Blog Archives

Are NVMe Flash Arrays Viable for Traditional Workloads?

Posted on May 6, 2019 by George Crump

NVMe Flash Arrays promise an unprecedented level of performance thanks to the higher command count, queue depth and PCIe connectivity. Most NVMe Arrays are boasting IOPS statistics of close to one million IOPS and latency in the low hundreds of…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Artificial Intelligence, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, IOPS, IoT, Machine Learning, NVMe, ROI, SAS, Western Digital
Posted in Article

Why Metadata Might be Impeding Your Flash Performance

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Krista Macomber

Metadata is an often overlooked but leading storage performance bottleneck. Metadata maps how files are stored on disks, and it summarizes characteristics of file attributes such as author and last date of access. As such, it is crucial to data…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Big data, Data Protection, Flash, HDD, Hybrid Cloud, IOPS, IoT, ROI, SSD, Western Digital
Posted in Blog

Cut Costs, Increase Quality and Accelerate Delivery of New Applications – IBM InfoSphere Virtual Data Pipeline

Posted on April 29, 2019 by George Crump

Application development is quickly changing from the old waterfall approach where applications were delivered once a year and all at once, to a more continuous development method where applications are delivered more frequently with more incremental changes between releases. The…

Tagged with: Actifio, Archive, Data Privacy, dev/ops, Disaster recovery, dr, IBM, Replication, ROI
Posted in Briefing Note

Taking Hyperconverged Infrastructure Beyond Point Application Hosting – Pivot3 Briefing Note

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Krista Macomber

As we enter the next phase of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market maturity, it is important for storage managers to be discerning when it comes to infrastructure architecture as well as intelligent management capabilities. The first generation of HCI stands to…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Encryption, Flash, HCI, Hybrid, Hyperconverged, IoT, NVMe, Pivot3, QOS, Replication, ROI, SLA, VDI, VM
Posted in Briefing Note

Lightboard Video: The Importance of Flash Architectures in Real-Time Workloads

Posted on April 2, 2019 by George Crump

Data centers are adjusting to the flash performance opportunity and are scaling their traditional environments much larger, pushing the storage systems’ architecture much harder than when all-flash arrays were first introduced. These organizations are also introducing real-time applications, like artificial…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Big data, Data Protection, Flash, Hybrid Cloud, IOPS, IoT, ROI, Western Digital
Posted in Video

Consolidation: The Key to Early NVMe Success

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Krista Macomber

As Storage Switzerland previously blogged, non-volatile memory express (NVMe) access protocols stand to add value to a host of applications, ranging from the performance-intensive newer workload set (e.g. artificial intelligence) to more traditional Tier 1 applications (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server).…

Tagged with: AI, Big data, Data Protection, Flash, Hybrid Cloud, IOPS, IoT, ML, NVMe, ROI, SAS, SCSI, SQL, Western Digital
Posted in Blog

Using Workload Simulation to Justify the Shift to NVMe

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Krista Macomber

The introduction of the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage protocol brings with it a new storage performance tier. Whereas older Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) and Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standards were designed for slower-performing hard disk drive (HDDs) and…

Tagged with: Analytics, ATA, Cloud, HDD, Hyperconverged, IOPS, NVMe, Object Storage, ROI, SANBlaze, SAS, SCSI, SSD, Virtual Instruments, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

How to Evolve From Unstructured Data Protection to Unstructured Data Management

Posted on January 15, 2019 by George Crump

A recent report from Igneous, “The State of Unstructured Management 2018,” indicates that most IT professionals are not satisfied with their ability to meet organizational expectations about the backup, recovery, and retention of their unstructured data sets. The value that…

Tagged with: Archive, Cloud, Copy Data, Data Privacy, Igneous, Migration, NAS, Ransomware, Replication, ROI, UDM, Unstructured data
Posted in Article

The ROI of a Flash and Object Storage Architecture

Posted on November 8, 2018 by George Crump

The flash+object storage architecture creates a cost effective, two tier storage architecture in the data center. It enables IT to better meet performance demands of applications and the retention demands of unstructured data. Ideally the organization can reduce the size…

Tagged with: All-Flash, EFSS, Flash, GDPR, NVMe, Object Storage, Retention, ROI, SAS, Tegile, Unstructured data
Posted in Blog

The Problem with Software Defining Consolidation

Posted on September 27, 2018 by George Crump

One of the challenges with storage sprawl is managing all the different islands of storage. Physically separate storage systems can be more difficult to manage. This is especially the case if they’re from different vendors, since each system has a…