Storage Strategies Now Snapshot Reports
Below is a list of our current Snapshot Reports
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StorageCraft has built a major market share in small and medium business data protection through its focus on managed service providers (MSPs) as the channel to address the enormous number of companies and organizations in this category. StorageCraft for years has provided an internet MSP Portal for product distribution, registration, updates and support. Now the portal becomes the onramp to StorageCraft’s Cloud Service that adds the dimension of instant disaster recovery using cloud-based backup images to the MSP portfolio, along with recurring high-margin revenue. Published on Monday, January 7th, 2013 | Deni Connor
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The virtualization and consolidation of business-critical applications is a high priority for IT operations in organizations of all sizes. But the owners of these applications often balk at virtualization because of a set of unknowns that surround the loss of dedicated server hardware. The truth is that applications perform differently in a virtualized environment as opposed to dedicated server hardware. Virtualization causes contention for shared storage resources and the performance of formerly well-behaved applications can become unpredictable. When performance becomes erratic and response times suffer, users grumble and application owners want their physical machines back. Storage equipment outages for routine maintenance, upgrades and expansion compound the problem because many virtual machines rely on those same resources. Published on Friday, October 19th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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The popularity of VMware virtualization is its own best enemy, at least that’s what many IT administrators would say. Virtualizing physical machines with VMware is so easy that even the most inexperienced IT administrator or staff can do it. Virtual machines pop up in the most unexpected places as test/dev machines, for use with production data or for whatever is the whimsy of the creator. This sprawl of virtual machines of varying configuration and deployment causes many a headache for the IT administrator, the person charged with provisioning, managing and most importantly, protecting and being able to recover the virtual machine environment. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Persistent 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 13th, 2012 | 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, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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It’s been nearly a year since a group of storage vendors including Cisco, EMC, Nuova Systems, QLogic and several others proposed a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard to the ANSI T11 standards committee. Since then, enterprise organizations have been giving serious consideration to FCoE for its ability to ramp up data center performance, rein in excessive cable management in storage area networks (SANs) and deliver overall improvements to virtualized environments. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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All‐flash memory storage arrays began appearing two years ago as the need for high‐performing storage to feed the latest generation of servers became apparent. Early adopters were willing to overlook the lack of software features compared to their existing high‐end SAN arrays and NAS filers in exchange for the sheer speed delivered by solid‐state appliances. While often expensive on a cost per GB basis, limited in scalability, and usually implying a high cost single point of failure, these systems
provided a cost advantage in two important areas.
Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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The need to reduce batch 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Demand for NAS devices is surging because of the growth factors involving unstructured data, virtualization and big data. While Linux and Unix are the favored environments for appliance manufacturers, the new requirements of future Windows operating systems for Server Message Block (SMB) 2.2 represent a major challenge for developers. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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For many companies the growth in the volume of data is greater than their ability to effectively and efficiently store it and manage it. Recent studies indicate that enterprise demand for primary data storage capacity is growing at a rate of 35% to 65% annually.1 Much of that data, as much as 80% in some organizations, is comprised of unstructured data -- files, spreadsheets and multiple data types (e.g. CAD, engineering data, PDFs, etc.) -- that are traditionally stored on network attached storage (NAS) devices and file servers. And that unstructured data is projected to grow at a rate of over 60% this year alone. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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TwinStrata’s introduction of CloudArray™ software to enable integration between business applications and on- or off-premise cloud storage marks one of the first real-world business implementations of cloud-enabled storage. CloudArray provides the look, feel and performance of local storage to the cloud with enhanced availability, security and agility. With CloudArray, companies can easily and quickly implement a variety of solutions such as disaster recovery (DR), data replication, backup / restore, data and application mobility, archiving and many more. Enabling the storage cloud for companies reduces the amount of on-premise infrastructure needed to accommodate business and rapid data growth and thereby reduces the capital required for expansion. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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 Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | 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). Small and mid-sized businesses without dedicated IT staffs and distributed enterprises with remote or branch offices are also turning to SaaS in an effort to simplify their infrastructures by offloading services such as backup and recovery, migration, replication and archiving to managed service or hosting providers. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Much attention has been placed on the importance of off-site storage of critical data in the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market. Once, and for many organizations still today, this meant carting a bundle of tapes to an offsite storage facility and, in the case of a disaster or other need to access the prior versions, finding the right tapes and carting them back. In the last few years the role of cloud storage has increasingly played the role of this off-site repository. With the success of consumer and single office and home office products with public cloud backup offerings, Zetta.net has assessed the requirements of the small to medium enterprise (SME) market and has completely redeveloped its offerings to address SME needs, including security, backup time, management and most important, recovery time. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Dot Hill has until now done business privately – they’ve OEMed and private-labeled products to some of the industry’s largest storage players. That is changing as the company has expanded its channel to IT customers and resellers. The company’s mid-range and entry-level storage arrays and JBODs are gaining mindshare in the storage market, primarily in businesses who are sensitive to price and performance. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Virtualization of server and client workloads has been growing dramatically in recent years with a tipping point reached in 2010 when virtual machines exceeded the number of physical servers.In fact, 69% of host workloads are predicted to be virtualized by 2013 and 75% of enterprises have client virtualization projects planned for the coming twelve months. Despite this growth, challenges remain with the specifics of hardware and software integration and the right-sizing of configurations for a given deployment . With differing requirements for software and hardware implementations, customers want more than reference architectures. They want to order a qualified configuration that includes operating systems, virtualization software, servers, storage systems, switching fabric, racking, cabling, installation and support from a single vendor with one throat to choke. And while some vendors can offer this on a huge, expensive platform that is cobbled together with server, networking and storage gear from different vendors, they still have limited choices regarding the virtualization software and operating systems that are used. This all adds up to complexities and delays for IT organizations that need to deliver more services with fewer resources and need scalable solutions to accelerate cloud deployment and application delivery. Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | Deni Connor
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Ask any Dell Compellent Copilot Support user about their experience with Dell’s support tool and they will tell you the same thing – that Copilot is second to none for product support. (SSG-NOW) interviewed several users of Copilot Support who told us that many times they don’t even know that problems with their Dell Compellent Storage Center SANs existed and only learned about them when new drives or parts arrived on their doorsteps. They also related that Copilot was the deciding factor in their buying a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN. Read on to hear of some of their experiences.
Published on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 | admin
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Data is growing in leaps and bounds and the quantity of data that needs to be stored is causing problems for IT managers, who fear that they won’t be able to meet backup windows or may lose data because of faulty or ill-designed backup processes. To accommodate this data growth, IT managers must make investments in more storage capacity, dedicate more floor space and energy consumption to it, and spend more money and time managing it, all with continually constrained budgets. Published on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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QLogic has expanded its fabric offerings with a new family of converged network adapters, switches and intelligent storage routers that define flexibility and interoperability. The FlexSuite Dual-personality PCIe Gen3 Adapters support either Fibre Channel or Ethernet connectivity. Universal Access Point 5900 Series Converged switches offer new levels of density and multi-protocol flexibility with any port configurable as either Fibre Channel or Ethernet, and the Intelligent Storage Routers provide multiprotocol data migration solutions and unified storage connectivity and interoperate with all storage vendors’ arrays. Published on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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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. As part of making the deal, NetApp required a single integrated chip design to simplify power, space and cooling requirements in both host computers and target arrays and QLogic met the company’s specific requirements. Today’s news also marks the fact that NetApp is the first storage vendor to offer native FCoE connectivity based on a single chip architecture, and the first vendor to offer an end-to-end FCoE SAN solution, covering storage systems, hosts and FCoE switches. The company will rebrand QLogic’s 8152 adapter as the NetApp Unified Target Adapter when it is used in NetApp storage systems and as the QLogic Converged Network Adapter when used in host computers. Published on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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Consolidation of IT datacenter infrastructure is happening in all forms. IT administrators have consolidated servers with virtualization technology from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix and have reaped significant cost and operational benefits. They’ve consolidated their storage infrastructures with virtualization software and hardware. Now, IT is eyeing the consolidation of their network fabrics, concentrating on implementing a single converged fabric and dispensing with separate networks for LAN, SAN and high-performance interprocess communications (IPC) traffic. Convergence offers the promise of: fewer network adapters (HBAs, NICs and HCAs) installed in servers; reduced network cabling; fewer fabric switches (FC, Ethernet, and InfiniBand); reduced datacenter footprint; streamlined management; and, decreased energy consumption. Published on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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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 Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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Actifio is introducing a radical new approach to data protection and management that virtualizes data and deals out instant virtual copies of data to their data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity applications. The Actifio system, termed Protection and Availability Storage, is indeed unique, being the first data protection solution that reduces the number of copies of data made to support an organization’s
infrastructure.
Published on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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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 Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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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 Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | admin
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[...] Published on Wednesday, January 11th, 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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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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Welcome to the Summer 2010 issue of the SSD Flash. Due to scheduling of releases of new products that we wanted to cover, the issue has been delayed somewhat but includes some recent market entries that are very interesting.
Published on Friday, November 19th, 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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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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The first month of the second calendar quarter of 2010 produced so much solid state drive (SSD) news that we were stressed to cover the briefings. A year ago it was hard to find a purpose-built appliance that used SSDs in any way. Today, it’s hard to find a new appliance that doesn’t have SSD as a critical, integrated component. In this issue we include a recap of the April Storage Networking World (SNW) conference, which was heavily attended by end-users who were there to learn the latest information about SSDs and cloud storage. Indicative of the rebound in storage purchasing, most Q1 2010 financial reporting from publicly traded companies have shown dramatic year-to-year performance as well as good sequential earnings. While several companies have been punished for being conservative about futures, we are very encouraged by the overall performance during calendar Q1.
Published on Wednesday, May 12th, 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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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 predicted, the first quarter of 2010 is shaping up to be a major milestone in the solid state business. The big surprise was Intel-Micron’s 25 nanometer foundry demonstration. Readers of The SSD-FLASH know that we must use acronyms and code words for the various interfaces (Serial ATA [SATA], Serial Attached SCSI [SAS], iSCSI, Fibre Channel, PCIe, et al.) to describe and classify the many end products being developed using solid state memory technology. So we have included a brief description, along with some historic trivia and trade-offs, about each of these interfaces in this issue. In order to keep the information concise, we are just using the acronyms, so please refer to the article describing them in this and future issues. Published on Monday, February 1st, 2010 | Jim Bagley
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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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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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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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In recent briefings with solid state drive (SSD) component and appliance manufacturers, there remains a significant divide between strategies aimed at dealing with the problem, within NAND flash, generally referred to as ‘write amplification.’ NAND devices require an entire block to be erased and re-written, even if only one byte is updated. Since this is a time-consuming process, and SSD’s are built for speed, two basic strategies exist in order to deal with the problem. Published on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | Jim Bagley
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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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When EMC became the first storage vendor to announce support for solid state drives over a year ago, the company didn’t say what software they had that would migrate business-critical data into and out of the newest Tier 0 cache. It wasn’t until April of this year, that EMC introduced its Fully Automated Storage Tiering Tool (FAST), which automatically moves data among storage tiers based on policies, predictive analysis and access patterns. The company’s only problem – FAST won’t be available until sometime in the second half of this year and full FAST implementation won’t be available until 2010. Published on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | Jim Bagley
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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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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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