Blog Archives

Why is Data Protection Still an Art?

Posted on October 31, 2017 by George Crump

Data protection has been a key data center practice for as long as there have been data centers. It would seem that by now the art of data protection would be a science and that every operating system or environment…

Tagged with: Backup, CDM, Cloud, dr, Hypervisor, NoSQL, Recovery, Replication, RPO, RTO, SaaS, Unitrends, Unstructured data, VM
Posted in Blog

Beating the VMware Tax – Maxta Briefing Note

Posted on October 26, 2017 by George Crump

The term VMware Tax was a derogatory description of a change in VMware licensing a few years ago that charged users based on the amount of vRAM they used. VMware, after public outcry, dropped that policy. The term is now…

Tagged with: Hyper-V, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, Maxta, Migration, Virtualization, VM, VMware
Posted in Briefing Note

Can You Backup a Nutanix Cluster to Amazon S3? – Comtrade Software Briefing Note

Posted on October 24, 2017 by wcurtispreston

Data centers of all types are increasingly trying to figure out how to store backups in the cloud. VMware and Hyper-V customers have a variety of options for doing this, but Nutanix customers using the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) have historically…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, dr, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Nutanix, VMware
Posted in Briefing Note

Look Before You Leap into DRaaS – Scale Computing Briefing Note

Posted on October 13, 2017 by George Crump

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solves a lot of problems for IT professionals trying to prepare their organizations to survive a disaster. At the same time, though, it also creates new challenges that need to be resolved prior to…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cloud, DRaaS, Flash, Hybrid, Hyperconvergence, Hypervisor, Replication, Scale Computing, SMB, VM
Posted in Briefing Note

NetApp Holds Annual Conference Amidst Mandalay Bay Shooting

Posted on October 12, 2017 by wcurtispreston

If NetApp handles its business as well as it handled Insight 2017 – held in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas – NetApp will do just fine. The conference, held at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, went…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cloud, GreenQloud, HCI, Hypervisor, Migration, NAS, NetApp, NetApp Insight, Replication, SolidFire, Spinnaker
Posted in Briefing Note

Is Recovery in the Cloud the New Standard

Posted on October 9, 2017 by wcurtispreston

The cloud is increasingly becoming the disaster recovery option of choice. In fact, it’s really hard to argue with the cost and functionality available from the various cloud vendors that are available today. Recovering to the cloud seems even better…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, Deduplication, Disaster recovery, dr, Hypervisor, Replication, Tape, VM
Posted in Blog

Hyperconverged Solutions Need Long Term Flexibility

Posted on October 2, 2017 by George Crump

There is only one constant in the data center – change. Change, at least in the data center, is good. Done right, it delivers more performance in less space while reducing costs. But some hyperconverged solutions are resistant to change,…

Tagged with: Hyper-V, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, Maxta, SDS, Virtualization, VM
Posted in StorageShort

Hyperconvergence – Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out

Posted on September 27, 2017 by George Crump

One of the attractions of a hyperconverged architecture is when the organization needs more compute or storage resources, it simply adds another node. But hyperconverged vendors seldom talk about the downsides to this approach. There may be times when it…

Tagged with: Hyper-V, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, Maxta, Migration, NVMe, Scale Up, Scale-Out, SDS, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Blog

SlideShare – Showdown: Hardware-Based Hyperconvergence vs. Hyperconvergence Software

Posted on September 22, 2017 by George Crump

Hyperconverged architectures come in two flavors; hardware-based hyperconvergence or hyperconvergence software. Hardware-based hyperconvergence is where the hardware and the software are licensed together and pre-integrated from a single vendor. Hardware-based solutions look appealing on the surface – just plug them…

Tagged with: Hyper-V, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, Maxta, SDS, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Slideshare

Why Has SDN Adoption Been So Slow? – Pluribus Networks Briefing Note

Posted on September 21, 2017 by George Crump

The move to commodity hardware changed the way data centers scale compute and storage resources. The network, for the most part, is being left out of the movement. Once an organization makes a network vendor selection, it has very few…