Blog Archives

Primary Storage for VMware on AWS – Zadara Briefing Note

Posted on April 8, 2019 by George Crump

VMware on AWS has been available for over a year, yet there are several missing elements. There are a lack of available data protection solutions and there is a lack of a truly enterprise class storage solution. The primary challenge…

Tagged with: AWS, Cloud, Copy Data, EBS, Hybrid, Object Storage, Replication, VM, VMware, VSAN, Zadara
Posted in Briefing Note

Hyperconverged 101 – Understanding the Components of HCI – Part 2 – Storage Software

Posted on April 4, 2019 by George Crump

In the last blog Storage Switzerland discussed the heart and soul of a Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the hypervisor. But a group of servers clustered via a hypervisor is not HCI, it is merely virtualization. For any virtualized environment to deliver…

Tagged with: Axellio, Cloud, HCI, Hybrid, Hybrid Cloud, Hyper-converged, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, SDN, SSD, Virtualization, VM, VMware, VSAN
Posted in Blog

Hyperconverged 101 – Understanding the Components of HCI – Part 1 Hypervisors

Posted on March 21, 2019 by George Crump

It is tempting for IT professionals to take a macro-view of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and let the vendor take care of all the details. The problem is the details matter, especially in HCI. The key HCI components for IT to…

Tagged with: Axellio, Cloud, HCI, Hybrid, Hybrid Cloud, Hyper-converged, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, IoT, NVMe, SDN, SSD, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Blog

What Can Storage Learn From Server Consolidation?

Posted on February 13, 2019 by George Crump

Storage consolidation projects are permanently on the IT project whiteboard. The process typically starts after IT realizes that their data center is overrun by multiple storage systems from multiple vendors. Storage Switzerland finds that most data centers have 5-6 different…

Tagged with: AI, Cloud, Compression, Consolidation, Deduplication, Hypervisor, Migration, ML, Object Storage, SDN, SDS, Software Defined Storage, StorONE, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Blog

Why is Traditional Storage Consolidation Failing

Posted on February 11, 2019 by George Crump

The most common method for consolidating storage is for the organization to purchase a single storage system, hardware, and software, and move all workloads to the new system. The organization is in effect creating a storage mainframe. The challenges with…

Tagged with: AI, Cloud, Compression, Consolidation, Deduplication, Hypervisor, Migration, ML, Object Storage, SDN, SDS, Software Defined Storage, StorONE, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Blog

Busting the NVMe Flash Myths

Posted on December 5, 2018 by George Crump

NVMe is the next wave of all-flash systems coming to market. These systems are fast, dense and scalable. They promise to fundamentally change the way IT designs storage architectures in support of existing applications, and they open up new possibilities…

Tagged with: Big data, Consolidation, Data Protection, Flash, Hybrid Cloud, IoT, Machine Learning, NFS, NVMe, NVMe-oF, SMB, Tegile, VMware, Western Digital
Posted in Blog

Have We Reached VMware Backup Parity?

Posted on December 3, 2018 by George Crump

There was a time not too long ago where the state of VMware backups was bad. It was so bad in fact that entirely new companies emerged to address the problem. These companies took the approach of ignoring the then…

Tagged with: Backup, Cloud, dr, DRaaS, Druva, Infrastructure, Migration, Replication, Virtualization, VM, VMware
Posted in Blog

Why SDN Should be Part of Your Cloud Strategy

Posted on November 7, 2018 by George Crump

Organizations are incorporating public cloud resources into their deployment strategies. The organization may have a cloud-first initiative, or it may use the cloud as determined by the workload but the reality is that an overwhelming number of organizations deploy in…

Tagged with: Big Switch, Cloud, Container, HCI, Hybrid, Hyper-V, Hyperconvergence, SDN, Virtualization, VM, VMware
Posted in Blog

A Collective Hive for HCI – Maxta MxIQ Briefing Note

Posted on November 6, 2018 by George Crump

Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) simplifies many things for busy IT professionals. As their environment grows, HCI automatically scales with it, adding performance and capacity with each additional node. However, an area where HCI falls short, along with many other storage systems,…

Tagged with: Cloud, HCI, Hyper-V, Hyperconverged, Hypervisor, Maxta, Migration, VDI, Virtualization, VM, VMware
Posted in Briefing Note

Re-setting the Bar for VMware Backups in the Cloud Era

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Krista Macomber

In a world where IT is scrutinized based on the bottom line, it’s easy to deprioritize disaster recovery. Building out, refreshing and managing a dedicated infrastructure for disaster recovery requires significant capex investment and compounds the already heavy burden of…