Entries categorized under “Tiered Data Systems”

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)

Everyone talks about how Big Data is changing how data and storage is managed but what many forget is that Big Data also comes with "Big Costs" in terms of the hardware needed to store it and the software and people needed to manage it. Imation saw these three costs coming down the pike and now provides SMBs and SMEs a very affordable and practical solution to address all of these concerns (read more)

Storage tiering as a strategy is gaining a lot of momentum as a way to optimize available storage capacity and bring storage costs under control. But many small and midsized businesses (SMBs) still question if storage tiering is right for them and, if so, what steps they should take to implement it. To answer these concerns, there are three tips for SMBs to follow to ensure implementing storage tiering is the right choice for them and that they do it correctly. (read more)

Data warehouses that are used to satisfy today's business intelligence requirements are measured by a new set of standards: Maximize performance and optimize storage capacity while keeping costs and complexity at bay. To satisfy these demands, Teradata recently introduced hybrid storage into its leading platform to boost its Enterprise Data Warehouse performance and storage utilization without making it a hassle to deploy and manage it. (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)

Over the years big data has crept into the everyday life of systems administrators. Attempts to solve the big data problem in both block and file storage emerged as data management software. While data management software struggled to get a footing, deduplication and compression took off stunting data management software's growth. Deduplication and compression technologies have well known capabilities in both the storage and information disciplines. However, they differ in a significant way. These technologies do not ease the burden of information management. (read more)

When companies discuss their backup strategy, disk and tape are almost always part of that conversation. But in a recent interview that I did with Matt Jorgensen, the system administrator at Neumont University, we did more than talk about how the value of the Overland Storage's SnapServer N2000 and NEO 2000e in its backup strategy. We also discussed the critical role that the SnapServer N2000 plays in supporting the two different backup products in Neumont's environment. (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)

Automated storage tiering (AST) seems to be getting ever more attention as more organizations move from physical to virtualized environments and look to use networked storage systems with AST to support them. But AST carries its own set of baggage and can potentially create as many problems as it solves, not the least of which is that it may not be as automated for all application workloads as some vendors may lead you to believe. (read more)

Moving unstructured data onto lower cost tiers of storage is an initiative on almost every enterprise organization's "to-do" list. But convincing a business unit or department to "volunteer" to move its data to a lower cost tier is not always as easy as it seems, especially when doing so may possibly put production applications at risk. (read more)

Moving from "D2D2T" to "D2D2D" is sometimes seen as an unattainable hurdle that enterprise organizations cannot overcome when tape is used for secondary roles such as archiving or disaster recovery (DR). But replacing the "T" in "D2D2T" with a "D" is now practical, possible and affordable. Doing so simply means enterprises need to demonstrate that disk offers the same or more functionality than tape when used in these capacities while costing the same or less. (read more)

Of all the topics that I thought I might be writing about after my first day in attendance at the fall Storage Networking World (SNW) conference in 2010, I did not think tape would be it. In fact, it was not even on my radar screen walking into the show. But after meeting with the Ultrium LTO team yesterday at SNW, it is clear that tape is back in the storage conversation and those arguing for its broader adoption and continued use have much more to talk about than its power savings, larger capacities and faster speeds. (read more)

Substantial technical differences exist between how the interfaces of storage clouds are presented, managed and secured. But from a business point of view, a cloud is a cloud is a cloud and the sooner that the technical challenges associated with managing these different storage clouds from a single platform are overcome, the sooner that businesses can ramp up their cloud storage adoption. (read more)

The appeal of sub-volume optimization to end-users is plain as it promises to lower storage capacity and management costs while increasing application efficiency. But before users succumb to its allure, they need to verify vendor claims regarding its benefits as vendors are stretching them to make this technology fit your environment. (read more)

Today DCIG is pleased to announce that through a special licensing agreement with Nexsan Technologies, the 2010 DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide is now available for a free download on Nexsan's website for a limited time. This is a full copy of the 105 page Buyer's Guide exactly as it was originally published by DCIG with no additions, deletions or edits. (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)

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)

The initial hype around solid state drives (SSDs) is starting to settle down. The performance benefits, costs, "gotcha's" and use cases of SSDs are now better documented which is resulting in new implementations of SSDs that emphasize their benefits while mitigating their drawbacks. A prime example of this is today's announcement from 3PAR that adds support for SSDs to its InServ Storage Servers but more importantly provides users with a means to optimally and simply take advantage of them. (read more)

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address. (read more)

Organizations do not like to think about business continuity for some very simple reasons: it's costly, it's complex and it exposes to companies just how vulnerable they really are should a disaster occur. So companies tend to live in denial about implementing a business continuity solution until some triggering event occurs that makes them have to deal with the problem head on. (read more)

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland's most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland's tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection. (read more)

While SaaS (Software as a Service) gets most of the press, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is finding its way into increasing numbers of corporate data centers. Parallel SCSI is a proven and reliable data transfer standard and serves the data center well, but all good things must eventually come to an end. With U320 parallel SCSI being the last stop on the SCSI roadmap, and with the advantages SAS has to offer over parallel SCSI, SAS is almost a certainty for the industry at large and your company specifically. (read more)

It is no secret that Overland Storage (Nasdaq: OVRL) endured a period of declining sales and management shake-ups in 2007 and 2008. A new CEO, VP of worldwide sales and VP of marketing in the past year indicate the company is trying to right itself from a leadership perspective. These changes provide insight as to where Overland Storage intends to go as it starts its makeover. Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy. (read more)

One of the more agonizing choices that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. (read more)

Quantum is aiming for the enterprise with its deduplication technology and looks to make a serious run at the enterprise datacenter with its DXi7500. Designed to anchor Quantum's deduplication strategy, companies can use the scalable DXi7500 when it is receiving replicated data from Quantum's DXi3500 or DXi5500 appliances in remote offices; replicating to disaster recovery site(s); or deduplicating terabytes of data during nightly backup jobs in the datacenter. To accomplish this, Quantum designed the DXi7500 to become the focal point for its DXi portfolio. (read more)