Blog Archives

Briefing Note: NetApp upgrades EF Arrays to address Performance First Workloads

Flash storage is being used in three areas of the data center infrastructure. First, flash and all-flash arrays are seeing adoption in both server and desktop computing environments, as well as mid-range database applications. Second, for databases that demand extremely

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The State of Deduplication in 2015

At its core, deduplication is an enabling technology. First, it enabled disk based backup devices to become the primary backup target in the data center. Now it promises to enable the all-flash data center by driving down the cost of

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Briefing Note: What is 3D NAND and why should the Data Center care?

Moore’s Law has fundamentally changed the data center. Plentiful processing power has driven the success of technologies like high performance computing, highly scaled database environments and of course virtualization and cloud computing. But to take advantage of all that CPU

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Briefing Note: DataGravity – Intelligent Primary Storage

There is no question that data centers need to provide faster access to ever increasing volumes of data, and do so at increasingly lower price points. To accomplish this storage vendors are focused on integrating flash based storage as well

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Hyper-scale Nightmare: Using Consumer SSD in the Data Center – Podcast

One way admins of hyperscale data centers try to reduce costs is to use consumer-grade solid state drives in their scale-out server architectures, instead of the enterprise-class SSDs that are routinely used in these environments. In this podcast, Shawn Worsell of OCZ/Toshiba

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In 2015 Storage is still all about the Network

Briefing Note: CISCO 2015 Product Announcement Summary As we enter 2015, IDC projects a 10X growth in virtual servers over the next five years, a 16X growth in data and a 4X growth in the use of flash based storage. The

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The cost of using low-cost Hardware in Hyper-scale Data Centers

Every IT organization strives to economize, but in the high-density, rack-mounted world of hyper-scale data centers, the pressure to reduce operating costs can be especially severe. These are the scale-out, clustered environments trusted to support most public clouds and many

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Analyst Blog: Which RAID Level should you use for your SSD Tier?

In a recent webinar I discussed how a Hybrid System could be architected so that it could perform as well, or almost as well, as an All-Flash Array. If the IT planner decides to implement a Hybrid Array, there is

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The difference between Retroactive Deduplication and Software Defined Storage

Short of buying a new storage system with storage efficiency (deduplication and compression) built in, it is difficult to add the technology to an existing storage array. Today there are two ways to accomplish this. First, you can wait for

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