Blog Archives

Identifying Tape As Production Workloads

Posted on November 6, 2013 by George Crump

I recently attended the Fujifilm annual Global IT Summit in Houston featuring CIO and IT executives from around the world. At the summit the subject of using tape in production came up. While we spend most of the time using…

Tagged with: Backup, Fujifilm, Fujifilm annual Global IT Summit, Hard disk drive, Houston, IBM, Tape drive
Posted in Blog

Is It Time To Bring Tape Into Production?

Posted on November 1, 2013 by George Crump

Tape as a storage medium has fought off all attacks from disk-based backup and archive vendors and is enjoying a resurgence in the data center. In fact, Storage Switzerland recently polled about 70 large enterprise IT professionals and not one…

Tagged with: CrossRoads Systems, Hard disk drive, IBM, Linear Tape File System, SpectraLogic
Posted in Blog

Flash Aware Fibre Channel

Posted on October 30, 2013 by George Crump

The key objective for organizations investing in flash is to make sure that they are getting the maximum performance out of their premium investment. This means making sure that the application and storage infrastructures are optimized for the near zero…

Tagged with: CrossLink, Data center, Emulex, Fibre Channel, Flash, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, LUN, Storage area network
Posted in Blog

Re-Thinking The Storage Architecture for Flash

Posted on October 14, 2013 by George Crump

One of the key discussion tracks at Powering The Cloud / SNW Europe is “Re-Thinking Your Data Center Architecture”. Storage is of course a part of the data center and its architecture also needs to be re-thought. There are two…

Tagged with: Data center, Flash, Hard disk drive, PCI Express, SNW Europe, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, VMware
Posted in Blog

Akitio Neutrino Thunder Duo Test Drive

Posted on October 11, 2013 by George Crump

It seems like it took forever but thunderbolt enclosures are finally coming to market. One of the first ones we have had a chance to get our hands on is the Akitio Neutrino Thunder Duo. This dual drive unit allows…

Tagged with: Akitio, Drive bay, Hard disk drive, Neutrino, Samsung, Serial ATA, Solid-state drive, Test Drive, Thunderbolt
Posted in Lab Report

Are PCIe SSDs Breaking Your Storage Network? – and how to stop it

Posted on October 7, 2013 by George Crump

olid state drive (SSD) solutions using flash are becoming the ‘go to’ options for addressing storage performance bottlenecks. And within that technology category, PCIe based SSDs could represent the state of the art. By locating the flash in the server…

Tagged with: Hard disk drive, High Availability, PCI Express, SAN, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage area network, Virident, VMware
Posted in Article

Using All-Flash Arrays To Solve Tier-1 Database Problems

Posted on October 2, 2013 by George Crump

To solve tier-1 database performance problems, it is important to understand the nature of tier-1 applications. Standard definitions of tier-1 include: (i) extremely high cost, extremely high performance applications – sometimes referred to as “tier-0” (e.g., Wall Street trading platforms)…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Cache (computing), Hard disk drive, High Availability, RAID
Posted in Article

The ROI of Server-Side Caching

Posted on September 18, 2013 by George Crump

Implementing server-side caching with the right solid state disk (SSD) can be like conducting a ‘surgical strike’ on storage performance problems. Installing this combination of hardware and software can eliminate the storage roadblock to increased transactions per second, while not…

Tagged with: Cache, Hard disk drive, PCI, RAID, SanDisk, Servers, Solid-state drive, SSD, VMware
Posted in Article

Hybrid Storage Needs SSD Cache Flexibility

Posted on August 6, 2013 by George Crump

While specialized all-flash storage systems grab the headlines, hybrid storage systems are increasingly becoming the workhorses of the data center, hosting the majority of applications, virtual machines and file shares. To expand the number of workloads that they can support…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Hybrid array, Hybrid drive, Nexsan, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage
Posted in Article

Are Flash Devices Putting Sensitive Data At Risk?

Posted on July 22, 2013 by George Crump

Flash based storage systems are now the “go to” option for improving the response time of performance sensitive applications. Some applications that require high performance are also storing extremely sensitive data that needs to be completely sanitized if the flash…

Tagged with: Encryption, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Skyera, Solid-state drive
Posted in Article