, Object Storage, Scale-Out, SMB, Unstructured data
Posted in Blog

Cloud in a Box – The On-site Cloud

Posted on November 9, 2015 by George Crump

While many companies are still developing their cloud strategy, others have jumped in with both feet and have moved most of their unstructured data to the cloud. These are organizations in the media and entertainment, online application provider, scientific processing…

Tagged with: CIFS, Cloud, Crossroads, Fujifilm, Legacy, NFS, Object Storage, Unstructured data
Posted in Blog

Selecting the Right OpenStack Storage Module

Posted on October 14, 2015 by George Crump

OpenStack is a set of tools for building and managing computing platforms for cloud data centers. Public cloud providers have widely adopted OpenStack, and now the toolset is working its way into the enterprise in the form of private clouds.…

Tagged with: Backup, Block Based Storage, CIFS, Cloud, NAS, NFS, Object Storage, Open Source, Scale-Out, SwiftStack, Unstructured data, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

The Elephant in the Data Center

Posted on September 14, 2015 by George Crump

Briefing Note: Introducing infinite io There is little argument among IT professionals that at least 80% of data is never accessed again after creation. In fact, Storage Switzerland finds that three months after a one week creation-edit cycle as much…