The Journey to Nirvana
Knowing where you’re going is one thing but understanding where you’re starting from is rather more important.
Storage Efficiency
As Life Sciences event approaches I’ve been looking into our theme for the day – Storage Efficiency.
Cloud Computing
“The Cloud” seems to be a word I’m hearing everywhere these days. Cloud Computing seems to be here to stay. As companies look to save money virtualized and outsourced IT infrastructures allow them to do this.
Environmental Responsibility
The environmental consequences of the way we live and work is having a greater impact on our pockets than ever before. While the costs are important they are not the only factor. Just doing the right thing is seen by most individuals as honourable and just as important.
Tiered storage
The definition of tiered storage (assigning different categories of data to different categories of storage) seems like it would be a logical process that shouldn’t require anything special to make it work.
How much is a Terabyte?
For those of you with an IT brain the answer to this question could be 1,024 Gigabytes. For those with a marketing brain the answer is probably 1,000 Gigabytes. However there is a third answer…
De-Duplication - Don't be Afraid
I was chatting to a potential customer the other day, looking at the pros and cons of de-duplication methods and it’s clear to me that most people still view de-duplication with a bit of trepidation.
The Year of iSCSI?
Every year, it seems, is going to be the year iSCSI emerges as a serious threat to the continued dominance of Fibre Channel (FC) as the protocol of choice for Storage Area Networks (SANs). It finally looks as though it may be happening.
De-Duplicated Nearline Storage For Netbackup
Data volumes in all organisations continue to grow relentlessly. Estimates vary between 50 – 70% a year.
NetApp S Family available from 15th August
The S Family (formerly StoreVault®) storage platform fits in Midsize Enterprise, as well as in large Enterprises with large numbers of Remote Office and Branch Office locations typically replicating to a core FAS.
NetApp Notes Accelerated Adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet for Storage Applications
On 8th August 2008 a NetApp release noted the accelerated adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) storage connectivity by customers who want to optimize their virtual environments and improve power efficiencies in the data centre. Since launching 10GbE in 2006, NetApp has shipped more than 3,000 array ports. In fact, 54% of this total was delivered in 2008 alone, exemplifying the technology’s growing popularity and NetApp’s continued leadership in Ethernet storage.
Doing More With Less - Approaches to de-duplication
Symantec note that “As companies integrate disk and discover its benefits as a more active component of their back up environments, they soon realize that they cannot keep all of their backup data on disk. Despite declines in the cost of disk storage, they still lack the available capacity to recover most data from disk locally in the data centre. Data de duplication is a disk-based technology that enables companies to eliminate duplicate backup data and significantly decrease the storage, and in some cases bandwidth, consumption.”
S3 Technology Note - Doing More With Less, Using Real-time data compression to reduce data volumes
According to The Storage IO Group “the combination of growing demand for electricity by data centres, density of power usage per square foot, rising energy costs, strained electricity generating and transmission (G&T) infrastructure and environmental awareness prompted the passage of a new law in The United States that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report to Congress on the state of IT data centres energy usage in the United States.”
Doing More With Less - Thin Provisioning
The concept of thin provisioning is really very simple; by being smarter in the way disk space is allocated less disk drives are needed. Consequently less power and space are needed, significant cost reductions are made and the corporate social responsibility requirement to produce a lower carbon footprint is satisfied. It looks like an all round winner!
Doing More With Less – Handling storage growth in recessionary times
According to International Data Corp’s (IDC) Annual European Storage Survey companies are continuing to invest in growing their storage capacity despite the credit crunch squeezing many IT departments. In the face of continuing data growth almost 20% of respondents named increasing storage capacity as their major spending priority in 2009. Enhancing DR capability was the second highest priority. This compares with indications that spending is likely to be frozen in areas such as PCs and printers.