Blog Archives

Will the All-Flash Array Market go away?

Posted on July 29, 2014 by George Crump

Recently HDS’s Hu Yoshida wrote in his blog that he thinks the all-flash array market will go away. I very often find myself agreeing with Hu, he’s a sharp guy and I respect his point of view. As an example,…

Tagged with: All-Flash, Array, Compression, DRAM, Efficiency, Flash, Hard Disk Array, MLC, RAID, SLC, TLC, Virtualization
Posted in Article

Maximum VM Density Requires Visibility

Posted on July 17, 2014 by George Crump

Most data centers have fully embraced server virtualization, with many data centers claiming over 50% of their server environment being virtualized. The early success of this technology has been unprecedented in IT terms, but now a key next step should…

Tagged with: Brocade, Next Generation, ROI, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VM Density
Posted in Blog

Virtualized Hyperconvergence – Compute, Storage and Backup all-in-one

Posted on July 16, 2014 by Colm Keegan

The term “Hyperconvergence” refers to the packaging or bundling of multiple hardware and software components into a single platform to give end-users a simple and rapid way to deploy applications. As a hyperconverged system (server, storage & networking resources combined…

Tagged with: Backup, Compute, Deduplication, Hyperconvergence, PCIe, SimpliVity, Storage, Virtualization
Posted in Briefing Note

SlideShare – Don’t Let Storage Eat Your Hyper-V Savings

Posted on July 14, 2014 by George Crump

In a competition that many had pronounced over, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is now a viable candidate in both the SMB, the remote office and even the enterprise data center. It brings the key virtualization features that most data centers at a…

Tagged with: Hyper-V, Hypervisor, StarWind, Virtualization
Posted in Slideshare

Why is VM Density so low?

Posted on July 3, 2014 by George Crump

In our recent webinar “Max VM Density Requires Optimal Storage Networking & Operational Transparency” respondents to one of the polling questions indicated that over 40% of the time their servers were supporting less than a dozen virtual machines (VMs). This…

Tagged with: Archive, Brocade, Density, ROI, Storage Networking, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VM
Posted in Blog

Virtualized Hybrid Disk Backup for Veeam

Posted on July 1, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Disk based backup has become a staple in many data center environments. But now thanks to advanced recovery capabilities from virtualized backup applications like Veeam, Unitrend’s PHD Virtual and Dell’s vRanger, more is being asked of disk backup systems. For…

Tagged with: Backup, Drobo, HDD, Hybrid, Recovery in Place, SSD, Veeam, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

The perfect Disk Backup for Virtualized Backups?

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Disk Backup Appliance Designed for VMware?
With its support for SSD, the Drobo B1200i could be one of the most viable platforms for supporting random I/O generating changed block backups and data in-place recoveries, the capability to execute a VM directly from the backup target. In this product analysis, StorageSwiss examines the Drobo B1200i to see how it handles the new requirements of VM disk backup and recovery.

https://storageswiss.com/2014/06/19/perfect-disk-backup-virtualized-backups/

Tagged with: Deduplication, disk backup, Drobo, Hybrid, RAID, Recovery in Place, SMB, SSD, Virtual machine, Virtual Server, Virtualization
Posted in Product Analysis

ChalkTalk Video – The Unique Hyper-V Storage Challenges

Posted on June 16, 2014 by George Crump

All virtualization environments place a strain on the storage infrastructure, making planning and design more critical than ever. But an advanced storage architecture drives up the cost of implementation. The relative cost of storage is a big concern in VMware…

Tagged with: Architecture, Hyper-V, ROBO, StarWind, Virtualization
Posted in Video

Storage Q&A: How to improve Bare Metal Server performance

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Charlie Hodges

When people have issues with performance on a server, the first thing they think about is adding flash to that server for tiering or caching. It’s a logical first step. For most companies these servers are hosting their VMware environment,…

Tagged with: Bandwidth, Bare Metal, I/O, SAN, SanDisk, Virtualization, VM Density
Posted in Storage Q&A

Hyper-V Storage Commoditization

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Today, many organizations are considering Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform as an alternative to market behemoth, VMware. But the key to fully delivering on the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) value proposition that Hyper-V offers, is commoditizing the storage infrastructure…