Blog Archives

Not all Snapshots are the same

Posted on February 2, 2015 by George Crump

In an upcoming webinar, Storage Switzerland will make the case for using snapshots as a primary component of data protection. For this strategy to work several things are needed from the storage infrastructure. First, it must be able to keep…

Tagged with: Backup, Copy-on-write, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Nexenta, Recovery point objective, Recovery Time Objective, Snapshots
Posted in Blog

A Big Data Center without White Boxes – Storage in the Large Financial Enterprise

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Eric Slack

Google, FaceBook and many of the largest web-scale companies have made the use of commodity, ‘white box’ storage systems seem like the standard practice for large enterprises. Not so. Storage Switzerland recently spoke with a global financial institution about how…

Tagged with: Analytics, Capacity, Efficiency, HDS, Hitachi Data Systems, Infrastructure, Real Time, Scale Up, Tier-1
Posted in Article

Briefing Note: CloudAlly provides Unlimited SaaS Application Backup

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Eric Slack

Originally the term “cloud backup” referred to primarily consumer-grade services that backed up PCs and laptops to a cloud-based provider. These services were designed to protect users’ data, mostly digital content like photos and music, but also documents. But business…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, CloudAlly, Data Protection, Deduplication, Infrastructure, SaaS, Software as a service
Posted in Briefing Note

Briefing Note: NetApp upgrades EF Arrays to address Performance First Workloads

Posted on January 29, 2015 by George Crump

Flash storage is being used in three areas of the data center infrastructure. First, flash and all-flash arrays are seeing adoption in both server and desktop computing environments, as well as mid-range database applications. Second, for databases that demand extremely…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Converged, Encryption, Flash, Hybrid, Hyper-converged, Infrastructure, IOPS, Latency, Mirroring, NAND, NetApp, performance, Replication, Scale Up, Snapshots
Posted in Briefing Note

Briefing Note: Platform9 brings Amazon Class Automation to Traditional Data Centers

Posted on January 29, 2015 by George Crump

For many data centers the most appealing part of the public cloud is the automated provisioning. Users or application owners simply define the type and amount of compute and storage they need and the public cloud automatically provisions the exact…

Tagged with: Cloud, Deduplication, Hypervisor, Infrastructure, OpenStack, Platform9, Provisioning, Virtualization
Posted in Briefing Note

The Value of an Independent Storage Performance Testing Platform

Posted on January 29, 2015 by George Crump

The more virtual machines per host, or users per application, the more cost effective an environment becomes. And the more environments that can be supported by a single storage system the more cost effective the storage infrastructure becomes. But increased…

Tagged with: I/O, Infrastructure, Load DynamiX, performance, Storage, Testing Platform, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

Analyst Blog: Why you DO need to Backup the SaaS Cloud

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Eric Slack

In my last column I discussed how cloud usage is approaching the ‘tipping point’, where companies will have to use the cloud in order to meet their expected infrastructure demands. Coupled with the price wars that are going on between…

Tagged with: Backup, Bandwidth, Cloud, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Recovery, SaaS, Software as a service
Posted in Blog

Cloud Backups – Purpose Built vs. Public Cloud

Posted on January 27, 2015 by George Crump

Leveraging the cloud as part of the data protection process is increasing in popularity, and with that popularity come a lot of options for IT planners to sift through. One area of consideration is the cloud destination. There is a…

Briefing Note: Dakota Cloud Recovery – Cloud Backup is about Data Center Quality

Posted on January 23, 2015 by George Crump

Cloud backup providers can come in a variety of forms. Some are really backup software developers that happen to leverage the cloud as part of their software solution. These providers count on a generic cloud data center, like Amazon AWS…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, Dakota, Data Protection, DR-as-a-Service, DRaaS, Infrastructure, Recovery
Posted in Briefing Note

Webinar: How Snapshots CAN be Backups

Posted on January 22, 2015 by George Crump

Snapshots have been a key feature of primary storage infrastructures that IT professionals have relied on for years. In fact, many use snapshots as their first recovery option when their primary data copy is compromised. But storage systems have traditionally…

Tagged with: Backup, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Nexenta, Recovery point objective, Recovery Time Objective, Snapshots
Posted in Webinar