Entries categorized under “Data Center Management”

Identifying who the "best" individual is to handle backup and recovery within an organization has always been at best a crapshoot. The choice usually came down to some arbitrary evaluation of a person's education, experience, knowledge, skills and their willingness to perform the task which had mixed results. The customer education services, certification program and online learning portal now available from CommVault trains and equips individuals to perform backup and recovery so this task of identifying the "right" person to do the job is a far more quantifiable and defensible process than ever before. (read more)

About a decade ago, give or take a few years, a huge debate raged in the storage industry as to what was the best form of storage virtualization. However all that debate created over time was an equally large sense of fatigue with many people souring on the whole topic of storage virtualization. To resolve that, the term "storage virtualization" has been given a facelift at the 2013 EMC World and with it a politically correct name: Software Defined Storage - that is available from EMC as EMC ViPR. (read more)

The allure of client virtualization is the promise that it can deliver a robust corporate desktop experience to any user at any time or place using any device. The reality is that to date client virtualization deployments pretty much required rocket scientists to configure, implement and manage them, especially when it came to the underlying storage architectures upon which they are based. (read more)

The need of businesses for greater responsiveness from their IT departments is driving data center automation. Data center automation requires a new approach to network architecture that results in networks that are flat for high performance, multipath for high availability, and open to orchestration for quick provisioning and re-provisioning as application loads move within and among data centers. (read more)

A question that gets raised almost every time that DCIG releases a Buyer's Guide is, "Why are performance metrics not included in the Guide or considered in its evaluation of the products?" While DCIG has answered this question in various ways and in a number of forums over the last few years, we thought it appropriate to aggregate those randomly posted responses into a more definitive blog entry to address this particular question as it inevitably comes up. (read more)

Companies have spent billions if not tens of billions of dollars putting in place the necessary hardware and software to virtualize their data centers. These numbers fail to take into account the countless man hours that they have also spent planning, configuring and implementing these environments. Yet just as many are ready to take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of their labors, they are coming to the realization that virtualizing their environment and creating private or public clouds only laid the foundation for the real goal of data center automation. (read more)

As the last business day of 2012 it is time for DCIG to unveil its most read blog entries of 2012. While a few long time reader favorites remain in this year's Top 5, a couple of newcomers also made first time appearances on this year's list driven by what is likely growing user interest/concern in managing Big Data and doing eDiscovery across their unstructured data stores. (read more)

I have disclosed the blog entries that have earned an honorable mention on DCIG's website for the number of page views they received in 2012. I have also already revealed the Top 5 blog entries written in 2012 that were the most frequently read in 2012. So it is time today to begin to reveal the Top 10 most frequently viewed blog entries on DCIG's website in 2012 regardless of what year they were published, starting with numbers 6 - 10. (read more)

Over the last five (5) years Dell has invested around $10 billion to acquire a far ranging set of hardware and software companies to include Compellent, EqualLogic, ExaNet, Ocarina, Quest, SonicWALL and others in an effort to transform itself into an enterprise solutions provider. These acquisitions now made, people are beginning to rightfully ask of CEO Michael Dell, "When exactly can end-users expect to see an integrated end-to-end data center solution that is based on these acquisitions?" The precise answer to that question still eludes even him. (read more)

Delivering high availability (HA) to applications classified as "business critical" in recent years has been as much a technical obstacle as a financial one that organizations have struggled to overcome. The latest version of Symantec's Veritas Cluster Server addresses these concerns. Now any application running on either a physical or virtual machine may recover almost immediately to a virtual machine (VM) giving enterprises the high availability (HA) they have sought without the hardware costs or VM reboot wait times. (read more)

At this fall's Storage Networking World (SNW) 2012 I purposely kept my briefings and attendance at the keynote events to a minimum so I could catch up with a number of industry insiders and engineers in the field to get an unofficial look at the current state of the storage industry that rarely gets publicly reported. What I learned was that many commonly held perceptions about the storage industry may be in fact on shaky ground and should prompt users to closely examine their current and future storage plans. (read more)

As DCIG makes its final preparations for the release of its inaugural Purpose-Built Flash Memory Appliance Buyer's Guide, we have had a number of conversations internally about what the criteria for product inclusion and exclusion in this Buyer's Guide will be. As we do so, our conversation almost always turns to ways in which these purpose-built flash memory appliances will impact organizations and their decision making and buying habits. (read more)

In the week that has passed since VMworld 2012 ended, I have had some time to contemplate the best technologies announced or on display at the show. In reflecting on what I saw at the show and while constructing my short list of what I considered the "Top Two," it struck me that the premise upon which many of these technologies are based has changed. They are less about filling the gaps that VMware vSphere leaves. Instead they focus on capitalizing on the vSphere platform that VMware has built. (read more)

When I attended my first VMworld a few years ago the excitement at the event was palpable. One could almost hardly wait until the opening keynote or to go to another breakout session because everyone innately sensed that whatever they thought they knew about how computer and/or data management was done could change dramatically as a result of attending yet another session and you dared not miss it. Fortunately or unfortunately, that experience changed at this year's VMworld 2012 as its "Right Here, Right Now" theme implied. (read more)

Once the term "virtualization" overcame the stigma of being "evil", VMware was arguably the largest beneficiary of the corporate transition from the physical world to the virtual one. But as competing hypervisor platforms from Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat mature, VMware finds its status as king of the virtualization hill under assault with storage vendors publicly sharing they are seeing more customers implementing multi-hypervisor environments. Never one to be put on the defensive, VMware has since moved beyond being a "virtualization-only" provider and is positioning itself in a broader context: A software management solutions provider that can help bring about an end to the schizophrenic state of corporations. (read more)

Dell has made a number of acquisitions over the last few years as it seeks to transform into a storage company. But after attending Dell Storage Forum in Boston this past week it is evident that it is well down the path of becoming something far more compelling than just a "storage" company. It is on track to becoming an infrastructure company. (read more)

New found agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX and centralized IT infrastructure management are driving the adoption of private clouds. But as organizations enter them their dark side of management complexities becomes more plainly seen. This is where HP's heightened integration with Microsoft Systems Center 2012 with its Virtual Machine Manager component comes into play. (read more)

Enterprise shops are like their small and midsize counterparts in that they share a similar desire to speed up and simplify backups in their respective environments. However the techniques required to meet these demands requires the use of backup software that is more sophisticated beneath the surface, easier to use and reduces operational expenses (OPEX). The enhancements found in this week's release of Symantec NetBackup 7.5 strike a good balance in accomplishing those exact objectives. (read more)

Today is the last business day of 2011 and with it DCIG brings you our top most read and referenced blog entries. Each blog entry is compelling, yet timeless. What we find ironic about these blogs is that even as topics like "cloud," "deduplication," and "virtualization" generate a great deal of buzz, simple blog entries on storage, backup and data center labeling outperform them due to their foundations for IT leaders and practitioners. (read more)

Before DCIG announces its top three blog entries of 2011 tomorrow, this year we thought we would do something different and take a look at some other blog entries that garnered a great deal of attention throughout 2011 but not quite enough to reach the Top 10. That being the case, an honorable mention for these blog entries was in order. Further, what is notable about these entries is that, with the exception of one, they were all published in 2011. (read more)

Today I continue to reveal the Top 10 most read blog entries on DCIG's website in 2011 with these four (4) entries typifying the two extremes of topics that DCIG's readers tend to read the most. At one end of the spectrum are two forward looking blog entries on topics that every organization are examining now: the cloud and virtual server backup. At the other end of the spectrum are two older blog entries on the topics of cable labeling and encryption for which organizations continue to need relevant information. (read more)

In the product and investing world, $1 billion dollars is interesting. Interesting markets draw new and existing companies. Derrick Harris of Gigaom believes Amazon's latest filing indicates they will have exceeded $1 billion dollars in revenue for Amazon Web Services by year end. $1 billion dollars creates a lot of interest by existing and venture backed product companies. (read more)

Early in October I wrote a somewhat disparaging blog entry about my initial impressions of the iPad that I had just purchased. Since then my perceptions and opinions about the iPad have changed significantly. The most notable change has been in my understanding of what problems the iPad was designed to solve. Rather than it being designed as a product to generate information, it is designed to consume and manipulate it. (read more)

IBM briefed DCIG on the details around its October Active Cloud Engine product announcement on Wednesday, November 16, of this past week. The briefing covered three functional areas, two products, one statement of direction and ironically nothing about the cloud. However, IBM deserves kudos for making a big change to its scale out NAS (SONAS) product during its Active Cloud Engine product announcement. (read more)

Virtualization is sweeping through data centers of all sizes and, as it does, it introduces levels of complexity that organizations are ill-equipped to handle. To mitigate this, reference architectures are emerging as a technique to standardize which hardware and software are deployed, under what circumstances, and how it is managed. (read more)