Applications and users demand unprecedented levels of performance, cyber-threats like ransomware require new levels of security and access control, and organizations are intolerant of any form of downtime or data loss. At the same time, they need to manage data…
Most data centers today have multiple primary storage systems. Often, each one supports a specific platform or environment and each of these systems are either backed up or archived. The problem is most data centers’ cloud architectures are at least…
As modern organizations struggle to keep up with the ever-growing data deluge, they have been forced to deploy and overprovision different types of storage in order to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLA), leading to unprecedented storage sprawl. Storage consolidation…
Flash storage is fundamentally changing the data center. It is allowing databases to meet the demands of users and virtual infrastructures to achieve new levels of virtual machine (VM) density. But what comes next after flash? Is it another advancement…
Storage consolidation is a lost cause. Why? The reason is that both the storage hardware and the use cases for that hardware are too different from each other. I outlined the problems in detail in my blog The Need for…
Here is the goal: Having a data center that consolidates all data onto a single storage system from one vendor. The hope is that by consolidating to a single system, the organization will reduce management headaches that IT administrators face…
Initiatives like server virtualization, cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, and real-time analytics are allowing IT to meet today’s ever-increasing business demands. These initiatives are designed to bring agility to the data center, yet they trip and fall when they have to interact with…
While the move to a virtualized data center continues, physical servers still matter! Its true that many organizations are now approaching 60%+ virtualization, few have reached 100%. That means that most data centers are still 40% physical. Those remaining physical…
