Blog Archives

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

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…

Briefing Note: Violin Memory ushers in the Flash Storage Platform

Posted on February 17, 2015 by George Crump

Even though memory has always played a role in the storage infrastructure, the introduction of flash based storage has lead to rapid advancements in the evolution of storage. Today flash use has evolved from simply augmenting disk-based primary storage (hybrid…

How Snapshots CAN Be Backups – Podcast

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Charlie Hodges

Snapshots have been part of the backup process for years, enabling traditional backup systems to reduce their impact on operations. But can you use snapshots to replace the backup itself? Historically, the answer has been “no”. But now, with new…

Tagged with: Backup, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Nexenta, Recovery point objective, Recovery Time Objective, Snapshots, Webinar
Posted in Podcast

Briefing Note: Catalogic releases Zero-Touch Copy Data Solution

Posted on February 11, 2015 by George Crump

If primary data is growing, the copies made of that data are exploding, with a growth rate expected to be 10X that of primary data. These copies are most often used for data protection, test/development, compliance, archive, and analytics. Fortunately,…

Tagged with: Analytics, Archive, Catalogic, Compliance, Copy Data, Data Protection, Snapshots, Test/Dev, Virtual machine, VM
Posted in Blog

Copy Data vs. Snapshots

Posted on February 4, 2015 by George Crump

As I discussed in an earlier column “Not All Snapshots are the Same”, storage systems that use a re-directed snapshot technique can typically maintain thousands of snapshots without impacting storage performance. But just because you can maintain thousands of snapshots,…

Tagged with: Backup, Copy Data, Data Protection, Disaster recovery, Point-in-Time, Retention, SDS, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage
Posted in Blog

Not all Snapshots are the same

Posted on February 2, 2015 by George Crump

In an upcoming webinar, Storage Switzerland will make the case for using snapshots as a primary component of data protection. For this strategy to work several things are needed from the storage infrastructure. First, it must be able to keep…

Tagged with: Backup, Copy-on-write, Data Protection, Infrastructure, Nexenta, Recovery point objective, Recovery Time Objective, Snapshots
Posted in Blog

Briefing Note: NetApp upgrades EF Arrays to address Performance First Workloads

Posted on January 29, 2015 by George Crump

Flash storage is being used in three areas of the data center infrastructure. First, flash and all-flash arrays are seeing adoption in both server and desktop computing environments, as well as mid-range database applications. Second, for databases that demand extremely…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Converged, Encryption, Flash, Hybrid, Hyper-converged, Infrastructure, IOPS, Latency, Mirroring, NAND, NetApp, performance, Replication, Scale Up, Snapshots
Posted in Briefing Note

What’s wrong with using Snapshots for Data Protection?

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Eric Slack

Snapshots are a standard feature of most storage systems today. They offer a remarkable ability to save a file at specific points in time without actually making a copy of it; in fact, they’re also referred to as “point in…

Tagged with: Data Protection, Metadata, Nexenta, performance, Replication, Snapshots, Software Defined
Posted in Blog

The State of Deduplication in 2015

Posted on January 26, 2015 by George Crump

At its core, deduplication is an enabling technology. First, it enabled disk based backup devices to become the primary backup target in the data center. Now it promises to enable the all-flash data center by driving down the cost of…