Blog Archives

Briefing Note: X-IO Enters March like a Lion – No Lamb in sight

Posted on March 13, 2015 by George Crump

The storage market is as competitive as ever, so vendors need to keep delivering the features that data centers require to meet the ever-increasing demands for performance and capacity. But through the feature war, IT professionals would be wise to…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, Hybrid, Replication, SDS, Snapshot, Software Defined, Thin provisioning, X-IO
Posted in Briefing Note

Analyst Blog: What is Real Software Defined Storage?

Posted on March 11, 2015 by George Crump

When it comes to defining specific parts of the storage industry the definition should be as general as possible, avoiding vendor specifics while not being so generic that it becomes useless and doesn’t categorize anything. We’ve successfully applied this philosophy…

Tagged with: Infrastructure, Object Storage, SDS, Software Defined Storage
Posted in Blog

Software-Defined Storage – Over-Hyped or Overdue?

Posted on March 10, 2015 by George Crump

The interest in Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is at an all-time high and data center operators want to know if now is the time to move towards this type of a storage infrastructure. In our latest workshop series “Software Defined Storage…

Tagged with: Infrastructure, Replication, SDS, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Thin provisioning, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

Designing Primary Storage to Ease the Backup Burden

Posted on March 2, 2015 by George Crump

When IT planners map out their primary storage architectures they typically focus on how well the system will perform, how far it will scale and how reliable it will be. Data protection, that process that guards against corruption or system…

Tagged with: Backup, Data Protection, dr, Nexenta, Protection, Replication, RPO, RTO, SDS, Snapshot, Software Defined Storage, Virtual machine, VM
Posted in Article

Analyst Blog: Are there Problems with Software Defined Storage?

Posted on February 27, 2015 by George Crump

In a recent article we discussed three potential problems with software defined storage (SDS). When we write these types of articles the goal is to bring to light areas of consideration for IT professionals contemplating taking the SDS plunge. The…

Tagged with: Converged, Disaster recovery, FUD, Replication, SDS, Software Defined Storage
Posted in Blog

How Software-defined Storage is Enabling Snapshot-based Data Protection

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Eric Slack

Snapshots are powerful tools for creating a primary storage data protection system, one that offers faster recovery and can even replace traditional backup altogether. But protecting against primary storage system failure, which would render the snapshots useless, requires a second…

StorageShort: Copy Data Methods

Posted on February 25, 2015 by George Crump

2015 is going to be a big year for Copy Data. We expect every major data protection vendor to release some form of copy data management solution to the market this year. But vendors will take different approaches to deliver…

Tagged with: Catalogic, Compliance, Copy Data, Data Analytics, Data Protection, Managability, SDS, Software Defined, Test/Dev
Posted in StorageShort

The Three Problems with Software Defined Storage

Posted on February 19, 2015 by George Crump

Software defined storage (SDS) promises to reduce storage capital and operational costs by abstracting data services from the storage hardware. To deliver on these promises, SDS typically enables the use of commodity storage which should lower storage acquisition costs. It…

Briefing Note: Springpath Delivers SDS from the Ground Up

Posted on February 18, 2015 by George Crump

In the future, the data center’s storage architecture should be able to scale elastically, automatically adapting to performance demands. It should also be more than just reliable; it should be self-healing, and deliver these capabilities with cloud economics. This future…

Tagged with: Architecture, Cloud, Deduplication, Flash, Hypervisor, performance, Replication, Scale, SDS, Snapshot, Software Defined Storage
Posted in Briefing Note

Briefing Note: Software Defined Storage grows up with FalconStor FreeStor

Posted on February 18, 2015 by George Crump

Software Defined Storage (SDS) is still in its infancy. While there are exceptions, like Atlantis Computing, Nexenta and DataCore, vendors in the space are for the most part startups looking to get their first hundred or so customers. FalconStor’s new…