Entries categorized under “Networked Storage”

DCIG is very excited to today announce the availability of a comprehensive Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 70 midrange arrays from more than 20 different storage providers. But the reason that DCIG believes users will find this guide so helpful is that it was written and prepared from a user's perspective while fully disclosing what factors it did and did not take into consideration when arriving at its weightings. (read more)

I started this blog entry last week while I was in attendance at Compellent's C-Drive. However it was only last night as I was flying to Boston to attend EMC World that I had the opportunity to wrap it up. The specific items on my mind that I wanted to highlight in this blog were two emerging technology trends that came into sharper focus while I was in attendance at C-Drive. (read more)

This week I am spending a couple of days at Compellent's annual C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN where about 500 users, value added resellers (VARs) and Compellent sales reps are in attendance. Since a couple of years have passed since I attended the last one, I thought I would make the 6-hour drive from Omaha to Minneapolis to catch up on the latest going-ons with Compellent and gain some insight as to how they plan to recoup after their latest earnings stumble. (read more)

The date for the release of the DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is rapidly approaching (the week of May 10th) and people are already asking me, "What makes this report so different from everything else on the market?" Well, it's very simple. An analyst firm is for the first taking a comprehensive look at the litany of available midrange arrays on the market and is then scoring them, ranking them, releasing the results and then putting their name next to the results. Further, this is all being done independently and without a storage provider paying to guarantee the outcome of the report. (read more)

Over the next few years IT managers face entirely new sets of challenges when it comes to managing storage. These challenges go well beyond just buying enough storage capacity to keep up with data growth. Instead IT managers need to come up with entirely new storage management strategies that enable them to more effectively and efficiently manage storage such that they can meet their application requirements while at the same time keeping their costs and risks in check. (read more)

Today's blog entry comes out of some recent conversations that I have had with end users in the small and midsized business (SMB) space. Some common themes about how these individuals want to scale their storage solution are beginning to emerge and they strike a different tone than what individuals in the small, midsized and large enterprise space have to say. In short, they want to control their storage growth at a much more granular level and they do not want to be penalized for having that level of control. (read more)

Call them what you will - private storage clouds; distributed, shared file systems; or file system platforms - the bottom line is that these deliver what many companies now want more than ever: cost-effective, easy to manage and easy to deploy storage solutions for their burgeoning data stores. But this is where the similarities can end as the differences between them can be significant, especially when it comes to the abilities of these storage systems to perform and scale. It is these specific concerns that the new HyperFS™ file system from FalconStor is intended to address. (read more)

Back in early February I wrote a blog that announced that I was going to resume writing technology reports similar to what I used to write for Storage magazine a few years ago. After some deliberation, I decided to focus the first one on midrange arrays. Since then questionnaires have been mailed out to storage providers, completed by them and their responses tabulated, weighted and scored. This means that DCIG is getting close to announcing how all of the different midrange array models from the various providers were scored and ranked. (read more)

The maturing and proven high availability and reliability features in NFS v4 clear the way for organizations to introduce more cost-effective, easier to manage NAS solutions from NetApp into their data centers for use by their mission-critical applications. (read more)

Software-only providers of private storage cloud solutions are quick to point out the value of using only software to build a private storage cloud solution. Enterprises can select any storage provider's hardware, they have more flexibility in how they scale out the solution and they can create competitive situations where hardware providers compete to provide servers, storage and networking gear. But other intangible factors also come into play that requires enterprises to carefully consider what private storage cloud software solution they select. (read more)

Last week I blogged about the issues that were top of mind with users who were in attendance at the quarterly Omaha VMware Users Group (VMUG) meeting. Those challenges specifically included data protection, I/O bottlenecks and iSCSI SANs but notice that their issues can largely be traced back to an ineffective storage management strategy as the root of their issues. (read more)

Going into the Omaha VMUG meeting, I was expecting to find maybe 40 - 60 users in attendance. However upon my arrival I found a steady stream of cars pulling into the parking lot, over 200 users registered to attend and I counted more than 150 people physically present at the event. So anyone who still doubts the impact virtualization is having on organizations need question no more. (read more)

Since EMC acquired Iomega about two years ago, the range of new features that customers can find as standard on Iomega's StorCenter™ lineup of network attached storage (NAS) products continues to grow. One of the more exciting additions is the new replication feature which gives small businesses new found flexibility to protect and recover their data at alternate locations. But like with any replication software, there are some "Do's" and "Don'ts" associated with properly using it. (read more)

A blog that I wrote back in January 2010 argued that enterprise data centers need to select a private storage cloud solution that can compete against the likes of Google and Amazon. But it was only last week that an individual posted a comment in response to that blog that asked, "Why would the enterprise data center 'compete' with Amazon or Google?" It was a good question and, to answer that, enterprise data centers need to quantify what exactly it is within Amazon and Google's offerings that they really compete against. (read more)

Cloud storage is generally broken out into two broad classifications: public storage clouds and private storage clouds. But as cloud storage technologies continue to mature, it is quickly becoming evident that these two categorizations are insufficient. Recent offerings from providers like 3PAR, EMC and IBM demonstrate that a new cloud storage tier is emerging. This tier extends the benefits of cloud storage up the application stack so that data center applications can also take advantage of the cloud storage architecture. (read more)

Last month I announced that DCIG is putting together its first annual Midrange Array Buyers Guide. Since then a lot has happened and over the last two weeks responses to the questionnaires that I sent out to over 20 storage providers representing over 100 midrange array models have been pouring in. So while it is still too early to announce any winners and results are still being tabulated, I am prepared to share some preliminary findings in the areas of total storage capacity and cache sizes on midrange arrays. (read more)

Next generation networked storage systems are adding solid state drives (SSDs) at an accelerated pace as a means to deliver dramatic performance gains for mission-critical, performance sensitive applications. To accomplish this, SSDs are being constructed to look and act like hard disk drives (HDDs) and while this seems sensible, this creates the possibility for data integrity issues to emerge. (read more)

Numerous surveys show that the adoption of server virtualization is poised to take off in small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). But what can get overlooked in this trend is that greater than 70% of these virtual server deployments that occur in SMB environments will use external storage. This is where SMBs can run into problems. Identifying an affordable, scalable external storage system that can meet their short and long term needs is sometimes easier said than done but that is exactly what the newly announced SnapServer SAN S2000 is designed to deliver. (read more)

Enterprise users are facing some tough choices right now as solid state drives (SSDs) begin to proliferate in the datacenter. Not only must they sort through the performance benefits and documented drawbacks of typical SSDs, they must also determine which SSDs are suitable for use in mission critical applications. But as they do, new evidence is emerging that an SSD's classification as "enterprise ready" is not determined by an SSD's use of "MLC" or "SLC" but rather if it possesses the ability to detect and correct soft errors as they occur. (read more)

I have recently heard it said that server virtualization is to data centers what marijuana is to other drugs: a "stepping stone" or "gateway" drug. After all, once you start down the path of server virtualization, at what point do you quit and stop virtualizing the rest of the infrastructure? (read more)

Virtualization, consolidation and servers are becoming inextricably linked in the minds of mid-sized organizations as they look to reduce data center footprints and energy consumption while increasing server hardware utilization. Yet what can get overlooked during the consolidation and virtualization of their Windows applications is the development of a corresponding storage strategy. This is where the specifics on what is needed to deliver on an appropriate storage solution for this environment become a necessity. (read more)

In 2007, IDC estimated that 211 PBs of iSCSI storage was shipped worldwide. This grew to 500 PBs shipped in 2008 and was forecast to continue to grow in 2009 and beyond. But what those numbers do not reveal is that it is mid-sized enterprises who bought the majority of these iSCSI storage systems. Now these same organizations are about to get a wakeup call as they start their upgrade cycles and encounter the challenges associated with migrating data to newer iSCSI storage systems. (read more)

Ever since I stopped writing technology reports for Storage magazine a few years ago, people periodically ask me when I am going to start writing them again. Until a few months ago, the answer was "No plans to write them." But then I started to receive some really good ideas from individuals like Kelly Polanski over at WaveBreak Marketing as well as Jim Nash, DCIG's new Business Development Manager. Their ideas, coupled with my own internal desire to once again resume writing these reports, pushed me over the edge and down this road again. (read more)

Anyone who has ever witnessed a disaster knows that one of two things can happen. Either the area affected by the disaster can be devastated, never to recover; or, new life can spring up in its place. In many respect, the economic disaster that hit the entire nation and world hit the data storage industry equally hard. However the data storage industry is picking itself back up and, based upon what I saw and heard this week at The BDEvent in Palo Alto, CA, it has brought an end to one era in data storage while the dawn of another is now upon us. (read more)

Some of the most read blogs on DCIG's website in 2009 covered how small and midsize businesses (SMBs) were implementing disk-based backup in their environments. So it should come as no surprise that individuals like Ken Clipperton, the Director of Information Technology at Midland Lutherans College (MLC), is also in the midst of implementing disk-based backup at MLC. What is unexpected are some of the decisions that he needs to make as he implements it at MLC. (read more)