Entries categorized under “Storage Systems”

The main theme at this year's EMC World is "Lead the Transformation" that EMC is illustrating through the use of superhero characters. The superheroes are represented as end users who come up with solutions to manage today's complex storage environment while the villain is pictured as "Doc Lock-in" who requires our superheroes to "lock-in" on a single vendor to mitigate this complexity. Yet for those users who think strategically about their storage acquisitions, Doc Lock-in may not be the full-fledged villain that EMC World portrays him to be. (read more)

Last week's acquisition of NexGen Storage by Fusion-io was greeted with quite a bit of fanfare by the storage industry. But as an individual who has covered Fusion-io for many years and talked one-on-one with their top executives on multiple occasions, its acquisition of NexGen signaled that Fusion-io wanted to do more than deliver an external storage array that had its technology built-in. Rather Fusion-io felt it was incumbent for it to take action and accelerate the coming data center transformation that it has talked and written about for years. (read more)

Hybrid storage arrays use flash memory in combination with hard disk drives to create storage that balances performance, capacity and cost. Because the majority of the data will ultimately be stored on slower HDD instead of flash memory, the trick is to achieve consistently high performance without 100% flash. The secret sauce the Hybrid Storage Array vendors bring to the table is a combination of storage architecture, hardware, and software features. (read more)

DCIG has for some time been recommending the adoption of flash storage in the data center as a way to achieve substantial overall savings and ROI. As part of the April 11 announcement of the IBM Flash Ahead Initiative, IBM revealed that a flash storage enabled systemic rethinking of the data center can generally achieve savings of over 30% in data center hardware and software costs. This finding affirms DCIG's belief that Flash Memory Storage Arrays are poised to address not only special I/O-intensive use cases, but to begin displacing traditional storage arrays in many data centers. (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)

A major objective for most organizations either right now or in the near future is to put in place a private storage cloud architecture to make the storage and ongoing management of their data easier to accomplish. It is for these reasons that many organizations are turning to scale-out storage systems as the preferred architecture to achieve this objective. Here is where it gets tricky. Scale-out storage system architectures have diverged to offer organizations many paths to follow in order to arrive at their desired private storage cloud destination. (read more)

In May 2010 DCIG released its first-ever Midrange Array Buyer's Guide in which we covered 70+ models from over 20 vendors. Fast forward just three (3) short years later and DCIG is on track to release not one, not two, not three no, not even four Buyer's Guides on enterprise midrange arrays but five distinct Buyer's Guides on this topic! So what has changed in just three (3) short years that DCIG feels the need to produce so many? To understand this requires a closer look at the forces that are driving the evolution and revolution in enterprise midrange arrays. (read more)

DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its inaugural DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks 85 features of 34 different storage arrays from ten (10) different storage providers. (read more)

When it comes to hosting Microsoft Exchange 2010, small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) have many if not all of the same performance requirements of a storage system that hosts Exchange that large enterprises have. What these smaller companies do not possess are the deep pockets that enterprises have and which are typically needed to acquire such a storage system. Using the latest midrange HP 3PAR StoreServ 7400 storage system, these organizations can get the storage performance attributes that they need while staying within their budget constraints. (read more)

DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its inaugural DCIG 2013 Midrange Unified Storage Array Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 100 features on 30 different storage arrays from eight (8) different storage providers. This Buyer's Guide provides the critical information that small and midsize enterprises particularly need in regards to storage arrays that will need to serve a variety of purposes within their organization. These purposes may include storing large amounts of unstructured data such as files and emails, hosting virtualized and high performance applications and even serving as a target for archival and backup data stores. (read more)

2012 saw a lot of discussion--some would say hype--over flash memory-based storage for the enterprise. Vendors are promoting various approaches to bringing flash memory storage to the data center. DCIG believes that Flash Memory Storage Arrays are poised to address not only special I/O-intensive use cases, but to begin displacing traditional storage arrays in many data centers. (read more)

Flash memory is fundamentally changing the metrics around how performance on storage arrays is measured with IOPs reaching into the tens or hundreds of thousands - even over a million in some tests. Despite these results, many organizations remain reticent to use solid state drives (SSDs) because of persistent questions about their reliability, especially around eMLC drives. These concerns are largely put to rest as the inclusion of eMLC drives in the new Nexsan NST5000 unified hybrid storage array gives these drives the storage industry's equivalent of a seal of approval. (read more)

Bad news is only bad until you hear it, then it's just information followed by opportunity. Information may arrive in political, personal, technological and economic forms. It creates opportunity which brings people, vision, ideas and investment together. When thinking about a future history of 2013, three (3) opportunities come to mind. (read more)

Optical media's 100 year life span earns it top marks among all media from a longevity perspective. But as optical media's cost per GB soars and manufacturing ranks thin, its future looks dismal at best. In its place, removable disk technology (RDX) makes a strong case for small and midsized businesses (SMB) to use it in lieu of optical. (read more)

Enterprises are looking for better returns on IT investments, including dramatically increasing the ability to respond to changing business requirements. They want cloud service provider-like flexibility, performance, and security even when they don't have service provider-sized budgets. (read more)

There is a tendency to look at Big Data and private cloud storage strictly from the perspective of enterprises that need to manage petabytes (PBs) of data. But small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) have their own smaller Big Data and private cloud storage needs that require they manage and store tens or hundreds of terabytes (TBs) of data with just a few people. Imation's recent announcement that it is acquiring Nexsan Corporation gives SMEs a compelling new option to pursue to meet their specific Big Data and cloud storage requirements. (read more)

One of the unique aspects about running a blog site that primarily does analysis as opposed to commenting and covering today's news is that the most read blog entries on DCIG's site each year are rarely from the current year. This year was no exception as only one of the Top 5 blog entries written in 2012 made it into the Top 10 of DCIG's most read blog entries of 2012 that I will start to reveal in tomorrow's blog entry. (read more)

Everyone anecdotally knows that solid state disks (SSDs) are fast - like really fast when compared to hard disk drives (HDDs). It is just that the number of proof points coming from independent sources that conclusively demonstrate their performance advantage have been in short supply. Now proof points appearing on the SPECsfs website are confirming what people already suspect to be true: the performance of SSD-based systems is smoking fast with off-the-shelf SSD-based storage systems leaving their enterprise counterparts in the dust. (read more)

Bringing storage systems initially designed to meet Big Data demands into enterprise data centers is proving to be a bigger challenge than either storage providers or enterprises anticipated. While enterprises certainly want a storage system with a cost-effective, easy-to-manage, scalable architecture, other features such as data protection, data security and virtualization integration also come into play. EMC Isilon's latest OneFS 7.0 operating system takes these specific needs into account freeing enterprises to tackle their Big Data concerns. (read more)

Many IT professionals assume that the high cost of flash-based systems takes them out of consideration for their own data centers. However, Hybrid Flash Memory/HDD Storage Arrays drive down the cost of flash-level performance by intelligently leveraging flash for speed and traditional spinning disks for cheap capacity to achieve an ROI and Return on Assets that makes them a compelling value for many businesses. In other cases, the low power and low latency of an all-flash array are the best fit for the needs of the business and achieve an acceptable ROI. (read more)

More enterprises than ever are ready to take the next step in their virtualization journey by virtualizing mission critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010. Yet taking Exchange 2010 virtual in enterprise environments involves much more than simply hosting Exchange on a powerful server and then hoping that the underlying storage is up to the challenge. (read more)

Fitting "enterprise" storage systems into small and midsized businesses (SMBs) requires they deliver all of the features without the up-front capital or ongoing management costs. To date, that has rarely been the case with SMBs either needing to make trade-offs in cost or ease of use to get the storage system they need. That changed earlier this month with HP's introduction of its HP StoreEasy and StoreVirtual that bring into SMBs the storage system efficiency, security, reliability and availability once previously only reserved for enterprise storage products. (read more)

Enterprise backup has changed significantly in the last decade with disk-based backup and deduplication contributing largely to that shift. But as array-based snapshots emerge as the next big wave in how data protection is done, organizations should not assume that a choice between array-based snapshots and disk-based backup looms. Rather, array-based snapshots and disk-based backup are complementary technologies that change the decision from being "one or the other" to "how to make them work better together." (read more)

Feature rich storage systems grab most of the headlines but when many organizations are pressed as to what features they really want a storage system to possess, their answer is simple. They want a Worry-free storage system that is reliable and easy to manage. In this third and final blog entry in my interview with NetApp VP Dave Mooney, he reveals what features contribute to making a storage system "Worry-free" and why having a reliable storage system "that just works" is so valuable to organizations today. (read more)

Recently DCIG did a webex of its Midrange Array module in its Interactive Buyer's Guide (IBG). During this webex, I showed how one could quickly sort through multiple products and features to create customized views of the data. Then once the desired view was created the user could generate an analyst-branded report in PDF format of this view. (read more)