Organizations are incorporating public cloud resources into their deployment strategies. The organization may have a cloud-first initiative, or it may use the cloud as determined by the workload but the reality is that an overwhelming number of organizations deploy in…
The network team has a lot invested in traditional networking and may resist the move to a software-defined network (SDN), but given the pace of growth and expansion of the data center, they may not have an option. The network…
While it should seem like someone else’s concern, no other group within IT should want software-defined networking (SDN) more than the storage administration and virtualization vAdmin groups. SDN’s promise to all the storage and vAdmin teams is to perform their…
Data management is hard, and with the massive growth of data this task is becoming even more difficult. But, data growth is also making data management an imperative. Organizations need to figure out a way to better manage their data…
When flash storage first became viable for the enterprise, it was also very expensive. Early devices where low in capacity as well. Hybrid systems overcame these two shortcomings by mixing hard disk and flash technologies. These systems added the capability…
The single biggest challenge facing backup, ironically has nothing to do with backup. Backup’s biggest challenge is the pace at which the organization evolves and the speed at which it expects IT to keep pace with that evolution. Combine that…
Organizations are asked to store unprecedented amounts of data. Protection of this data to a secondary storage device and replicating it off-site is critical. For most organizations, the capacity requirements of secondary data, data used for backups and other purposes,…
In a recent blog, we discussed how scale-up architectures break backup, forcing customers into expensive and disruptive forklift upgrades. Scale-out architectures are the logical solution to the scale-up challenge. But, scale-out architectures create problems of their own. IT planners need…
Like other software defined initiatives, software defined networking (SDN) abstracts the networking operating environment from the hardware switches and controller. The SDN promise is to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency by managing a set of physical top of rack…
Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendors have gotten into a bad habit of claiming that once an organization implements the HCI solution, they no longer have to worry about backup. While there are components of HCI, (snapshots and replication), that do help…
