Many industry observers estimate that the server infrastructure in a typical data center environment is approximately 50% virtualized. As virtual machine (VM) density increases, conventional storage platforms are wilting under the pressure of managing highly randomized storage IO patterns. Indeed,…
Blog Archives
The Value of Real Time Backup Health Assessment
Change is good…or is it? The sheer volume and velocity of changes taking place in IT environments today is staggering. While change may be good for business needs, if left unchecked, improperly managed changes within the backup environment could deal…
Tagged with: Backup, EMC, Hypervisor, Monitoring, Real Time, Recovery, SLA, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Article
Posted in Article
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…
Tagged with: Availability, Disaster recovery, Hyper-V, Multi-Hypervisor, Neverfail, RPO, RTO, Virtualization
Posted in Briefing Note
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…
Tagged with: Avamar, Changed Block Recovery, EMC, Recovery in Place, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Article
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,…
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…
Tagged with: Density, Nutanix, PCIe, RAM, ROI, SSD, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Article
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,…
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…
Tagged with: Flash, HA, RAID, Ramsan, Solid State, Texas Memory, Virtualization
Posted in Product Analysis
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…
Tagged with: Hypervisor, Primary Storage, Shortcoming, Thin provisioning, Virsto, Virtual machine, Virtualization
Posted in Article
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…
