Tier-1 vendors are falling behind startups in offering a complete data efficiency solution. As we discussed the reasons why they are so far behind in our recent article, “The Tier-1 Storage vendor Deduplication and Compression challenge“, integrating a new technology…
Veeam Provides Sneak Peek Into Version 8 Protecting data via point-in-time snapshots may be easy to setup and configure but performing a VM based recovery off this data is typically layered with lots of manual and time consuming steps. Not…
Hyper-V is emerging as an alternative to VMware in many environments, but those data centers choosing the Hyper-V path to virtualization nirvana must still deal with storage issues. As it does in VMware environments, Software Defined Storage holds great promise for Hyper-V administrators looking to lower storage costs while increasing storage performance. In this article George Crump, Storage Switzerland’s Lead Analyst, covers how software defined storage can be optimized for the Hyper-V environment to insure consistent application storage performance while maintaining Hyper-V’s cost advantage.
Cloud Providers and enterprises must be able to guarantee performance to specific applications or groups of applications. They also need ways to distribute some of their storage management workload directly to the users or ‘interests’ they support. In the cloud…
The I/O Blender has reached an almost legendary status in virtualization circles. It is a term for what happens to storage I/O when in a virtual infrastructure. The I/O Blender is created when potentially hundreds of virtual machines across dozens…
The term “noisy neighbor” in the storage context refers to a rogue virtual machine (VM) that periodically monopolizes storage I/O resources to the performance detriment of all the other VM “tenants” in the environment. This phenomenon can become more pervasive…
Many organizations have adopted a virtualize-first policy, where all new applications brought online are considered for virtualized deployment prior to getting their own bare metal hardware. But there are typically a number of mission critical applications that are still not…
A discussion about the storage infrastructure supporting virtual servers or virtual desktops almost always starts with a focus on performance. After all, solving the much talked about I/O Blender problem often takes center stage. But according to a poll conducted…
The key objective for organizations investing in flash is to make sure that they are getting the maximum performance out of their premium investment. This means making sure that the application and storage infrastructures are optimized for the near zero…
In the first article we opened with a short discussion on why TCO calculations are worth the time they consume. Essentially, any realistic effort to reduce overall costs must start with an accurate baseline of the existing system cost. We…
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