Blog Archives

Don’t Let Virtualization Break Your Backup Infrastructure

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Colm Keegan

As a seasoned IT backup administrator recently said on a Storage Swiss webinar, “Avoid hearing the footsteps…”. This IT pro was referring to the unpleasant situation when folks from the C level suite start milling around outside your office waiting…

Tagged with: Backup, Deduplication, disk backup, ExaGrid, GRID, Hybrid, Infrastructure, QOS, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

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

A Virtualization Backup Alternative – Nakivo Backup and Replication 3.9

Posted on February 14, 2014 by George Crump

When it comes to virtualization specific backup applications, many IT professionals only think of one name, Veeam. But there are several alternatives that those professionals should consider. One of those alternatives, Nakivo, just made its case stronger with the recent…

Tagged with: Backup, Compression, CSP, Deduplication, MSP, Multi-Tenant, Nakivo, Replication, Virtualization
Posted in Briefing Note

Are Disk Backup Appliances Ready For a Virtualized World?

Posted on February 6, 2014 by George Crump

Data protection in a virtualized world can be a daunting issue. Advanced backup capabilities like changed block tracking (CBT) and data in place recoveries from backup storage are creating new demands which are heavily taxing already overburdened backup appliances. Left…

Tagged with: Backup, ChalkTalk, disk backup, ExaGrid, Video, Virtualization, Virtualized Backup, Whiteboard
Posted in Video

Is 10GbE Fast Enough For Flash Storage?

Posted on February 5, 2014 by George Crump

In a recent Storage Switzerland report (commissioned by Brocade and now available for download), we point out that there is a gap between high performance compute and high performance storage — the storage network. Workloads like server and desktop virtualization,…

Tagged with: Brocade, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Flash, Gen 5, performance, Spanning Tree Protocol, Virtualization
Posted in Blog

Why Is Storage Hardware Sprawl Worse Than Ever?

Posted on February 3, 2014 by George Crump

Once thought eliminated through storage networking via storage consolidation, storage hardware sprawl is worse than ever. As we discussed in our webinar, “How To Stop Storage Hardware Sprawl“, there are several reasons for this. First, there are more workload types…

Tagged with: Coho Data, Flash, Hybrid, Sprawl, Storage Hardware, Virtualization, Webinar
Posted in Blog

How Data Deduplication Impacts Recovery

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Data deduplication has become a standard offering in backup product portfolios. As a technology that has been mainstream for over five years, some IT decision makers may tend to treat deduplication as an afterthought. In actuality, how data deduplication is…

Tagged with: Deduplication, disk backup, ExaGrid, Hybrid, Latency, Recovery, Restore, Virtualization
Posted in Article

Webinar – How Server Virtualization Is Breaking Disk Backup

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Colm Keegan

Disk Backup Appliances have traditionally featured deduplication as the primary selling point. While efficiently storing protected data is critical, the ability to scale your systems to meet rampant data growth – while maintaining backup windows and meeting recovery objectives –…

Tagged with: Backup, Deduplication, ExaGrid, Recovery, Virtualization, Webinar, White paper
Posted in Webinar

Is QoS Enough to Ensure Virtualized Application Performance?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Colm Keegan

An increasing number of vendors are offering quality of service (QoS) capabilities for their storage systems. But the ability for these system to assure storage performance quality to mission critical applications is suspect at best. Guaranteeing virtualized application performance requires more than QoS, it requires a scalable storage infrastructure that understands specific virtual machine performance requirements.

In this article Storage Switzerland Senior Analyst, Colm Keegan provides the details on how a storage system has to go beyond QoS to provide complete application performance.

Tagged with: Gridstore, Hyper-V, I/O, Infrastructure, QOS, Virtualization
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…