Entries categorized under “Grid Storage”

Today many enterprises and cloud storage providers ask, "What scale-out storage solution will enable us to economically and easily house our burgeoning Big Data stores?" However small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) put a slightly different spin on that same question by asking, "What scale-out storage system will enable us to affordably address our 'bigger data' problems?" SMEs are finding an answer to their question in the form of the Gridstore Scale-out Storage platform. (read more)

Server virtualization is creating new demands for ease and simplicity in managing and scaling storage capacity and performance that go well beyond what traditional single or dual controller storage systems can provide. But what organizations may fail to recognize is that even current scale-out storage systems may NOT be truly optimized to cost-effectively deliver the storage capacity and performance that virtualized environments require. This is the unique value proposition that Gridstore with its vController technology is well positioned to address. (read more)

In the last year or so a number of articles and blogs have appeared on the topic of inline and post-processing deduplication in an attempt to answer the question, "What is the best approach for deduplicating data during disk-based backup?" Unfortunately what these pieces fail to quantify is, "What objectives are enterprise organizations looking to accomplish with disk-based backup and recovery?" The problem this creates is that without first establishing these objectives, it makes it very difficult to arrive at any sort of meaningful conclusion about how to best proceed with deduplication. (read more)

The NEC HYDRAstor grid storage platform is best described as one that can evolve and grow on an as-needed basis while introducing newer technologies as they become available. Today's announcement continues to reinforce this compelling value proposition that the HYDRAstor platform delivers. In today's software release NEC improves HYDRAstor's performance, adds in-flight encryption to its replication feature and extends its support of application-aware deduplication to Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC NetWorker all at no extra charge to HYDRAstor users. (read more)

582,226. That's the number of individuals laid off at America's largest companies as of July 10, 2009, according to the Layoff Tracker on the Forbes website since November 1, 2008. And, depending on what date you are reading this blog, that number has probably gone up. But what this number can not quantify is how layoffs are forcing the individuals left behind within these Fortune 500 organizations to cope with increasing workloads and nowhere is that problem more acute than within IT. (read more)

Recently Kelly Polanski (another DCIG analyst) and I had a rather lengthy discussion about the value of keeping archive and backup data on disk versus tape long term. We were both in agreement that using disk in some form as an initial backup target makes sense in most environments but as we started to debate the merits of keeping data on disk versus tape long term, the issue can get more cloudy. While DCIG has previously argued that eDiscovery is becoming a more compelling reason to keep archive and/or backup data on disk long term, the concerns we had centered on the fact that some disk-based archival and backup storage systems can become as problematic as tape. (read more)

No one plans for "Domesday" scenarios because the thought is (a) if it does happen, I'll be gone anyway or (b) if it does happen, hopefully it won't happen on my watch so I will not be held accountable. But many organizations are unknowingly creating their own Domesday scenarios by selecting archiving products that take them down a path of technology obsolescence. One notable exception to this trend is Permabit with the Enterprise Archive solution which, with today's announcement of its new model 4010, demonstrates that archiving solutions and Domesday scenarios do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. (read more)

Cisco's bold move to enter the server market in mid-March was followed by the equally dramatic news just a couple of days later that IBM was allegedly in talks to acquire Sun. While Cisco's intentions to enter the server market have been rumored for some time, the news that IBM was allegedly in talks to acquire Sun caught many by surprise. Yet what makes both of these moves noteworthy is that they may signal a larger shift away from the traditional segmentation of server, network and storage vendors as it exists now and towards a single vendor providing all hardware and software in order to deliver a more holistic cloud computing offering. (read more)

Over the last few months DCIG has spent fair amount of time researching and documenting specific reasons why tape will not die. Green IT is the one reason we most often hear cited for retaining tape, though new disk-based deduplication and replication technologies coupled with new disk storage system designs that are based on grid storage architectures can offset some of those concerns. So before organizations think that after 30, 90 or 180 days that they should immediately move their archival and backup data, deduplicated or otherwise, from disk to tape just to save money, there are certain intangible savings from an eDiscovery perspective that keeping data on disk provides that are not always feasible on tape. (read more)

If you happened to attend any recent conferences or trade shows then you know that most of the discussions center on driving costs out of storage environments. In the current yo-yo economy we live in, most IT Directors are looking for new and unique ways to solve their storage dilemma as storage capacity continues to grow. One way enterprise IT organizations are tackling this problem is thru deduplication using a disk-based backup solution. Though this is definitely a good approach of tackling data growth and cost savings in the backup space, it does nothing to alleviate the burden of data growth on primary storage since backup solutions do not remove and archive aging production data. (read more)

Almost 3 years ago now, Robin Harris over at Storagemojo.com starting posting the list prices for different vendor's products so customers have at least a starting point when comparing product prices. Though I suspect the list prices associated with these vendors' offerings have changed since he originally posted some of them, what I specifically found remarkable is how difficult it is to ascertain what a deduplication solution will cost for an organization. The difficulty in pricing deduplication solutions had less to do with making sure you getting deduplication than making sure you include in your configuration all of the options that your environment needs, such as failover, NAS or VTL interfaces, data retention periods or replication, to effectively compare different solutions. (read more)

Innovation within the data center seems to be on the lips of IT managers, vendors, and analysts alike. Innovation, it is said, will pull us through this economic downturn even as organizations experience cutbacks in budgets, staff and just general doom and gloom. These innovations include maturing technologies such as virtualization, grid computing and deduplication coupled with management initiatives like consolidation, outsourcing and reduced expansion. These ensure organizations can continue to cut costs and stay on budget while creating more efficient data centers that are ready for whatever tomorrow brings. (read more)

It is common for users to tell me they are just going to add some SATA disk trays to their existing primary storage while others have said they are going to just purchase the cheapest possible JBOD system that they can. There are a couple of concerns I have with either of these two approaches. In these examples, they are way too focused on the short-term cost savings that JBOD offers and they fail to fully consider the protection and preservation of their archived data over the long-term. If enterprises really did not need the archived data, then they are better off directing their IT staff to just completely remove the data from their environment anyway. (read more)

Having managed multiple types of storage systems from multiple different storage vendors, there are two flaws that are common across many vendors' storage systems: the inability to transparently migrate data to subsequent generations of their own hardware and the inability to share administrative permissions with other like storage systems from that vendor. How acute this problem is depends on how many storage systems a company manages and how often it replaces them. However any administrator that is responsible for managing five, ten or more storage systems in today's enterprise corporations understands exactly what I am talking about. (read more)

For the vast majority of the IT Directors and CIOs one of the more elusive questions that that they need to answer is, "Will the useful life of the infrastructure I just acquired match up to my depreciation cycle?" This is a slippery financial slope that anyone in IT management has to constantly be concerned about. If the useful life estimate is three years of depreciation and the equipment lasts only two, then you and your company are stuck with an extra year of depreciation on the books, as well as an extra year of maintenance you didn't really need. Conversely, if it lasts four years, you end up depreciating too much up front and not extending the depreciation out over the appropriate period of time. (read more)

Companies sometimes assume that they must continue to use legacy archival techniques for retaining their critical intellectual property and business data. Based upon my experience, when developing new and more up-to-date archival strategies for organizations, tape and optical can no longer be viewed as the primary media for archival data. (read more)

NAS is sometimes viewed as a challenge by enterprise shops if their intent is to use it as a target for disk-based backup. Two reasons often cited is that there is only a finite amount of storage capacity available on NAS and backup software does not handle out-of-space conditions on file systems very well. This causes failures in backup jobs as well as performance bottlenecks when multiple backup jobs are occurring . The use of grid storage architectures in products like the NEC HYDRAstor are helping to put some of these concerns to rest and making NAS a more practical option for use as a target for disk-based backup in enterprise shops. (read more)

When I recently attended VMworld 2008, I had the opportunity to get a closer look at NEC's latest HYDRAstor release, the HS8-2000, and some of its features. Of course at a trade show all you generally have the time and opportunity to do is take a quick look at some of the product's hardware and software features. But in this case there was a feature on the HYDRAstor that struck me just from the short time I spent evaluating it: the ability to create a 256 petabyte (PB) or larger file system. (read more)

When you really look into the data that your organization is archiving, there is usually a good reason for the business to retain that data, otherwise why would it be archived at all? Placing that data on a system designed and built from the ground up to be an archival repository is probably a really good idea. (read more)

For most end-users the promise of a truly open archival system has been mostly out of reach. The proprietary approaches taken by storage vendors in the deployment of archival systems inside the hardware and application stacks has left users without a viable, standards-based archiving option. (read more)

The ease in which HYDRAstor's underlying grid storage architecture gives companies to migrate to higher capacity and faster performing hardware found in its new HS8-2000 make it easy to overlook some of its other new features. Part of the reason I devoted the last blog entry to HYDRAstor's self-evolving architecture is because I usually have to do just the opposite: educate readers about the advantages of upgrading to a new product so they can justify the pain of going through the migration. In HYDRAstor's case, it is so painless to upgrade and migrate to the new HS8-2000 release that it is almost easy to overlook its new features. (read more)

Cloud storage is generating a fair amount of interest in the press, among analysts, and even, to some degree, among the end-user community who actually store their data in the cloud. The big attraction of cloud storage is that it provides companies with an economical, always available pool of storage that they can use for their data storage needs while off-loading the task of storage management to a third party provider. On the surface, this sounds great. But companies really need to understand exactly what problems that they hope to solve using cloud storage and then only use it under those circumstances. (read more)

A self-evolving platform is one of the promises behind products like the NEC HYDRAstor that are based on grid storage architectures. Grid storage architectures automatically take over data migrations during technology refreshes which eliminates the need for application downtime or for companies to do forklift upgrades. Yet up to this point it was difficult to establish the validity of that promise for the NEC HYDRAstor since its HS8-1000 series was still in its first release. (read more)

Who is Omneon, Inc., and why should you care? Do not worry if you have not heard of them as I said the same thing to myself when the name was first mentioned to me because if you are not from the video and digital broadcasting industry, it's unlikely you have heard of them. So, I was interested to hear what its Senior Vice President of Products and Markets, Geoff Stedman, had to say about its product and why Omneon is making a push outside of its traditional storage niche. (read more)

Replication and deduplication are features that are fast becoming necessities when disk libraries are introduced into enterprise IT backup environments. But as I brought out in a previous blog entry, introducing multiple functions into disk libraries intended for enterprise caliber backup environments typically has some unpleasant trade-offs. A primary concern in enterprise IT shops is how large (or small) to initially configure the solution so companies neither overspend on oversized hardware nor purchase undersized hardware that cannot scale to meet their future requirements, so they need some way to forecast how their IT environment is going to look going forward. (read more)