The WD Sentinel DS5100/6100 is a compact file server system from disk drive manufacturer Western Digital (WD), designed for the Small- to Medium-sized Business (SMB). The DS5100/6100 comes with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials and has the upgraded hardware…
LSI has recently released the Nytro MegaRAID (NMR) 8140-8e8i, the latest generation of the company’s PCIe flash acceleration cards for direct-attached storage (DAS). Like the previous NMR versions, this product integrates PCIe flash, caching software and LSI’s MegaRAID technology into…
During a recent Storage Swiss webinar, we polled our audience about how they were currently using caching technology in their environment. A significant percentage of respondents replied that they were using caching directly on their server infrastructure. This is not…
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…
One of the top read articles on StorageSwiss is, “What is a Storage Controller?“. As we discussed in that article, a storage controller is the compute power in a storage system and is responsible for delivering basic functions like concatenating disks into volumes, RAID data protection…
At LSI’s Accelerating Innovation Summit (AIS) this year, someone brought up a blog I’d written after a previous AIS event where an LSI executive said they had a RAID stack that was 25 years old. What popped into my mind…
To solve tier-1 database performance problems, it is important to understand the nature of tier-1 applications. Standard definitions of tier-1 include: (i) extremely high cost, extremely high performance applications – sometimes referred to as “tier-0” (e.g., Wall Street trading platforms)…
Implementing server-side caching with the right solid state disk (SSD) can be like conducting a ‘surgical strike’ on storage performance problems. Installing this combination of hardware and software can eliminate the storage roadblock to increased transactions per second, while not…
The cost of storage is important in all data-dependent companies, but in hyper-scale environments like web-based enterprises, it can literally consume the business. With the simultaneous requirements of scalable capacity, reliability and availability, these organizations face serious challenges with storage…
Caching is an ideal way to maximize an investment in solid state disk (SSD), especially in virtual environments where massively random I/O patterns are the norm. Caching provides an automated way to make sure that the most active data is…
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