Blog Archives

Micron Invests Big to Drive Flash Innovation Outside of the Box

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Eric Slack

Fifty percent of enterprise data centers are leaving the big storage companies, according to Micron VP, Darren Thomas, and chip vendors like Micron can’t simply rely on these OEMs any more to sustain and grow their businesses. This was a…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Big data, Briefing, Flash, HDD, Hyperscale, Micron, NAND, Software Defined, SSD, Unstructured data
Posted in Blog

Briefing Note: SolidFire shows why more and less is better for Software Releases

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Eric Slack

Nitrogen is SolidFire’s seventh generation OS release, following their theme of naming operating system versions after elements, Oxygen being the next. With 100+ elements on the period table, they should be set for the next several years of releases. While…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cloud, Flash, Infrastructure, SolidFire, SSD, VLAN
Posted in Briefing Note

Enterprise- vs Consumer-grade Flash in the Datacenter: How to Choose

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Eric Slack

Using consumer-grade flash drives in datacenter environments is a common practice for saving money. So it wasn’t a big surprise that two-thirds of attendees on a recent StorageSwiss webinar reported that they currently use both enterprise and consumer SSDs in…

Tagged with: Backup, Flash, Hyper-scale, Metadata, OCZ, performance, Redundancy, Reliability, SSD
Posted in Blog

Briefing Note: What is 3D NAND and why should the Data Center care?

Posted on January 23, 2015 by George Crump

Moore’s Law has fundamentally changed the data center. Plentiful processing power has driven the success of technologies like high performance computing, highly scaled database environments and of course virtualization and cloud computing. But to take advantage of all that CPU…

Tagged with: 3D NAND, All-Flash, Cloud, Flash, Hybrid, Intel, MLC, Solid State Disk, SSD, TLC, Virtualization
Posted in Briefing Note

Hyper-scale Nightmare: Using Consumer SSD in the Data Center – Podcast

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Charlie Hodges

One way admins of hyperscale data centers try to reduce costs is to use consumer-grade solid state drives in their scale-out server architectures, instead of the enterprise-class SSDs that are routinely used in these environments. In this podcast, Shawn Worsell of OCZ/Toshiba…

Tagged with: Cloud, Data center, Flash, Hyper-scale, Hyperscale, IOPS, OCZ, OCZ Technology, SATA, SSD, Web-scale
Posted in Podcast

Briefing Note: Panasas makes HGST 6TB Helium drive Practical for Big Data

Posted on January 16, 2015 by George Crump

Big Data, Sensor Data and Business Analytics are accelerating the already rapid growth of unstructured data. To make matters worse these data sets often need to be retained in an online format for very long periods of time. The capacity…

Tagged with: Big data, Business Analytics, Data Protection, High Capacity, Hybrid, Metadata, NAS, Panasas, Reliability, SATA, Scale-Out, SSD, Unstructured data
Posted in Briefing Note

The cost of using low-cost Hardware in Hyper-scale Data Centers

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Eric Slack

Every IT organization strives to economize, but in the high-density, rack-mounted world of hyper-scale data centers, the pressure to reduce operating costs can be especially severe. These are the scale-out, clustered environments trusted to support most public clouds and many…

Tagged with: Flash, Hyper-scale, OCZ, performance, Reliability, SSD
Posted in Blog

Analyst Blog: Which RAID Level should you use for your SSD Tier?

Posted on January 13, 2015 by George Crump

In a recent webinar I discussed how a Hybrid System could be architected so that it could perform as well, or almost as well, as an All-Flash Array. If the IT planner decides to implement a Hybrid Array, there is…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Cache, Compression, Deduplication, Flash, Hybrid, Latency, performance, RAID, Solid State Disk, SSD
Posted in Blog

Briefing Note: The Ultra48 AssuredSAN, Dot Hill’s new High-Density Hybrid Array

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Eric Slack

Long-time storage systems OEM, Dot Hill, recently announced the Ultra48 AssuredSAN, a high-density, 48-drive, hybrid disk array that runs their RealStor 2.0 software. The Ultra48 is designed with three drawers of 16 x 2.5” drives that can be configured in…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Caching, Dot Hill, FC, HDD, Hybrid array, ISCSI, SSD, Tiering
Posted in Briefing Note

Business Outcome Driven Storage

Posted on January 8, 2015 by George Crump

The new mantra for IT is to focus the technology and services their data centers provide on business outcomes. That concept seems more easily applied to front-line and customer-facing applications, like customer relationship management, decision support and Web servers that…