The cloud offers a number of significant benefits for IT organizations, especially flexibility, as it allows companies to expand resource capacity on a moment’s notice. Cloud-based storage and services also provide a way to shift infrastructure costs from upfront, capital…
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,…
Backup appliances have become a popular method for backup software vendors to deliver their software. It eliminates much of the hassle of initial installation and makes on-going support easier, since the vendor is now dealing with a more common foundation.…
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.…
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…
The explosion of digital content is forcing an evolution, making the traditional data center model of a single standardized Network Attached Storage (NAS) system a thing of the past. Today, data centers are forced to use multiple NAS types to…
Originally the term “cloud backup” referred to primarily consumer-grade services that backed up PCs and laptops to a cloud-based provider. These services were designed to protect users’ data, mostly digital content like photos and music, but also documents. But business…
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.…
File data, also known as unstructured data, is one of the biggest challenges facing IT. Users want seamless access to this data no matter where they are or how old the data is. IT needs to manage the growth of…
In my last column I discussed how cloud usage is approaching the ‘tipping point’, where companies will have to use the cloud in order to meet their expected infrastructure demands. Coupled with the price wars that are going on between…
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