Storage Strategies Now Snapshot Reports
Below is a list of our current Snapshot Reports
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[...] Published on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 | Deni Connor
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[...] Published on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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[...] Published on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 | Deni Connor
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[...] Published on Monday, November 28th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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[...] Published on Monday, November 7th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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[...] Published on Monday, November 7th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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Recently, SSG-NOW tested the Drobo B800i, an iSCSI SAN for small and mid-sized businesses. By way of background, Drobo, formerly Data Robotics (http://www.drobo.com), makes a family of multi-drive external storage devices for both servers and workstations under the Drobo brand name. Drobo devices have between four and twelve drive bays and, depending on model, support USB (2.0v and 3.), FireWire 800, gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI connections. All units use SATA drives, which are hot-swappable. Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology (described below) allows drives to be added, swapped or even removed as needed, and drive of differing sizes can be used. Depending on configuration, the number and capacity of installed drives, a Drobo unit can survive a failure or removal of either one or two drives concurrently. After a drive failure, the Drobo will reconfigure itself to return to a protected state. After reconfiguration, given sufficient disk space, a Drobo could survive another drive failure or removal even if the previously-failed had not been replaced. As capacity requirements grow, smaller drives can be replaced with larger drives. All Drobo devices support standard 3.5" SATA drives of any capacity, including 3TB drives. As larger drives are available they should be supported, as well. The Drobo drive bays accept bare, carrier-less drives. A lever at the bottom of each bay ejects a drive or allows a drive to be quickly and easily installed. LEDs on the front of the Drobo show the status of the array and each drive. Published on Monday, July 18th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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Persistant hardware is a promise made by many storage systems, but Compellent has delivered a best case scenario in its latest hardware release – a truly refreshing alternative to the typical forklift upgrade that is the industry norm. Compellent customers have the advantage of being able to run the latest software on their existing systems, and the Storage Center 5.4 software release maintains this compatibility, while the new hardware provides scalability, performance, improved drive density and converged network support. In addition, the 5.4 release integrates Live Volume for virtualized migration and continuous optimization in high availability and cloud environments.
Published on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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Performance analysis should be left to the protocol experts -- that is the belief of many, but it isn't necessarily true. The analysis of performance of network attached storage (NAS) systems running the Network File System (NFS) can be intimidating except for a new service from CopperEgg called RevealStorage, which is targeted for use by IT managers and sysadmins. Published on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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LSI MegaRAID controllers based on SAS technology have established a high standard for performance since their first SAS RAID card introduction in 2005. Now it looks like LSI may be changing the game in host-based RAID. LSI appears to have rewritten the performance equation, not just for storage, but for the entire system with its recently announced MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i and 9285-8e 6Gbs/s controllers, and based on the company’s performance numbers, the IT community around the world should take note. Published on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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Riverbed’s Whitewater appliances provide enterprises with many choices when it comes to cloud storage providers. The recent addition of the Nirvanix CloudComplete portfolio of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions provides turnkey access to cloud storage that was purpose-built for enterprise requirements. Nirvanix operates seven globally positioned data centers that are accessed as a single namespace, meaning that no matter where you upload or download a file from, it always appears as the same file. When you upload a file, even before it’s replicated to other nodes, it’s immediately available by redirecting the user to the node where the file exists. If a file exists in three nodes but is only updated in one node, Nirvanix software will update the file across all three nodes automatically, ensuring that only the most current content is accessed.
Published on Saturday, April 9th, 2011 | Deni Connor
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QLogic recently announced a new partnership with Avaya to provide its ‘Bullet’ 10GbE converged network switching technology for Avaya’s Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA). Published on Monday, November 22nd, 2010 | Deni Connor
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QLogic’s recent launch of its third-generation converged network adapters, dubbed 3GCNA, is important in that it builds upon the company’s first place market share in 10GbE Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) CNAs and a second place finish behind market leader Intel for 10GbE NICs.
Published on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Geminare, an emerging strength in the Recovery as a Service (RaaS) market, is bolstering its capabilities with new cloud-based services called Cloud Recovery and Cloud Storage Assurance that are targeted at small and mid-sized enterprises.
Published on Monday, September 13th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Geminare, an emerging strength in the Recovery as a Service (RaaS) market, is bolstering its channel-only partner program for managed service providers, value-added resellers and OEMs with new cloud-based services called Cloud Recovery and Cloud Storage Assurance that are targeted at small and mid-sized enterprises. Published on Friday, September 10th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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QLogic’s converged network adapters have stacked up another design win with the selection by Oracle for their exclusive use in the company’s Oracle SPARC-based and x64 servers.
Specifically, QLogic’s single-chip 8100 Series CNAs will be used in Oracle SPARC M Series enterprise, Oracle SPARC T Series entry and mid-range and Oracle x64 (x86-64) platform servers, where they will speed I/O performance and provide connectivity to Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI fabrics. Published on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Originally used for 3D gaming acceleration, GPUs have now come to the forefront of use for scientific computing, financial services’ Monte Carlo simulations, oil and gas exploration and pattern recognition, among other applications – all embarrassing parallel workloads involving very large datasets and calling for floating point operations – that can be broken down into parallel processes and thus, saving organizations time and money. Published on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Virtualization of input-output makes it possible to share the latest generation of PCIe-based solid state drives (SSDs) between servers via dynamic reallocation of the I/O resources. NextIO has developed a bus-switching technology that provides a new level of flexibility for I/O device reconfiguration within a rack or adjacent racks. The advent of PCIe-based solid state drives from several manufacturers gives NextIO the ability to take advantage of the competition in this area and provides a unique value proposition for sharing these relatively expensive devices (on a price per GB) across a server pool. The result is an extremely high performing storage array at a price-performance level that is only going to improve over time as new PCIe products enter the market and take advantage of new SSD advances.
Published on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 | Deni Connor
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New server virtualization and quick server recovery features introduced
By Deni Connor
Principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW
April 2010
Protecting your organization’s most valuable assets – your data – should be a priority for any business. Whether those data assets are stored on physical or virtual servers or desktop PCs in your environment, it is important to be able to not only back this equipment up, but to recover it as well in the event of a disaster or server failure.
StorageCraft’s introduction of new versions of its data protection software -- ShadowProtect Server4, ShadowProtect Small Business Server 4, ShadowProtect Desktop 4 and ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise 4-- this month is focused on rapid server recovery, server virtualization and an enhanced management interface – each an enhancement that will help an IT administrator to better manage and protect the physical and virtual machines in his environment.
Published on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Adoption of cloud storage services is increasingly desirable for organizations of all sizes. A pay-as-you-go model makes sense rather than heavy capital expenditures on storage systems that won’t fill up immediately or which reach capacity too fast: storage systems that can scale up and down according to business needs rather than a pool of underutilized storage resources draining a company of data center floor-space, power and cooling. Let’s face it, storage systems are costly to acquire, maintain and expand. In the previous few years, company IT infrastructures have been constrained at best, having flat to modest IT budgets. Today, we are seeing companies face expensive technology refreshes in a still uncertain economy. In a world where storage requirements continue to double every year or two, many organizations are now looking for alternative solutions and the cloud is becoming more appealing. With the introduction of cloud storage enablement solutions for accessing the storage cloud’s affordable and dynamic resource - and its ability to seamlessly integrate with many front-line business applications, deployment of cloud storage now becomes possible. Secondary data, associated with applications such as data protection, archiving, disaster recovery and daily data management operations become an ideal match with the storage cloud. Mid-sized organizations, many cash-strapped and with minimum IT staffs, would like to adopt a cloud strategy but run into implementation roadblocks.
TwinStrata is bringing to market a software solution with enterprise-class storage features that makes cloud storage transparent to the customer’s applications, hardware and systems - leaping the biggest single barrier to cloud storage use – easy to implement access to cloud services.
Published on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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The Billion Dollar Bet is when (not if) Solid State Drives (SSDs) will be the primary high speed storage in enterprise and mobile computer applications. SandForce has moved that date much closer than conventional wisdom would predict. Published on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Backing up and protecting your electronically protected health information (EPHI) and medical imaging data is paramount for IT administrators intent on complying with the mandates of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and receiving the latest incentives available from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Published on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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Recovering from disasters is an arduous process for mainframe data center managers who rely on tape-based backup jobs – it’s a process often fraught with the fallibility of tape -- media errors, time-consuming tape mounting, security risks caused by data loss and the timely and costly retrieval of data from off-site locations. Companies’ recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) must synch with the technology they use for protecting their mainframe data and with how they manage their off-site disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity operations. Published on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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The need to extend processing windows, allow for rapidly increasing data growth and provide higher reliability top the list of data protection challenges that IT managers are facing. A new storage system from IBM solves these issues with a system designed to simplify tape processing operation and improve tape application performance with high-speed inline data deduplication. Published on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 | Deni Connor
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As the amount of data that needs to be stored and retained grows from terabytes to multiple petabytes in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, IT administrators and data center managers increasingly require ultra-dense, scalable storage systems in order to ensure they will have enough capacity to keep data online and available years into the future. Published on Monday, December 7th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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When 3PAR introduced the InServ Storage Server in 2002, they incorporated the concept of rapid provisioning for storage administrators into the InForm operating system. Now, with the release of InForm OS 2.3.1, 3PAR is introducing Autonomic Groups, a means of automating the provisioning of storage. Published on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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Implementing data protection applications and disaster recovery across a wide-area network (WAN) can be fraught with obstacles such as latency, low bandwidth, network contention, out of order packets and packet loss that interfere with an organization’s efforts to meet recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO). Published on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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When you consider implementing thin provisioning for storage, it’s not as easy as simply checking a box on an RFP, it’s more than that as 3PAR's InServ storage system and the newest release of its InForm operating system have proven. For 3PAR, thin provisioning is the ability -- without administrative overhead -- to allocate virtual volumes once -- and autonomically consume physical capacity for written data. It lets IT administrators meet capacity requirements, support multiple service levels and drive efficiencies in the data center. Published on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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Every organization relies on the integrity of data for sustaining its business. If that information is lost, the likelihood of the business’ survival decreases dramatically -- one estimate claims that 7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within one year. It behooves any organization to protect the data stored on its networks from failures, corruption and loss -- and to do so as quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. While there are many data protection solutions on the market that backup and protect data, there are a few like Syncsort’s Backup Express, which also provide bare metal restoration of servers, snapshot capability and virtual machine provisioning. Published on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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QLogic this month bolstered its end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) strategy with the announcement that NetApp has signed an agreement to incorporate QLogic's converged network adapters (CNAs) into the company's storage systems. The agreement is significant because NetApp will work with QLogic exclusively on native FCoE connectivity for all of its NetApp storage arrays -- the FAS3000, 3100, 6000 and 2050 Series arrays and the company's V Series storage controllers -- and that NetApp will primarily recommend the QLogic 8100 Series CNAs for FCoE server connectivity. Published on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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StorageCraft of Draper, Utah, is bolstering the sales of its ShadowProtect data protection and disaster recovery and system migration products with a new program and products for managed service providers (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) that will not only increase their business opportunities but their chances of engaging customers. Published on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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3PAR’s introduction of its midrange F-Class InServ Storage Server underscores the value of its third-generation Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), which enables the company’s ‘thin’ storage technologies. These storage technologies are called ‘Thin Built In’ because they are incorporated into the ASIC and not as separately deployable software. The 3Gen ASIC, which is also used in 3PAR’s high-end modular T-Class arrays, features thin persistence, automated mixed workload support, Fast RAID 5 data protection and adaptive caching to make the 3PAR InServ Storage Servers some of the most adaptable, high-performance and scalable storage systems in the industry. Published on Friday, June 19th, 2009 | admin
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As the amount of data that needs to be stored and retained grows from terabytes to petabytes in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, IT administrators and data center managers increasingly require ultra-dense, scalable storage systems in order to ensure they will have enough online capacity to make keep data online and available years into the future. Published on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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Rarely does a product or technology make as much simple sense. But that is exactly what QLogic’s announcement of the QLogic 8100 Series Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) does -- it makes simple sense – whether products such as the QLogic 8100 Series of CNAs are used to consolidate the data center infrastructure, reduce cabling and switch ports, simplify management or save on power consumption – all while protecting existing data center investments and reducing total cost of ownership. Published on Friday, March 27th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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It is no longer good enough to buy storage arrays of differing types and drive configurations to support separate applications. Because of budget restraints and constraints on physical floor space, it doesn’t make sense to buy a Fibre Channel array to host business-critical, transaction-oriented OLTP applications, a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance to support file sharing and a separate Fibre Channel array or NAS appliance to support the virtualized servers in your mid-sized or enterprise environment. Published on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 | Deni Connor
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Virtualization of file services using ONStor clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems and gateways lets enterprise datacenter customers leverage their existing storage investments, meet service level agreements and boost their operational efficiencies, cost-effectively. Published on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 | Deni Connor
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Providing quality customer support is one of the thorniest issues vendors face. Getting systems up and running, making operating system and other software upgrades, resolving problems with misbehaving software, or fixing equipment failures is easy for some vendors and increasingly hard for others. Published on Monday, March 17th, 2008 | Deni Connor
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The software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is white hot as enterprise-size customers scramble to reduce their IT staffing costs and maintenance of applications, as well as meet exponential data growth and existing service-level agreements (SLAs). Published on Monday, March 17th, 2008 | Deni Connor
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