Blog Archives

How Does Shutterfly Keep 80PB of Pictures Safe and Available?

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Eric Slack

Shutterfly is the market leader in digital, personalized photo products, currently serving millions of customers who benefit from unlimited, secure (and free) storage, plus a 100 percent happiness guarantee. They help customers turn their pictures into lasting keepsakes, such as…

Tagged with: Big data, Cleversafe, Disk array, Hardware, Object Storage, RAID, Shutterfly, Storage
Posted in Case Study

How to Make Reliable SSDs – Reliable NAND Flash

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Eric Slack

“Reliability” in a storage context means that the storage infrastructure can be counted on to keep data safe and to produce that data in a reasonable timeframe when called upon. While it’s true that storage systems have redundancies built in…

Tagged with: DRAM, ECC, Flash memory, Micron, Multi-level cell, RAID, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article

How To Make Object Storage More Secure

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Eric Slack

Object storage is an enabling technology, one that improves scalability and performance at scale over traditional storage architectures which use RAID and replication to protect data. Using erasure coding and data dispersion within an object storage system can also greatly…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Cloud computing, Data security, Encryption, Keys, Object Storage, RAID, Security
Posted in Article

Unstructured Data Storage For The Mid-Market

Posted on April 26, 2013 by George Crump

Unstructured data (data that’s outside of databases), is growing at an out-of-control pace in organizations of all sizes. Large cloud service providers and some larger enterprises have dealt with this challenge by embracing object storage. For smaller data centers and…

Tagged with: Data center, Exablox, Hardware, OneSystem, RAID, Storage, Unstructured data
Posted in Briefing Note

What Is Dispersed Storage?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by George Crump

Keeping unstructured data available, as data sets continue to grow, is a key challenge for today’s data center. The access requirements of unstructured data often preclude relying 100% on capacity centric tape so higher capacity disk solutions, for many organizations,…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Disk array, Dispersed storage, Object Storage, RAID, Storage
Posted in Article

A Better Answer than RAID and Replication for Cloud Storage

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Eric Slack

Cloud applications and web-based services, such photo sharing sites, create some monumental challenges for a storage infrastructure. Not only must they expand almost without limit, they also need to protect and secure data sets, typically for thousands or millions of…

Tagged with: Cleversafe, Data corruption, Data integrity, Disk array, Erasure code, Object Storage, RAID, Replication
Posted in Article

Is it Time for Hybrid SSD RAID Controllers?

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Eric Slack

Server side SSD caching solutions are popular implementation choices for performance upgrades because they allow users to put the performance right where it’s needed, in the application server itself. For many of these use cases, a direct attached disk array…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, LSI, Multi-level cell, Nytro MegaRAID, PCI Express, RAID, RAID controller, SandForce, Solid-state drive
Posted in Briefing Note

Highly Available, High Capacity SSD Solves Application Latency Problems

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Eric Slack

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has been building high performance, solid state storage systems for over three decades, laying claim to the “fastest storage on the planet” with their World’s Fastest Storage® trademark. The RamSan-720 added to this legacy with hardware…

Tagged with: Capacity, Density, Efficiency, eMLC, Flash, HA, Latency, RAID, Ramsan, SSD, Texas Memory
Posted in Product Analysis

Achieving Maximum SSD Efficiency

Posted on January 25, 2012 by George Crump

There are two well-known facts about solid state disk (SSD). First, SSD is fast and second, SSD is expensive—compared with traditional disk drives. There are also two well-known facts about the data center. First, almost every data center needs more…

Tagged with: Data center, Deduplication, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, RAID, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article