All primary storage systems protect themselves in some way. Most provide protection from media failure by leveraging some form of RAID. They also provide snapshot technology to protect against data corruption or user entry error. Many also provide the ability…
Gartner recently released its 2015 Magic Quadrants for General-Purpose Disk Arrays and another one for Solid-State Arrays. Over the next few weeks we will provide our analysis of these two charts, but first we need to discuss why there are…
It’s been a year since Dell became a private company. At his opening press conference at Dell World 2014 Michael Dell sounded like a CEO who likes coming to work every day, no longer subjected to Wall Street’s fixation over…
One of the announcements made at the Next Generation Storage Summit was the formulation of a consortium of vendors called the Object Storage Alliance Group. The stated mission of this group is to “promote the business value of object addressable…
The cloud is disrupting the storage market and not just by offering ‘cold storage’ for tier-3 data. Cloud-scale, ‘commodity’ infrastructures have made companies reconsider how much they need to pay for their tier-1 storage as well. Other companies are building…
The term “noisy neighbor” in the storage context refers to a rogue virtual machine (VM) that periodically monopolizes storage I/O resources to the performance detriment of all the other VM “tenants” in the environment. This phenomenon can become more pervasive…
How to be intelligent about flash storage deployments Storage performance has become a “hot button” issue in the server virtualization era. While there is a need for high performance storage, such as flash and hybrid storage solutions, there is a…
A cache in a manufacturing environment is an intermediate store of components or partially assembled products, often referred to as “in-process inventory”, that serves to make the overall production process more efficient. In a computer system, caches, also called “buffers”,…
In a recent Storage Switzerland write up, “Is Real-time Tiering the Next Big Thing in Storage?”, we explored Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 disk array systems and their interesting data tiering technology. Dot Hill is a disk array manufacturer that’s…
Small to medium sized businesses aren’t in the enterprise category but their users certainly have enterprise expectations. Storage Switzerland Founder George Crump calls it the “Facebook-ing of IT”, in reference to the always-on, always-available services that big cloud and social…
StorageSwiss.com - The Home of Storage Switzerland 