Blog Archives

How to Beat Dropbox

Posted on February 17, 2015 by George Crump

Almost every laptop I see has Dropbox installed on it. It’s easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and works 99% of the time. Users love it, but Dropbox does have its problems. First, it removes data out from under the control…

Tagged with: Cache, Cloud, Dropbox, Enterprise, file sync and share, Infrastructure, Protection
Posted in Blog

Briefing Note: Zadara Multi-Tenant Storage Multi-Zoned for increased Availability

Posted on January 16, 2015 by George Crump

Any time a storage system claims to be “enterprise-class”, IT planners should look into its ability to survive a disaster. This is even true for storage systems that are cloud based, since a cloud data center is still just that,…

Tagged with: Cloud, Enterprise, HA, Infrastructure, Multi-Tenant Storage, Replication, Zadara
Posted in Briefing Note

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

OCZ’s Saber 1000 Flash Drives Fill the Gap between Client and Enterprise SSDs

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Eric Slack

Hyper-scale deployments, common in cloud environments, can have hundreds of rack-mounted servers running content-based applications, such as media streaming, video on demand or web services. These mostly read-intensive workloads require the strong storage performance of server-side flash, but hyper-scale infrastructures…

Tagged with: Cloud, Enterprise, Flash, Hyper-scale, OCZ, performance, SATA, SSD
Posted in Briefing Note

Micron’s M500DC – an Enterprise-grade SSD at a reasonable cost

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Eric Slack

Over-buying or over-spec’ing an SSD solution is all too common because managers often aren’t completely sure of the requirements for a particular application but can’t risk having their SSD fail or even underperform. The available options have been consumer-class drives…

Tagged with: Enterprise, Hyperscale, Micron, NAND Flash, SSD, XPERT
Posted in Product Analysis

Enterprise Backup For The Next Generation Data Center

Posted on May 12, 2014 by George Crump

The Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) must contend with massive growth, not only in data capacity, but also in data criticality. Data in the NGDC must be protected and available in case something goes wrong. At the same time, IT…

Tagged with: Backup, Deduplication, Dell, Enterprise, Metadata, Next Generation, NGDC, Scalability
Posted in Article

Designing Enterprise-class Multi-Tenant Storage

Posted on January 9, 2014 by George Crump

Cloud Providers and enterprises must be able to guarantee performance to specific applications or groups of applications. They also need ways to distribute some of their storage management workload directly to the users or ‘interests’ they support. In the cloud…