Blog Archives

Analyst Opinion: Analyzing the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Posted on December 18, 2014 by George Crump

Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for storage. While I don’t always agree with their positioning, it is a reasoned analysis and I’m sure they can defend the various positioning of vendors they are tracking. It also gives other analyst…

Tagged with: Analyst Opinion, Dell, EMC, Enterprise, Gartner, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NetApp, Opinion, Storage
Posted in Blog

Retroactive Deduplication and Compression

Posted on December 15, 2014 by George Crump

In recent months there has been a lot of attention given to how primary storage deduplication is being implemented; should it be implemented selectively, or always on? The problem with this discussion is that it first assumes that the existing…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Compression, Deduplication, EMC, Hybrid Flash, Permabit, Retroactive Deduplication, storage array
Posted in Blog

Permabit Provides Retroactive Deduplication via EMC Select – Podcast

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Charlie Hodges

Retroactive deduplication is the ability to add deduplication to an existing storage array without the vendor having to change its storage software. One vendor that seems to be out in front with retroactive deduplication is Permabit. On a recent Podcast…

Tagged with: Deduplication, EMC, Permabit, Retroactive Deduplication, storage array
Posted in Podcast

Using EMC RecoverPoint to improve DR testing

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Colm Keegan

One of the key components of any disaster recovery plan is to verify that plan and make sure it works. The problem is that these tests are expensive, are not real world and are performed infrequently. In this article, we…

At EMC, the 3rd Platform is all about the Metadata

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Colm Keegan

With EMC’s acquisition of Spanning, the data protection arm of EMC’s new core technologies division (CTD) now has a tool for protecting data in cloud based applications like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Office 365. This was a needed acquisition that…

Tagged with: Archive, Backup, Big data, Cloud, Data Protection, EMC, Metadata, Object Storage
Posted in Blog

Non-disruptive Flash – How important is it?

Posted on October 27, 2014 by George Crump

Recently EMC announced that they were upgrading the storage software that drives their XtremIO to be able to compress and deduplicate data. This is an important addition, since not all data benefits from deduplication, databases being a good example. But…

Tagged with: All-Flash, All-Flash Array, Compression, Data compression, Deduplication, EMC, Flash, Scale-Out, XtremIO
Posted in Blog

vCloud Powered Data Protection-as-a-Service

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Automated data protection is becoming increasingly important given the fact that multiple IT stakeholders are taking a more active role in protecting their critical data. Virtual server administrators, database administrators and other application owners are now involved in the data…

Tagged with: Data Protection, Data Protection-as-a-Service, DPaaS, EMC, RPO, RTO, Server Virtualization, VDC, Virtual, Virtualization
Posted in Video

Understanding All-Flash Architectures – Assessing the right fit for your Data Center and Workloads

Posted on September 23, 2014 by George Crump

Today in the all-flash array market there are two architectures for data centers to choose from; scale out and scale up. Both have their unique strengths and weaknesses. Deciding on the right architecture for an organization’s data center first depends…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Architectures, Compression, Deduplication, EMC, Encryption, I/O, IOPS, Scale Up, SLA, Snapshots, Sprawl, Thin provisioning
Posted in Article

Backup or Replication?

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Charlie Hodges

Data protection can be challenging since virtualized applications typically have various recovery point and recovery time (RPO/RTO) objectives. Replication provides applications with near zero RPOs and when configured with redundant server infrastructure, it can also provide near instantaneous RTO. But…

Tagged with: Backup, ChalkTalk, Data P, EMC, Replication, VMware, VMworld2014
Posted in Video

Four Requirements for adding DR-as-a-Service to VMware

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Colm Keegan

For years, organizations have struggled with maintaining functional disaster recovery capabilities for their most critical business systems. The capital investment for redundant hardware, software and data center infrastructure, along with the personnel time required to ensure that business applications are…