Blog Archives

What Is A Hyperscale Data Center?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by George Crump

Hyperscale data centers have architectures that are designed to provide a single, massively scalable compute architecture. The architecture is typically made up of small, individual servers, called nodes, that provide compute, storage and networking. These nodes are then clustered together…

Tagged with: Hardware, Hyperscale, PCI Express, SMART Storage, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage
Posted in Article

Unstructured Data Storage For The Mid-Market

Posted on April 26, 2013 by George Crump

Unstructured data (data that’s outside of databases), is growing at an out-of-control pace in organizations of all sizes. Large cloud service providers and some larger enterprises have dealt with this challenge by embracing object storage. For smaller data centers and…

Tagged with: Data center, Exablox, Hardware, OneSystem, RAID, Storage, Unstructured data
Posted in Briefing Note

Power Failure and Flash Storage

Posted on April 10, 2013 by George Crump

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of power failures in flash based solid state storage systems. In various tests run by industry associations flash based solid state disk (SSD) devices, when subjected to a sudden power-loss,…

How Legacy Storage Breaks The Cloud

Posted on March 14, 2013 by George Crump

As business data continues its relentless migration to the cloud, providers of cloud hosted environments and applications are creating the perfect storm for their legacy storage systems, a storm that will break the ‘cloud promise’. These environments require high scalability,…

Tagged with: Cloud computing, Hardware, IOPS, OnApp, Scalability, Service-level agreement, Storage area network, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

Solving Hadoop Storage Challenges by Converging Storage and Compute

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Eric Slack

Cleversafe’s object-based, scale-out storage architecture leverages a unique information dispersal algorithm to distribute data objects across multiple storage nodes (called Slicestor ** nodes). These nodes can be located in a single data center or spread around the world. Using a…

Tagged with: Apache Hadoop, Big data, Cleversafe, Data center, Hadoop, Hardware, HDFS, MapReduce, Object Storage
Posted in Briefing Note

The Challenges with SSD Caching and Tiering

Posted on February 29, 2012 by George Crump

It is universally accepted that for most applications, adding flash to the storage infrastructure will greatly improve storage performance and offer a productivity return on the investment. The controversy in the industry is deciding where the flash storage should be…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Cache (computing), Flash memory, flash storage, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Pure, Solid-state drive, storage system
Posted in Article

High Performance Storage For The Mid-Range

Posted on September 15, 2011 by George Crump

Mid-range data centers have many of the same performance challenges that large enterprises do. As these organizations grow they are virtualizing servers, becoming more reliant on high transaction databases and can have Exchange or Sharepoint performance issues. The problem is…

Tagged with: CASL, ExecEvent, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Nimble, Storage, Technology
Posted in Blog

What Are IOPS? and why should you care?

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Eric Slack

In a recent article, “What is I/O and why should you care”, we discussed what input and output (I/O) operations are and how a storage system’s ability to support these I/Os is a finite resource, one that’s arguably as important…

Tagged with: Computer data storage, Disk storage, Hard disk drive performance characteristics, Hardware, IOP, RPM, Solid-state drive, Storage
Posted in Article

What is I/O? – And Why Should You Care?

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Eric Slack

Recording data to a storage device requires two things, a place to put those bytes and a way to get them written to that device. Capacity is the first thing we think of when talking about a storage system, and…

Tagged with: Disk storage, Hard disk drive performance characteristics, Hardware, IOP, RAID, Storage, Subsystems
Posted in Article

Breaking The Top Four Myths Of Tape vs. Disk Backup

Posted on January 27, 2011 by George Crump

Over the past few years disk as a backup target has become a key enhancement to most backup infrastructures. Disk is believed to be faster, almost as cost-effective and more resilient. In reality tape has its own unique value in…