IT organizations select NetApp storage because it excels at managing unstructured data. When NetApp first introduced the filer concept, the data it was intended to store was typically user created files from office productivity applications. The files were created, modified,…
Organizations embark on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) projects to drive down end-user operational costs and to enhance infrastructure security. These projects often evaluate well. During “test mode” there are a limited number of users, making it easy to meet their…
Cloud and traditional data centers face two competing challenges. The first is meeting the ever-increasing demand for performance. Flash, in its various forms, can meet these requirements. On the other end of the spectrum is meeting the demands of storing all the data we create. The answer to these environments has not been as simple. Flash, by itself, is not the answer due to its higher cost per GB. SMR hard drives improve the ability to meet capacity demands, but have limited random write performance. By coupling SMR drives with flash, these two technologies can create a very practical solution which enables adoption without significant change to the existing infrastructure. In this article we will discuss how SMR drives work and how they can be coupled with flash to meet both of these challenges
Data Centers are under increasing pressure to build infrastructures that are responsive to the application workloads of the organization. Understanding what a workload is and what its characteristics are is critical to creating a responsive infrastructure that can satisfy the…
In terms of storage performance, the actual drive is no longer the bottleneck. Thanks to flash storage, attention has turned to the hardware and software that surrounds them, especially the capabilities of the CPU that drives the storage software. The…
Briefing Note: Avere CloudFusion The cloud appeals to organizations of all sizes, but as they begin their migration they are faced with the challenge of trying to integrate into the cloud provider’s storage infrastructure. Amazon, for example, has Elastic Block…
Briefing Note: Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform Flash has solved a lot of the storage performance challenges that the modern data center has but it is not a cure-all. The problem is that most organizations are ill-equipped to resolve the issue…
