Entries categorized under “Virtualization”

Among the plethora of news today from VMware, its larger announcements are the introduction of a new cloud infrastructure initiative and the general availability of vSphere 5.0 in late August. These announcements are particularly noteworthy in the storage industry as vSphere contains enhancements to many of its existing data storage and data protection APIs plus vSphere offers up a new API that deals exclusively with array 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)

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)

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) does many things well when it comes to automating the recovery process for virtualized environments that simultaneously eliminates the complexity of creating and testing recovery plans. But what SRM does not do is provide control of and visibility into the applications within VMs at the recovery site. That changes today as organizations now have a new option to enhance their SRM deployment with the latest release of Symantec ApplicationHA. (read more)

There seems to be this almost naïve assumption out there that once "the cloud" is built everything in the computing world will be better. While I certainly agree with that to a point - cloud computing and cloud storage technologies stand to solve some very thorny problems within IT - there is one question that companies seem to be turning a blind eye to: "Who owns the cloud?" (read more)

It is no secret that virtualization is changing everything about how organizations think about and manage their data centers. But perhaps one of the more dramatic changes in thinking that still needs to take place is in how they should approach disaster recovery (DR). The odds of this shift in thinking occurring sooner rather than later just got a boost as a result of the announcement of a new replication software solution from a new company called Zerto that emerged from stealth mode this week. (read more)

Enterprises are quickly evolving to adopt and implement virtualization across their entire infrastructure for multiple reasons: improved economies of scale, improved efficiencies and better utilization of existing resources just to name a few. But as enterprises move down this path, they may sometimes feel like they are flying blind unable to see how their underlying physical resources are being used and where potential challenges lay. (read more)

As I was watching the local 10 o'clock news last night to catch up on the latest on the flooding in the surrounding Omaha area, I was hit by a piece of unexpected news. The Army Corps of Engineers had earlier in the day released a map and began to warn residents that a major portion of downtown Omaha could be under as much as 10 feet of water should a levee that borders the Missouri River fail. Yet what many do not know is that the Omaha area is the home for datacenters of many of the world's largest and most well-known Internet companies such as Google, Paypal and Yahoo. (read more)

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is emerging as one of the hot trends for 2011 and beyond. But successful VDI deployments, especially large ones, do not happen by accident and deduplication and solid state drives (SSDs) are now viewed as key technologies to deliver on a successful VDI deployment. The trick is identifying an appropriate and risk-averse way in which to implement these technologies without incurring some of the unpleasant side effects they can cause. (read more)

The results of Applied Research's 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey are in and they reveal that enterprises are approaching both of these technologies (virtualization and cloud) with a great deal of caution. The feedback from 3,700 enterprises of various sizes in 35 different countries suggests that many organizations still struggle with the capabilities, challenges, and benefits of virtual and hybrid cloud computing even as the boardroom holds the line on budgets and staffing levels. (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)

Charge back is one of those pesky little details that every IT person hates to address as it can be painful to implement and then equally cumbersome to administer. Yet the upside of implementing it provides data centers the ability to justify their costs as well as opens the door for them to have conversations with their clients as to what additional service offerings they want. (read more)

Backup redesign continues to be one of the hottest topics among end users for three years running with blog entries on that topic on DCIG's website consistently being among the most read. The problem is that many backup redesign offerings turn out to be just a rehash of the way backup has always been done which is inadequate when it comes to protecting growing virtual server environments. (read more)

The start of every decade new trends emerge that do more than influence opinions and behavior for a few months or years. Instead they are megatrends that fundamentally shape and mold an industry for the entire decade and influence innovation that will come in the decades to follow. Right now four such megatrends are emerging that are reshaping datacenters as a whole and are changing how hardware and software are being delivered to them. (read more)

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is well on its way to becoming the next big trend in virtualization in enterprises but before that can happen, a viable back end storage solution must emerge that can cost-effectively deliver VDI's conflicting capacity, cost and performance demands. One specific configuration that end-users find particularly appealing are those storage solutions that deliver both deduplication and SSDs. (read more)

Virtualizing business critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2010 is the next frontier in server virtualization. But as organizations move down this path, sizing the underlying hardware that will host these applications becomes much more complex. This explains why we are seeing the emergence of reference configurations such as what HP has introduced for Microsoft Exchange 2010. (read more)

Lately I have spent quite a bit of time talking about and defining different cloud terms. But the last few weeks have provided me with some additional perspective in terms of what people are looking for from "the Cloud." They don't just want "the Cloud" - they want the ability to manage the cloud and be in control of the data they put there and that inability to do so is what still gives users pause about "the Cloud." (read more)

Enterprises covet the higher levels of transparency, faster information processing and improved decision making capabilities that result from deploying SAP into their environments. But with IT staffing levels and budgets staying flat, businesses need solutions that enable them to deliver SAP's benefits without spending more money or hiring more people. (read more)

EMC World is always a crazy, energetic, bop-till-you-drop type event and this year's EMC World was no exception. Highlighted by keynotes from EMC's CEO Joe Tucci, VMware's CEO Paul Maritz and a closing night customer appreciation event that featured the wildest hats I have ever seen and a performance by The Fray, EMC World 2011 was both fun and informative. But now that the dust has begun to settle, I had a chance to reflect on what I had seen and heard to consider what my top three takeaways from EMC World were. (read more)

The introduction of the vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) VMware vSphere 4 contributed to making virtual machine (VM) backups easier to accomplish. But vendors are just starting to tap into VADP's restore capabilities. Evidence that is beginning to occur appeared again a couple of weeks ago when EMC announced the ability for Avamar 6.0 to do faster VM recoveries as well as better leverage Avamar's integrated file system to do file level restores from VM image-based backups. (read more)

Back in 2003 hardly anyone had heard of a small but rapidly growing technology company called VMware. But since that time VMware literally exploded to become the dominant player in enterprise server virtualization. Now the same forces that propelled VMware to the top of the server virtualization heap are at work again. (read more)

As part of his opening remarks during his keynote on Tuesday morning, Symantec's CEO Enrique Salem shared a comment that was made to him by a Symantec user, "We are in the middle of a time of profound meaningful change." Truer words were never spoken as enterprises of all sizes are facing a broad spectrum of technology changes that are unequaled in this modern era of computing. (read more)

Regardless of whose numbers or what percentages you believe, it is clear that the adoption rate of server virtualization is accelerating with more organizations virtualizing their production application servers than ever before. But as this occurs, new demands are being placed on data protection solutions to more efficiently and quickly complete VMware virtual machine (VM) backups. To meet this emerging end-user requirement, EMC Avamar 6.0 has enhanced its virtual proxy server pooling capabilities to better automate and simplify the scheduling and management of VM backups. (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)