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Storage Strategies NOW


"Deni Connor's extensive background spans multiple IT disciplines and enables her to provide actionable feedback and thorough analyses which benefits QLogic, our global channel partners and our customers. I highly recommend SSG-NOW as a cost-effective IT consultancy that delivers high impact results."

Steve Zivanic,
Senior Director, QLogic

"Deni is fearless. As a reporter she never failed to objectively cover the prickliest of issues. As an analyst, we expect her to be one of the best."

John Dix, editor in chief of Network World

"SSG-NOW provides deep market knowledge coupled with a strategic, yet pragmatic approach. Deni's technology understanding is well matched with the skepticism of a former reporter - she drills down to relevant questions and quickly assesses the viability of a strategy or technology from an end-user's perspective."

Ursula Talley, vice president of marketing, StoredIQ

"Storage Strategies NOW analysts are experts in data center and storage/server issues, always providing deep technology experience and objective, practical and timely analysis of products, technologies and industry direction."

Jay Kramer, vice president of worldwide marketing, SEPATON


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512.345.3850

info@ssg-now.com



Storage Strategies Now Snapshot Reports

Below is a list of our current Snapshot Reports

  • QLogic Stacks up Design Wins with Oracle’s Server and Storage Stack

    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
  • NextIO’s vCORE: Consolidates and optimizes GPU operations

    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
  • NextIO vSTOR Solid State Drive appliance

    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
  • StorageCraft Technology’s ShadowProtect 4: A study in enterprise data protection

    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
  • TwinStrata bridges the storage cloud chasm with intelligence

    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
  • SandForce™ Enterprise Solid State Drive Processor with DuraClass™ Technology

    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
  • Protecting Electronic Health Records and Imaging Data with SEPATON

    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
  • Improving disaster recovery with Virtual Tape Libraries in Mainframe Environments

    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
  • IBM’s System Storage™ TS7680 ProtecTIER® Deduplication Gateway for System z®: A mainframe powerhouse

    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
  • Data growth in HPC environments spurs need for ultra-dense tape/disk subsystems

    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
  • 3PAR’s Autonomic Groups: Provisioning storage rapidly

    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
  • Accelerated WAN-based backup and disaster recovery with Certeon’s aCelera Sync

    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
  • 3PAR’s new Inform operating system enables complete thin technologies

    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
  • Syncsort’s Backup Express

    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
  • QLogic bolsters Fibre Channel over Ethernet strategy with NetApp win

    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
  • StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect rises in SMB market

    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
  • 3PAR’s ASIC-enabled Thin Built In Technology

    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
  • Data growth in HPC environments spurs need for ultra-dense tape/disk subsystems

    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
  • QLogic’s 8100 Series Converged Network Adapters

    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
  • Pillar Axiom Application-Aware Storage Profiles

    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
  • Virtualization with ONStor Clustered NAS

    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
  • The IBRIX Customer Support Experience

    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
  • CommVault and Software-as-a-Service

    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