Entries categorized under “Storage Management”

The question of FC or ATA disk is now a moot point as 3PAR makes use of, and has for a while, a FC-to-SATA bridge that enables high-capacity ATA drives to be integrated into its storage arrays that provides customers like CEDAR a low-cost but highly available storage infrastructure for even the most demanding application loads. (read more)

The current recession's wrath has spared few, and technology has seen its hard times just like all industry sectors, but one area that appears poised to be one of technology's biggest benefactors is healthcare. When the Stimulus bill was passed, President Obama made it a point to bring healthcare technology front and center by providing $19 Billion dollars for the implementation of an electronic medical record (EMR). $19 Billion dollars certainly gets companies attention and most are either positioning themselves, or renewing their focus on healthcare to glean their share of this substantial investment of dollars. (read more)

Symantec's recent announcement that it will support its Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) 5.1 in the Microsoft Hyper-V parent tremendously increases the breadth of functionality available to the child virtual machines (VMs) of Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Immediate new benefits that child VMs will realize include the restoration of full path and storage management capabilities that often were severely handicapped once physical servers were virtualized. But other benefits that also come along with moving SFW 5.1 into the Hyper-V parent include better utilization of thinly provisioned storage volumes assigned to the Hyper-V parent along with an attractive SFW licensing option for Hyper-V servers. (read more)

Consolidating multiple physical machines onto one physical server that hosts multiple virtual machines (VMs) requires that organizations consider much more than just if the new server has sufficient processing, network bandwidth and memory to support the applications. Specifically, path and storage management issues can result when physical servers are virtualized which can preclude organizations from virtualizing some of their mission critical servers. (read more)

The million (or maybe billion) dollar question that companies are asking as they look at the server virtualization market is which platform to place their bets on: VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2. VMware has streaked out to an early lead while Hyper-V Server has left many enterprise organizations asking for more. But don't count Microsoft out quite yet as Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is just around the corner. (read more)

Applied Research recently surveyed 400 companies with 1000 or more employees and uncovered that 12% of them found that there is no way that their business could survive another 24 months without buying more storage. Conversely, 15% said they could go "cold turkey" without buying any more storage capacity for that same period of time. But the majority of companies (over 70%) are unsure if they need more storage capacity and, if they do, what tier of storage capacity they need. This uncertainty around what to do next probably explains the recent increases in storage utilization that companies have experienced in the last six (6) months as well as the renewed interest that companies are expressing in better managing their existing storage capacity. (read more)

STOP BUYING STORAGE!!! If there is any one dictate that organizations are following right now in this current economic crisis then "Stop buying storage" would have to be it. Aside from anecdotal evidence that organizations were buying too much storage capacity last year, the first solid evidence that organizations were overbuying came out last fall in Symantec's annual "State of the Data Center" survey uncovered that storage utilization had actually dropped from ~60% utilization in 2008 to closer to 50% in 2007 even though storage purchases had increased. Since then, new survey results show that organizations still plan to buy more storage but it also appears that they are doing a better job of utilizing the storage capacity they have. (read more)

Whether taking on a new plan, or retrofitting an existing Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plan, it's extremely helpful to have a strict set of goals on how to accomplish, not only the DR when an actual incident occurs, but also to ensure that an appropriate test matrix is in place and utilized. Surprisingly the organizations I visit all seem very dedicated to DR and Business Continuity. (read more)

Backup software is, if nothing else, a "Me-Too" space with each vendor adding new features to each release of its product to try to match what its competitors are doing as well as trying to add a few new twists of their own to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Today's CA announcement of ARCserve r12.5 continues this trend. To remain competitive, r12.5 adds data deduplication as a core component of ARCserve, improves users' abilities to recover guest VMs on virtual server operating systems and more tightly integrates ARCserve with popular applications. CA seeks to differentiate ARCserve from competitors with new native SRM reporting capabilities and providing assurance that organizations can restore their deduplicated backup data. (read more)

You can't talk about storage these days without including virtualization somewhere in the conversation. The Spring 2009 SNW was no different as one of its Summits was devoted to virtualization. The Tuesday, April 7, Virtualization Summit proved very interesting even though it was dominated by vendors. Some of the better data points that came out of this Summit were from TheInfoPro and Boston Medical Center. Also, interesting tidbits on SSD are emerging as SSD appears to solve performance challenges for VMware-access-to-storage in high I/O environments as well as performance intensive development environments. (read more)

A clustered server environment is only as reliable as the system administrators who maintain it. The challenge they encounter after they configure and deploy the hardware and software that make-up a clustered environment is, "How to maintain it?" Most system administrators leave the configuration alone for fear of disrupting a mission critical application after it is initially deployed. Crucial details such as patches and configuration changes are not completed just due to the nature of the system itself. But what catches organizations off-guard is that at some point down the road when an event does prompt a failover from one server to another, the failover fails to occur because smaller changes have occurred in the environment that now preclude the failover from successfully taking place. (read more)

Right now the economy may be sick but if the recent results of Symantec's annual State of the Data Center survey are any indication, enterprise IT budgets look surprisingly healthy for 2009. 84% of enterprise companies with 5,000 or more employees responded that they plan to keep their current IT budgets intact and a full 50% plan to increase them to 2009. Adding to the validity of the report, Symantec's research was performed by a third party firm (Applied Research) that spoke to1600 enterprise companies (5000 employees or more) in 21 countries. (read more)

As I travel around talking to companies of all sizes, one of the biggest concerns that they have and ask me about is how to drive costs out of their storage environment. Most of them dedicate a certain percentage of their overall IT budgets to counter the exploding growth in their storage environment but, due to the current economic crisis, that budget is now shrinking. My answer to them is always very straightforward, "You need to get a solid handle on what storage is allocated and what is used. (read more)

Managing today's data center infrastructures is not for the faint of heart. Administrators have to verify new gear works with existing gear, existing gear works with other existing gear in new configurations and current configurations will not fail under peak loads. While vendors provide hardware and software compatibility lists in efforts to help administrators address this task, there is still usually more work than hours in the day to verify all of this gear is optimally configured and in an optimal state. It is this void that the new Veritas Operations Services seeks to fill. (read more)

2009 is shaping up as the year of server virtualization. The hype around Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server is giving way to the reality of companies actually virtualizing their production servers as a means to improve energy efficiencies and slash infrastructure costs. But as companies virtualize these servers, many are leaving the familiarity of direct attached storage (DAS) and entering the world of networked storage for the first time. This is creating new challenges, especially for Windows servers using utilities such as defragmenters that will begin to operate on virtual machines (VMs) and defragment each VM's associated file system. (read more)

Anyone who works as an end-user is continually confronted with crafting SLAs for various infrastructure components. Aggravating the situation, once SLAs are signed-off on, it is nearly impossible to make changes without completely rocking the boat so it is extremely important to get it right from day one. (read more)

Even in these trying times aggressive companies are looking to the future. Companies continue to grow organically through mergers, acquisitions or takeovers. While the latter might be more the norm these days, the need for a company to keep IT storage management costs under control remains constant. Growth creates problems in the form of logistics, energy and maintenance concerns as well as with the physical computing and storage resources. Companies lacking the infrastructure to support these increases in operational demands can quickly squash any growth plans. (read more)

One can hardly visit any storage system vendor's website without running into a reference to "Thin Provisioning" that is available either in their current product or on their product roadmap. However, how many operating system or volume managers/filesystems producers do you find using those words? Until recently, there were none. But now that Symantec has jumped with both feet into the Thin Provisioning arena, how companies use and manage thin provisioning in the coming years should change significantly. (read more)

If companies thought that times were tough over the last few years, 2009 is shaping up to be a doozy. Corporate layoffs, cutbacks in spending and decreased revenue coupled with the looming threat of more government regulation and oversight will make the last few years seem like a cake walk compared to what is to come. But as companies prepare to make even more cutbacks in IT staff and budgets, the "Do more with less" mandate that seems to accompany every round of corporate cutbacks remains. This directive leaves IT survivors needing to identify technology providers that can help them better manage their company's data, recover their enterprise applications more quickly and perform these tasks with minimal training, time and effort. (read more)

Providing value-add in any market can become increasingly difficult as the competition continues to mimic your every move and steal you thunder. But keeping pace with Bell Micro, and their ever expanding programs, might leave some of the competition a... (read more)

There is no question that the recent economic uncertainty will impact organizations on a global scale. Already continents and countries as well as individual companies are being affected daily. Gartner notes that no one is immune with the United States and Western Europe being affected the worse. Examples include: Europe recently put $2.3 trillion on the line to protect the continent's banks in a unified response to the global financial crisis; Europe's largest economy, Germany, is on the edge of recession and poised to come to a halt next year; and, venture capital firms are issuing strict advisories for startups while established companies are trimming expenses. (read more)

In the computer industry, Diskeeeper is as synonymous with disk defragmentation as Microsoft is to Windows. In fact, any knowledgeable Microsoft Windows administrator knows that defragmenting a disk drive can provide application performance boosts of up to 176 percent, if you believe some reports. That makes Diskeeper a must-have in the eyes of some shops with performance intensive applications running on Windows servers. However as more enterprises virtualize their servers and disk drives, how does Diskeeper's technology remain relevant? To get some answers to these questions, I recently spoke to Derek De Vette, VP of Public Affairs for Diskeeper Corporation. (read more)

If you ever wanted to create war within the confines of an application design meeting just bring in someone with an eye for architecture. I don't care if the person is a database, storage or system administrator or some sort of system architect. These guys will often start questioning the application in relationship to the physical requirements of hardware. How much data will there be? What does a typical transaction look like? How many updates will there be? What will be the growth pattern? (read more)

I just got back to Omaha after spending the last three days at Storage Networking World (SNW) and used the time on my flight home to reflect upon some of the conversations I had during my time there. While I still plan to do more blog entries in the coming days around the technologies that I reviewed at SNW, I first wanted to share some of the thoughts and feelings of those in attendance about how they think the economic crisis will affect tech in general and how companies should prepare to act in 2009. In particular, I wanted to share the thoughts of those who have weathered economic downturns in the past and how users have responded to them. (read more)

Traditional clustering methodologies are severely limited in respect to scale, heterogeneous support, and distributed application support. Because of these limitations, clustering has primarily been the domain of shops with high-end applications with equally high-end budgets for the hardware and software needed to implement clustering. Symantec's announcement last week of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) One begins to change this scenario for any organization interested in extending the benefits of clustering to a greater number of their applications. And based upon what we saw in this first release of VCS One, we are now wondering who wouldn't be interested in clustering more of their environment, whether virtual or physical. (read more)