Blog Archives

Multi-Hypervisor, Multi-Use Application Availability

In an ever changing IT landscape, business owners and data center managers are finding it increasingly challenging to ensure that critical business information is not only adequately protected, but that the underlying system infrastructure is resilient enough to withstand outages

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Posted in Briefing Note

VM Recovery In Place vs. Changed Block Recovery

One of the benefits of virtualization has been the ability to recover applications and servers more rapidly. Recently some backup software vendors have added the ability to recover a virtual machine directly from the backup image. A technique commonly called

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Posted in Article

Preparing For Virtualization 3.0

Virtualization 3.0 is the eventual end-game for the data center. In this environment the host will become the ‘atomic’ element of the data center, with applications, storage and networking all centered on this single element, for the most part. Clearly,

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Posted in Article

Rack Density – The Key to Maximum Virtualization ROI

Data center floor space is an increasing concern for IT managers. Once the walls of the data center have been reached, the only options are to either decrease the amount of devices in the current data center or to build

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Posted in Article

Faster VMAX and Isilon Performance

Another key theme coming out of EMC World Day 1 was a focus on providing a performance boost to EMC’s core storage platforms, beyond just adding solid state disk. The EMC Symmetrix family, the EMC VMAX, and their scale out NAS offering,

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Posted in Briefing Note

Highly Available Solid State Storage Performance

Getting the absolute maximum performance from Flash-based storage and providing shared access across multiple servers typically requires a solid state storage appliance. These systems are designed specifically to eliminate bottlenecks and latency to deliver extreme performance. However, most of these

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Posted in Product Analysis

The Storage Hypervisor

Flexibility is a key objective for many data centers. They want to respond to the needs of the business without having to slow the business down. Flexibility like this is a primary deliverable of server virtualization and one of the

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Posted in Article

Using Replication to Eliminate Virtualization Stall

Virtualization stall usually occurs in a server virtualization project when business-important or mission-critical servers are targeted for virtualization. There is risk associated with virtualizing these servers and this risk can cause IT managers to move slowly or put off their

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Posted in Article

Using NPIV to Optimize Server Virtualization’s Storage

Despite the economy, server virtualization rollouts continue unabated and in fact because of the economy there is increased pressure to optimize further the virtual infrastructure by increasing virtual machine density. This increased density puts additional pressure on an already strained

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Posted in Article