Blog Archives

Podcast – How to Keep Virtualization from Breaking Your Backup.

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Charlie Hodges

Our podcast guests are Kevin Russell, VP of Systems Engineering at ExaGrid, and Storage Switzerland Senior Analyst Colm Keegan to discuss ways to efficiently backup data is a virtualized environment. Click below for our webinar with Kevin and Storage Switzerland’s…

Tagged with: Backup, Data center, disk backup, ExaGrid, Virtual machine, Virtualization, Virtualized Backup
Posted in Podcast

Three Ways To Improve Software Defined Storage

Posted on February 11, 2014 by George Crump

Hyper-converged Storage may be the purest form of the software defined storage (SDS) concept, as it runs storage services as a virtual machine within the customer infrastructure. This new take on storage architectures collapses the traditional compute, storage and networking…

Tagged with: Architecture, Atlantis, Hyper-converged, ILIO, In-memory, Optimize, SDS, Software Defined Storage, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

Top Backup Takeaways from 2013

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Colm Keegan

As we usher in 2014, industry prognosticators are publishing their predictions about what will be the hot trends in the New Year. While backup technology may not be towards the top of this list, there were some interesting developments that…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, Copy Data, Deduplication, Flash, HDD, PBBA, Primary Storage, RLM, SIaaS, SLA, SSD, Tape, Virtual, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

How to Prevent Noisy Neighbors

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Colm Keegan

In response to my recent article, “What Is A Noisy Neighbor”, one of our reader’s asked if limiting the number of IOPS (via VSphere) on all but the most disk I/O intensive VMs would be a good approach for reducing…

Tagged with: Flash, Hypervisor, I/O, IOPS, QOS, SSD, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

How Do I Know My Virtual Environment is Ready For SSD?

Posted on January 7, 2014 by George Crump

The I/O Blender has reached an almost legendary status in virtualization circles. It is a term for what happens to storage I/O when in a virtual infrastructure. The I/O Blender is created when potentially hundreds of virtual machines across dozens…

Tagged with: CPU, Flash, IOPS, LUN, SolarWinds, SSD, Utilization, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Article

The New Normal: Software-Defined WAN Acceleration for a Cloud-Centric World

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Wide area network (WAN) acceleration technology has been successfully used by many organizations for over a decade to accelerate data traffic between data centers and branch offices. Typically deployed as an appliance, WAN accelerators help to ensure the timely transmission…

Tagged with: Acceleration, Bandwidth, Cloud, Data Center Sprawl, Hypervisor, Silver Peak, Software Defined, Virtual machine, Virtualization, WAN
Posted in Article

What Is A Noisy Neighbor?

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Colm Keegan

The term “noisy neighbor” in the storage context refers to a rogue virtual machine (VM) that periodically monopolizes storage I/O resources to the performance detriment of all the other VM “tenants” in the environment. This phenomenon can become more pervasive…

Tagged with: Disk array, FIFO, Flash, I/O, LUN, PCIe, Solid-state drive, Virtual machine
Posted in Article

Webinar: Are You Ready For Software Defined WAN Acceleration?

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Colm Keegan

WAN Acceleration technologies have typically been deployed as appliances, however, the realities of virtualized infrastructure is demanding a more flexible approach to align with the needs of the software defined data center. WAN acceleration and optimization is more critical than…

Tagged with: Data center, Virtual machine, Virtual reality, WAN, WAN optimization, Wide area network
Posted in Webinar

How Are You Guaranteeing Virtualized Application Performance?

Posted on December 11, 2013 by George Crump

Many organizations have adopted a virtualize-first policy, where all new applications brought online are considered for virtualized deployment prior to getting their own bare metal hardware. But there are typically a number of mission critical applications that are still not…

Tagged with: Gridstore, Hyper-V, LUN, Quality of service, Software Defined Storage, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

Guaranteeing Application Storage Performance When Virtualizing

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Colm Keegan

It’s no surprise that traditional storage performance falls off a cliff in heavily virtualized server environments. Originally designed to interface with a limited number of hosts, legacy dual controller storage architectures simply cannot meet the I/O workload demands of multiple…