In Depth

In Depth

IT architecture

• File, block and object: Storage fundamentals in the cloud era

  We look at the three basic ways that storage accesses data – via file, block and object – as well as the ways in which the rise of the cloud and distributed systems have brought changes to them  Continue Reading

• Global file systems: Hybrid cloud and follow-the-sun access

  We look at global distributed file systems that put enterprise data under a single file access namespace so that enterprises and branch offices can get to data from anywhere  Continue Reading

• Data gravity: What is it and how to manage it

  Data gravity can attract increasing amounts of data, and brings with it onerous management overheads. We look at how to mitigate data gravity in datacentre and cloud  Continue Reading

• Refugee support group works with tech startup on reporting system

  Computer Weekly speaks to a refugee support group about its ongoing collaboration with an academic tech startup to develop a digital human rights reporting system for refugees  Continue Reading

• Enterprises shore up supply chain resilience with data

  Using data to gain better visibility over their supply chains and forge closer connections between disparate links is helping organisations respond to disruptions faster  Continue Reading

• The role of infrastructure as code in edge datacentre computing

  As datacentre computing is pushed to the edge of the organisation’s network, IT has to address the overheads associated with remote server management  Continue Reading

• Storage requirements for AI, ML and analytics in 2022

  We look at what is needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the pros and cons of block, file and object storage to store and access very large amounts of often unstructured data  Continue Reading

• Snapshots best practice: Five key things you need to know

  We look at snapshots best practice, including the way they work, why they are not the same as backups, how to avoid heavy processing overheads and key user permissions tweaks  Continue Reading

• Cloud ERP: Rise of the industry cloud

  There is a new variable in the build or buy debate, and it’s all about the way cloud-based services connect internal and external business processes  Continue Reading

• Storage suppliers put Kubernetes platforms centre stage

  How to orchestrate the orchestrator? Storage suppliers’ Kubernetes management platforms aim to meet storage and data protection challenge in containerised application environments  Continue Reading

• Why post-pandemic reskilling must focus on mainframes

  A major contributing factor to UK-wide skills shortages is the significant number of people who have left the workforce since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic  Continue Reading

• Software firm saves storage array costs with Nutanix hyper-converged

  Banking SaaS provider Vialink needed more IOPS when its NetApp arrays slowed up, but Nutanix hyper-converged proved a better package than Pure Storage and Dell EMC, too  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage cost challenges and how to tackle them

  We look at cloud capacity procurement pitfalls, forecasting challenges, the danger of over-buying, supplier lock-in, deciphering billing and resizing capacity when projects finish  Continue Reading

• Define RPO and RTO tiers for storage and data protection strategy

  We look at RPO and RTO in defining data protection and disaster recovery strategies and how to specify tiers that reflect the importance of different systems in your organisation  Continue Reading

• Storage and 5G: Big impacts likely as wide-area topologies evolve

  Enterprise 5G will boost the need for storage generally. It will also push capacity needs closer to the edge and create new locations for processing and storage  Continue Reading

• Evolving a data integration strategy

  Linking IT systems together is never going away, but the approach CIOs adopt is key to ensuring relevant data feeds the decision-making process  Continue Reading

• Posix vs object storage: How much longer for Posix?

  We look at Posix compliance in storage and why it is being challenged by object storage and the need to scale much further than Posix-oriented storage was ever intended to  Continue Reading

• Four emerging data integration trends to assess

  To accelerate their performance in data integration, companies are evaluating and adopting a range of contributing technologies  Continue Reading

• Refrigeration firm freezes legacy backup for one Cohesity cluster

  France-based Clauger had reached limits of capacity and complexity with multi-supplier legacy backup, so moved to one Cohesity cluster and gained restores that took mere minutes  Continue Reading

• EDSFF brings built-for-NVMe connectivity to the datacentre

  Aimed at enterprise use cases, EDSFF offers incredible flash density in shared storage and hyperscale deployments, but storage products that use it are still thin on the ground  Continue Reading

• Hybrid cloud storage: Options for rearchitecting enterprise IT

  Hybrid cloud is seen as a way to have the best of both the on-premise and public cloud worlds. We look at the pros and cons of hybrid cloud storage  Continue Reading

• Dispelling the top five myths of modern infrastructure

  Modern infrastructure is agile, flexible and scalable. It is at the forefront of every CIO’s digital strategy – and it's everywhere. But with the multitude of choices comes complexity  Continue Reading

• Scale-up vs scale-out: Horizontal vs vertical scaling for storage

  We look at the differences between scale-up and scale-out in storage – or horizontal vs vertical scaling – and the key ways it can be carried out on-prem and in the cloud  Continue Reading

• The emerging role of software in business development

  Business leaders generally recognise the importance of software as a business enabler – but some see technology driving business growth  Continue Reading

• Edge storage: Four key points

  Edge storage is driven by rapidly emerging edge computing and data gathering use cases. We look at why it makes sense to store data at the edge and the key challenges involved  Continue Reading

• How advanced comms can gain an edge in the post-pandemic world

  Advanced communications not only connects the real world to the digital world, but also enables a hybrid and more environmentally friendly world of work  Continue Reading

• Cloud repatriation: Five reasons to repatriate data from cloud

  We look at key drivers of cloud repatriation, including cost, compliance, issues around latency and data gravity, reversing poorly planned moves to the cloud, and supplier failure  Continue Reading

• Five ways the hyper-converged infrastructure market is changing

  We look at changes in the hyper-converged infrastructure market as suppliers go cool, go soft, disaggregate HCI nodes, provide as-a-service options and look to containers  Continue Reading

• Hybrid cloud: Five key questions in 2021

  We look at key need-to-knows about hybrid cloud in 2021, including how it is defined, key use cases, the main pitfalls and where it’s heading  Continue Reading

• NVMe-over-fabrics: Five need-to-knows

  We look at five need-to-knows about NVMe-over-fabrics, such as its implementations – RDMA, Fibre Channel and TCP – use cases, hardware and operating system support  Continue Reading

• Five things you need to know about cloud file services

  We look at cloud file services, which provide a file system-like architecture that gives users access to file data wherever they are, just as if it were a local NAS filer  Continue Reading

• Five key questions to ask about storage-as-a-service and consumption models

  We look at important questions to ask providers of consumption-based storage procurement services, such as base costs and burst, usage measurement and upgrade paths  Continue Reading

• Making the enterprise composable

  We speak to industry experts about how to develop composable IT that can quickly adapt to business change  Continue Reading

• Modern ERP breaks the chains

  Modern ERP systems mean user organisations need no longer be stuck with hefty upgrades at times convenient to suppliers  Continue Reading

• How digital operations drive ERP modernisation

  When it comes to modernising enterprise resource planning, IT decision-makers have a multitude of options. We look at what to consider when planning a modernisation project  Continue Reading

• Storage-as-a-service: Consumption models from the big six

  We look at the big six storage makers’ consumption model offers, which allow customers to pay for on-prem hardware and cloud storage capacity on a pay-per-use basis, within limits  Continue Reading

• Lakehouse concept aims to merge data lake and data warehouse

  Data lakes are big, amorphous and difficult to access, while data warehouses are costly and aimed at structured data. The data lakehouse aims at analytics in an age of unstructured data  Continue Reading

• How the pandemic changed backup

  The Covid-19 pandemic forced big changes in how people work – we look at impacts on backup, including increased reliance on the cloud, plus security and compliance vulnerabilities and ransomware  Continue Reading

• Gartner: How to turn old datacentres into critical IT assets

  IT infrastructure and operations leaders are increasingly focusing on new ideas and technologies alongside ways to deliver business value  Continue Reading

• How computational storage delivers datacentre benefits

  Computational storage is an emerging field of IT that features compute processing power closely coupled with storage. We look at what it can be used for  Continue Reading

• Where to run containers? Bare metal vs virtual machines

  We look at the key differences between running containers in virtualised environments and on bare metal servers and focus in on the main trade-offs and decision points  Continue Reading

• How Bureau Veritas migrated 85% of its applications to the AWS cloud

  In six years, France-based services giant BV has migrated 115 applications to the AWS cloud, mostly using in-house expertise. We talk to the company’s IT director  Continue Reading

• What digital transformation means for data storage

  We survey the key planks of digital transformation and look at the storage technologies emerging to support it, such as NVMe and QLC flash, hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud storage  Continue Reading

• Container-native storage: A definition, and what to ask suppliers

  We look at container-native storage – aka cloud-native storage – what defines it, and its benefits as a way of bringing persistent Kubernetes storage to containerised applications  Continue Reading

• APAC career guide on cloud computing

  Besides having engineering chops and certifications, aspiring cloud professionals should have curiosity and soft skills to succeed in the evolving cloud computing landscape  Continue Reading

• Five reasons to look at hyper-converged infrastructure

  HCI promises easy setup, purchasing flexibility, low procurement and operation costs, reliability and all in one box – but there are challenges too  Continue Reading

• Where now for storage? Hitachi, IBM and Pure Storage

  Part II: Storage supplier strategy in the cloud era: Hitachi, IBM and Pure Storage. We snapshot the big six hardware makers, as they take things to the cloud and as-a-service models  Continue Reading

• Where now for storage? Dell EMC, NetApp and HPE

  Part I: Storage supplier strategy in the cloud era: Dell EMC, NetApp and HPE. We snapshot the big six hardware makers, as they take things to the cloud and as-a-service models  Continue Reading

• Data warehouse storage: Has cloud made on-premise obsolete?

  There once was no alternative to building a data warehouse on-premise, but with cloud providers targeting analytics, building data warehouses on-site is looking obsolete  Continue Reading

• Backup appliances the hot topic for Pas-de-Calais fire brigade

  With requirements for strict, long-duration backup and archiving, French fire brigade set out to replace optical media with a StorageCraft appliance and disaster-proof storage  Continue Reading

• Anti-money laundering technology must operate in a collaborative ecosystem

  With new technologies making it easier for banks to spot money laundering activity, we look at why the problem persists at scale, finding that ecosystems and collaborative processes need to be built  Continue Reading

• Containers for a post-pandemic IT architecture

  One of the positive effects of Covid-19 is that it has put IT at the top of the business agenda – and containerisation is part of that strategy  Continue Reading

• How colocation fits alongside a cloud-native architecture

  IT departments are on a cloud-native roadmap to become more agile, but they are constrained by the risks involved in migrating core systems and data  Continue Reading

• Data lake storage: Cloud vs on-premise data lakes

  The data lake is a fundamental concept of data management. But what type of storage do you need to build a data lake on and what are the pros and cons of on-premise vs the cloud?  Continue Reading

• APAC career guide: How to become a DevOps engineer

  A DevOps career can be highly rewarding, as long as you are open to learning new things and collaborating with team mates to solve problems in software development  Continue Reading

• Cloud DR from the Big Three: Who’s best at what?

  We look at cloud disaster recovery from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google to see which is best for provision of turnkey solutions, breadth of portfolio and modular building blocks  Continue Reading

• Five key points about cloud vs in-house disaster recovery

  The cloud is well suited as a disaster recovery failover option. The key questions are about what you should keep on-site and what goes to the cloud. We look at five key points to consider  Continue Reading

• A safe bet: How Covid-19 is fuelling investor interest in the datacentre industry

  With demand for cloud and colocation capacity soaring on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic, datacentres are looking like an increasingly attractive bet for the investor community. Computer Weekly finds out why  Continue Reading

• How AI is helping to drive business process optimisation

  Automating an inefficient process simply leads to a faster inefficient process. Artificial intelligence needs to be deployed to ensure business processes are optimal  Continue Reading

• Unified file and object storage: The best of both worlds?

  Unified file and object storage tackles growing volumes of unstructured data in a way that’s compatible with traditional and cloud-era applications, and friendlier to analytics  Continue Reading

• How the supply chain is handling Covid-19

  Cost-cutting habits have left supply chains chasing their tails in the wake of the pandemic. We take a look at how they’re coping  Continue Reading

• Supporting mobile workers everywhere

  With VPNs struggling to serve the unprecedented number of remote workers, we look at other ways of providing reliable remote networking  Continue Reading

• Top five ways to benefit from tape today

  We look at the benefits that tape can bring, including in backup and recovery, long-term and ‘warm’ archiving, compliance and WORM use cases and ‘air gapping’ to protect data  Continue Reading

• Coding within company constraints

  We find out how containerised microservices and automated testing, combined with effective collaboration and communication, can drive innovation  Continue Reading

• Portrait of the software developer as an artist

  Many programmers see themselves as artists – of a sort. Computer Weekly investigates what it means to be a modern software developer  Continue Reading

• How to achieve resilience – the modern uptime trinity

  IT leaders can take responsibility for ensuring their organisations are resilient during times of crisis. There are no quick fixes, but if you think it is expensive to ensure resilience in your IT systems, try frequent failure instead  Continue Reading

• Five on-premise and cloud options for network-attached storage

  We look at five options for file access storage, from ‘traditional’ NAS in a standalone appliance to distributed hybrid cloud file storage and NAS cloud gateways  Continue Reading

• Storage pros and cons: Block vs file vs object storage

  Despite the many changes in storage, there are still some fundamentals that hold true. We look at the key defining characteristics and use cases of block, file and object storage  Continue Reading

• APAC hybrid cloud adoption still cloudy

  Although there are clear benefits of hybrid cloud, enterprises in Asia-Pacific aren’t making the most of them due to a lack of holistic understanding, strategic frameworks and skillsets  Continue Reading

• Auditing for algorithmic discrimination

  Despite the abundance of decision-making algorithms with social impacts, many companies are not conducting specific audits for bias and discrimination that can help mitigate their potentially negative consequences  Continue Reading

• Cloud flash storage: SSD options from AWS, Azure and GCP

  We look at the flash storage options available from the big three cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform – that can help narrow the gap between on-site and cloud workloads  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage 101: File, block and object storage in the cloud

  We run the rule over file, block and object storage from the big three public cloud providers: AWS, Azure and GCP. We look at what’s on offer and the use cases they are aimed at  Continue Reading

• Mainframe storage: Three players in a market that’s here to stay

  Far from disappearing, the mainframe market and the storage it needs is here to stay for some time. The three key array makers compete with high-end flash-equipped products  Continue Reading

• What are the security priorities for the post-coronavirus world?

  The Covid-19 pandemic is forcing massive change across the business world and things may never go back to normal. What does security look like in this new world, and what will buyers be prioritising?  Continue Reading

• Public sector IT: The road to digital

  Progress to digital transformation is patchy in the public sector, but some CIOs are embracing the strategy  Continue Reading

• How to overcome application modernisation barriers

  Most businesses are not lucky enough to be able to build a new cloud native architecture. We look at how to take legacy applications forward  Continue Reading

• Applications: Combining the old with the new

  We look at how organisations can integrate legacy applications with newer digital platforms  Continue Reading

• NAS backup: Which suppliers have gone post-NDMP?

  NAS backup with NDMP has many drawbacks so some vendors have moved to a data management approach that tracks changes and allows for incremental forever protection  Continue Reading

• What are the drivers for application modernisation?

  Application modernisation is not something that just happens, nor is it just driven by digitisation and cloud-first strategies  Continue Reading

• Coronavirus: How app developers large and small are working to help fight Covid-19

  Computer Weekly looks at how a range of actors are using technology to help mitigate the various impacts caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak  Continue Reading

• Computational storage: What is it and what are its key use cases?

  Computational storage brings the CPU to the storage and so boosts system performance by tackling processing tasks, such as near the edge or in AI/machine learning workloads  Continue Reading

• Networking gains ‘cool’ status

  There is renewed interest in networking, driven by enterprises looking at how public cloud services can co-exist with on-premise IT  Continue Reading

• Molotov.tv streams 24/7 with Dell EMC and Scality object storage

  France-based Molotov.tv has offered streaming TV services on digital platforms since 2016, based on Dell EMC servers with GPU acceleration and Scality Ring object storage  Continue Reading

• Three network technologies driven by cloud-native computing

  Networking technologies are being driven heavily by digitisation and cloud computing. Gartner picks three networking trends to watch  Continue Reading

• Cache vs tier: What’s the difference between cache and storage?

  We look at the key distinctions between cache and tiers of storage, and where the line has become blurred with fast flash, 3D Xpoint and storage class memory technologies  Continue Reading

• The future of open source licences is changing

  The Open Source Insider blog on Computer Weekly recently asked industry experts for their views on the future of open source licensing  Continue Reading

• Trusty methods to keep out intruders

  Today’s hyper-connected world means trust can no longer be taken for granted to keep networks secure – enter the zero-trust model  Continue Reading

• Industrial edge requires a focus on machines

  After the office edge and the mobile edge comes the industrial edge. We look at a shift in computing paradigms  Continue Reading

• Big storage meets cloud in the datacentre 'as-a-service' revolution

  Cloud is mainstream but the datacentre’s here to stay. This has resulted in a trend towards as-a-service in the datacentre where big storage array makers and the cloud giants meet  Continue Reading

• DRaaS decisions: Key choices in disaster recovery as a service

  We examine the key decisions when considering DRaaS. Whether to go full self-service, assisted or managed will depend on what you need to protect and your in-house resources  Continue Reading

• Life on the edge: A new world for data

  Edge computing is regarded as the next frontier for data, with rapid growth expected in the market. We assess the prospects  Continue Reading

• Top 10 storage deployment stories of 2019

  Here are ComputerWeekly’s top 10 storage deployment stories for 2019, which see quite a move away from traditional SAN and NAS to hyper-converged, software-defined storage and object storage  Continue Reading

• Deliver quality software at speed with CI/CD

  Continuous integration and delivery promises a remarkable acceleration in software development, but some basics need to be in place to ensure success  Continue Reading

• Changes in the CI/CD pipeline

  Continuous integration/continuous delivery is responsible for pushing out a set of “isolated changes” to an existing application. We look at how big these changes can be  Continue Reading

• How Sporting Group tackles the Rugby World Cup

  Sporting Group has readied its system monitoring to ensure the technology is able to cope with the huge demand for bets during the Rugby World Cup final  Continue Reading

• Key differences between cloud storage offerings

  Cloud storage offerings are often largely similar. We run through the key areas where they can differ, such as location, range of services and data protection  Continue Reading

• Data storage: The top five storage deployment pitfalls

  Key pitfalls in data storage include silos, under-utilisation, backup and disaster recovery, plus neglect of skills and application requirements. We ask analysts how to avoid them  Continue Reading

• Putting blockchain technology to good use

  Experts share their views on the best and most effective ways information security professionals can use blockchain technology  Continue Reading

• Top five cloud storage pitfalls

  Cloud storage offers apparent simplicity, but unexpected costs, complexity, data movement and integration challenges can arise. We look at how to avoid common cloud storage pitfalls  Continue Reading

• Inside blockchain and its various applications

  We explore the technology around blockchain shaping how businesses use data  Continue Reading