Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

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)

"Nirvanix was about a year ahead of everyone else in terms of what it could offer for enterprise cloud storage services." Making this claim is Fred Rodi, the CEO of DRFortress, who over the last year had to look ahead to determine which storage provider could best position DRFortress and it customers for the future of cloud storage. So when it came time for DRFortress to make the choice, Nirvanix was the hands down winner. (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)

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)

The introduction of the HP P10000 into the HP 3PAR line of storage systems about three (3) months ago firmly put 3PAR systems in the realm of high end, Tier 1 storage. But the new V400 and V800 models in the HP P10000 line do more than increase the available storage capacity and performance of existing 3PAR storage systems. They indicate that the mainframe-like requirements that enterprise data centers have for storage systems persist and that, in order for HP to keep up, it needed to introduce a high end storage system that possessed "Big Iron" like attributes to meet these growing storage cloud requirements. (read more)

According to IDC, revenue from external disk storage systems totaled over $18 billion in 2010. But what that IDC number does not fully reflect is the growing impact that midrange arrays are having on organizations of all sizes and how well they are positioned to deliver the other key feature that organizations now want in their virtualized environments: Reliability. Among the midrange arrays available, the new NEC M100 storage array is better positioned than most to deliver on these two features. (read more)

VMware will hit a tipping point with 2011 with VMware customers expected to cross the 50% virtualization threshold by the end of the year. But as VMware adoption accelerates, a hurdle that every organization faces as it looks to implement VMware vSphere is identifying a back-end storage system that delivers the appropriate levels of availability and performance at the right price point. Last week the new Symantec FileStore N8300 v5.7 with its new deduplication feature gave organizations a glimpse into how that may be accomplished. (read more)

More storage capacity, new options to configure storage capacity and a starting price point of under $2,000 -- that's the at-a-glance description of the newest Overland Storage model, SnapServer DX, available in a 1U and 2U form factors, SnapServer DX1 and SnapServer DX2, respectively. But what makes the new NAS/iSCSI SAN SnapServer DX so compelling is the increased flexibility that it offers to organizations to manage and scale, using the new DynamicRAID technology which contribute to eliminating the need for organizations to provision storage altogether. (read more)

Last week the DCIG team attended the Fall 2011 Storage Networking World (SNW) show in Orlando, FL. While there were a lot of cool storage companies, only two meetings left any kind of impression on me: one with IBM and another with SNIA. (read more)

No one ever gets every decision right the first time. In fact, most of us are lucky to get most of our decisions mostly right most of the time. Yet to date storage administrators have been forced to live in somewhat of an alternate universe where the expectation is that they plan and execute on storage allocations perfectly every time. (read more)

The number of storage arrays that have a starting price point under $5,000 has grown substantially in the last few years. But the adoption of these systems is being largely fueled by their low price point even as features such as availability, performance and scalability are in some way sacrificed. The one notable exception to this trend is the Gridstore GS-1000 which also offers this attractive entry-level price point but does not require SMBs to sacrifice any of these features. (read more)

In Q2 2010 DCIG released its first ever Buyer's Guide of any kind on the topic of Midrange Arrays. But in the year or so that has passed since the release of that Buyer's Guide, a seismic shift has occurred in terms of what users are looking for midrange arrays to deliver and storage capacity is no longer at the top of their list. Rather vSphere integration and storage intelligence have become their new hot buttons in terms of what they expect midrange arrays to deliver which is resulting in a shake-up in terms of which midrange arrays users should give top priority. (read more)

If you are a regular follower of the DCIG blog site you may have noticed that there has been a noticeable lack of blogging activity on DCIG's site this week. Unfortunately it is not because I have been taking a vacation, fishing or merely lounging by the lake. Rather I have been locked away in my office completing the background research associated with the upcoming release of the DCIG 2012 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide due out in the 4th quarter of 2011. Out of that some interesting early observations have emerged. (read more)

Over the past 15 or so months DCIG has released a multitude of Buyer's Guides on topics ranging from Midrange Arrays to Virtual Server Backup Software to Small Enterprise Storage Arrays to Midrange Array Snapshot Software. As DCIG has done so, it has learned a great deal about what it has done right and areas where it can improve. But the general feedback is that the Buyer's Guides provide users valuable insight into different technologies and help them understand the market landscape. So today DCIG is announcing the topics for its Buyer's Guides that it plans to release for the remainder of 2011 and the first half of 2012. (read more)

In 2010 the amount of digital information created in the world exceeded a zettabyte for the first time. Now, in 2011, enterprises have to deal with the reality of managing and storing that amount of data. As they do so, they are coming to the realization that the majority of that data may only be actively accessed for a short period of time. (read more)

Scale-out storage has become one of the most rapidly growing areas of storage as it enables organizations to easily and rapidly scale storage into the hundreds of terabytes (TBs) or even petabytes (PBs). But between expensive scale-out solutions intended for enterprises and economical, stand-alone NAS solutions that meet the needs of small businesses, small and midsize enterprises go begging for a storage solution that meets their specific needs and price points. It is this gap that the new Gridstore NASg solution fills. (read more)

Independence Day on July 4th in the United States is only a few days away but as it approaches storage companies are cautiously celebrating their independence. As they do they are either looking to survive or aggressively looking to be acquired to avoid becoming a footnote in the annals of history with Pillar Data Systems becoming the latest storage company to join the ranks of the acquired that now pledges its allegiance to a new master. (read more)

A few weeks ago a DCIG blog entry appeared that described the four emerging datacenter megatrends of the decade of the teens and how any new storage offering that expects to achieve "mega" success must satisfy those criteria. So it was in that context that I was evaluating the new Dell FS7500 at the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando, FL, in my conversations with Dell, other analysts and end users as well as in the demo that Dell provided me. (read more)

Here are the million and, in many cases, the multi-million dollar questions that every enterprise of almost any size or consequence is making or will be making now or in the next few years, "Are Dell and HP serious about enterprise storage?" Or are they inclined to treat storage as they have in the past - a bolt-on accessory to a server sale? (read more)

Companies that go from "Good" to "Great" do not get there by accident. They have what can only be considered the best employees, management, technology and support with a cohesive vision that aligns these factors while matching current industry trends. But even with all of those factors working in a company's favor, sometimes they need that extra intangible that motivates everyone to go the extra mile in the pursuit of perfection: a rival. In the case of NetApp, it feels that pressure from EMC to the point where it permeates the thinking of the entire company. (read more)

The recent outage at Amazon Web Services highlights an unpleasant reality of using cloud storage. Many organizations either mistakenly overlook or presume that the cloud storage services that all cloud providers deliver are the same when in fact they are not. (read more)

Block and file storage platforms are many times viewed by enterprises as mutually exclusive designed to solve very specific application workloads. But the lines between what data should reside on block and file-based storage platforms have begun to blur. To alleviate this uncertainty a new bond between these two storage platforms has emerged with providers delivering them as a single solution, the latest evidence of this being HP's qualification of its X9000 Network Storage System (IBRIX) for use with 3PAR Storage Systems via its X9300 Network Storage Gateway (read more)

As the economy rebounds, midsized companies looking to expand their business must usually first grow their datacenter. However datacenter growth introduces new levels of complexity that cast a long shadow over future business expansion as managing this technology can take the focus off of the business. The Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX400 server changes that model. (read more)

Today DCIG, LLC, and Foskett Services, LLC, are pleased to jointly announce the availability of an Expanded Edition of the DCIG 2011 Small Enterprise Storage Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 35 small enterprise storage array models priced from $5,000 - 30,000 from 19 different vendors. (read more)

About a year ago DCIG decided to do something completely different in the analyst space: a side-by-side independent comparison of products in a particular market segment in the form of a Buyer's Guide. The end result of that was the DCIG 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. But believe it or not, a year has already passed since that was produced and it is now time to update and refresh that Buyer's Guide for a number of reasons. (read more)