In Depth

In Depth

Object storage

• From capex to opex: Storage procurement options bloom

  We look at the growing list of possibilities when it comes to paying for storage infrastructure, ranging from upfront purchases with upgrades to pure pay-as-you-go options  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage: Key storage specifications

  We look at the key specs in cloud storage, including availability – such as five nines – bandwidth, IOPS and latency, capacity and tiering functionality, egress charges and security  Continue Reading

• How to get structure from unstructured data

  We look at how to gain structure from unstructured data, via AI/ML analytics to create new records, selecting object data via SQL and storing unstructured files in NoSQL formats  Continue Reading

• Is object storage good for databases?

  We look at object storage vs block access SAN storage and ask if object storage can be used for database workloads, or is it just good for bulk storage of analytics datasets?  Continue Reading

• Unstructured data storage – on-prem vs cloud vs hybrid

  We look at storage for unstructured data on-premise, in the cloud and across multiple locations. There are advantages to a hybrid approach, but there can be hidden costs, too  Continue Reading

• 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

• 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

• Unified file and object storage: Three suppliers and their approaches

  We look at unified file and object storage products from NetApp, Pure Storage and Scality, the differences, the workloads aimed at, and how unified they actually are  Continue Reading

• Four obstacles to hybrid cloud storage – and possible solutions

  We look at obstacles to hybrid cloud storage, such as complexity, a need for object storage, application suitability, and cost, with potential ways to mitigate the problems  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

• 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

• Five key points on file locking vs object locking

  We look at file vs object storage locking mechanisms, how different forms of storage ensure data consistency, and especially how object storage is tackling the challenge  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

• 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

• How open source is shaping data storage management

  Open source data storage offers a great deal of flexibility, but unlocking its benefits will require strong technical resources to meet requirements such as stability, high availability and security  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage data residency: How to achieve compliance

  There’s a conflict between cloud storage and the need to comply with local laws and regulations. We look at cloud data location, data residency, data sovereignty and data adequacy  Continue Reading

• Object storage: How research institute got 850TB for €150,000

  French scientific research institute had its budgets cut and to meet the new cost constraints, it settled on Swarm software-defined object storage from DataCore  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

• APAC expert guide to storage management

  In this expert guide to storage management in Asia-Pacific, we unpack the developments shaping storage management and key strategies to extract business value from data  Continue Reading

• French Caisse uses NetApp to move backups to object storage

  State financial arm wanted to move backups held on NAS file-based storage to object storage, so stuck with NetApp StorageGRID and achieved near-seamless migration  Continue Reading

• Dell, NetApp and Pure: Healthy results on Covid easing

  Dell’s still top of the storage supplier pile with midrange arrays doing well, but meanwhile NetApp and Pure are making gains on the rise of public cloud  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

• Briefing: Cloud storage performance metrics

  We look at some of the key storage performance metrics that determine what your applications will get from cloud storage, plus cloud essentials that are beyond simple measurement  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

• Cloud storage APIs: What are they and what can be done with them?

  We look at the kinds of application programming interfaces (APIs) available to expose cloud storage to applications, from SME-targeted solutions to higher-end hooks  Continue Reading

• Storage performance metrics: Five key areas to look at

  We look at the essentials in storage performance metrics: capacity, throughput and read/write capability, IOPS and latency, and hardware longevity measured by failure rates  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Five key points about unstructured data storage on-prem and cloud

  We look at unstructured data, the myriad forms of data it comprises and the key storage options available, which include NAS and object storage on-prem and in the cloud  Continue Reading

• Five key benefits of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud file storage

  The big three offer cloud file storage that can ease hybrid cloud operations, with consistency between cloud and on-premise as well as greater enterprise application compatibility  Continue Reading

• APAC buyer’s guide to data management

  In this buyer’s guide, we look at the challenges surrounding why enterprises are struggling to deal with data, the use of cloud data management platforms, artificial intelligence, and recommend some best practices  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

• Erasure coding vs RAID: Data protection in the cloud era

  Erasure coding has come to prominence with its use in object storage and, by extension, in the cloud. We run the rule over its pros and cons vs RAID data protection  Continue Reading

• A peek into the future of storage

  Flash-based storage is here to stay and will continue to be enhanced, even as helium and DNA are being primed for use in the distant future  Continue Reading

• Storage analytics: How AI helps storage management

  We look at storage analytics products that measure key metrics in storage hardware, single-vendor and multi-vendor tools, and how AI-based storage management and AIOps is emerging  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

• Decision points in storage for artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data

  Artificial intelligence and machine learning storage is not one-size-fits-all. Analytics work differs, and has varied storage requirements for capacity, latency, throughput and IOPS. We look at key decision points  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage 101: NAS file storage on AWS, Azure and GCP

  We look at NAS file storage options in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. All three offer native-based and NetApp-based file storage, with Azure adding single namespace cache services  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

• High-performance object storage: What’s driving it?

  Object storage is getting its performance on to meet the needs of content delivery, analytics and IoT use cases while enabled by rapid flash storage media and other tech advances  Continue Reading

• Multicloud storage 101: Pros, cons, pitfalls and strategies

  Not putting all your eggs in one basket can be helpful to an enterprise’s resilience strategy. We look at multicloud storage and the benefits and pitfalls it brings  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

• Do you use cloud storage for these use cases yet?

  We look at the use cases most suited to a quick transition to the cloud: backup, archiving, disaster recovery, file storage and cloud bursting – cloud storage’s low-hanging fruit  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

• Storage and DevOps: What is required for agile development?

  DevOps brings continuous and agile application. Storage has to fit in and make itself just as responsive to development that does away with the inertia of stifling hierarchies  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

• Scale-out NAS hits the spot for large datasets, AI and machine learning

  Despite the rise of cloud and object storage, scale-out NAS is a key choice for the big datasets increasingly prevalent in artificial intelligence and machine learning scenarios  Continue Reading

• On-premise object storage: Key products and use cases

  We run the rule over on-premise object storage, key use cases and suppliers, take a closer look at an organisation that has deployed object storage, and assess cloud compatibility  Continue Reading

• Docker backup: Deciding what to protect and how

  Docker is a simplified form of virtualisation whose popularity has rocketed. We look at the key decisions about what parts of Docker you need to backup and how to do it  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage and its main cost components

  We run through the main items charged for by the big cloud storage providers, such as capacity, storage type, transactions, data egress, networks and data protection  Continue Reading

• APAC buyer’s guide to NVMe storage

  NVMe storage is becoming popular among Asia-Pacific enterprises that want to reduce latency and speed up application performance  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage 101: Cloud gateways for hybrid cloud connectivity

  Two of the big three public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure – offer gateway on-ramps that can speed the deployment of hybrid cloud operations for SME and remote office locations  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Object storage in the big three public clouds

  We look at the object storage services of the big three cloud providers – Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage – and how customers can achieve compatibility between them  Continue Reading

• Cloud-era backup appliances aim at hybrid content platform

  While traditional backup apps evolve to meet the cloud via S3 and Azure, a new breed of backup appliances aims to build a single environment across cloud and on-premise  Continue Reading

• Career choices for storage admins as technologies converge

  There is collateral damage in datacentre convergence, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for storage administrators to stick with storage-centric skillsets. Two solutions exist  Continue Reading

• Australia and New Zealand gear up for storage analytics

  Despite the marketing wars, ANZ is ahead of the adoption curve for storage analytics, which promises to alleviate storage management woes  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Structured data and its storage needs

  Structured data is declining as a proportion of all data but its importance to business applications and its organised nature make its storage requirements very specific  Continue Reading

• Top 10 cloud storage stories of 2018

  Top trends in cloud storage in 2018 included key enablers of hybrid- and multi-cloud such as native cloud storage, array makers’ cloud appliances and distributed file systems  Continue Reading

• OpenStack storage update 2018: After Rocky

  Snapshots and container storage support are among recently added functionality in the open source private cloud platform, but vendor driver support for OpenStack is not universal  Continue Reading

• Flash storage in the cloud from the big cloud providers

  We survey the big three cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google – and find a range of mostly block storage flash storage options with performance choices available  Continue Reading

• How the big five storage array makers tier data to the cloud

  We look at the big five storage array makers' efforts to connect on-premise hardware with cloud storage and find automated tiering, on-ramps, and backup and archive capability  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage: Amazon vs Azure vs Google vs IBM Softlayer

  Computer Weekly looks at the biggest four cloud storage providers, how they stand in the market, the products they offer, and which offers the widest range of products and features  Continue Reading

• Cloud NAS offers file access across on-site and in-cloud

  We run the rule over cloud NAS products that allow customers to build single-namespace file systems, including between in-house datacentres and public cloud storage  Continue Reading

• Flash vs 3D Xpoint vs storage-class memory: Which ones go where?

  New media provide a range of options to speed workloads, from “old-fashioned” flash to storage class- and persistent memory. We help you exploit the storage performance hierarchy  Continue Reading

• Software-defined storage: Startups bring innovation to SDS

  We survey the startup suppliers pioneering new approaches to software-defined storage, including block, file and object, and VM and container-oriented approaches  Continue Reading

• Object storage is inching into Australian enterprises

  Even as Aussie firms such as Bauer Media and Redbubble are lapping up object storage, others are facing visibility and analytics issues with the technology  Continue Reading

• Who needs hybrid cloud object storage?

  Hybrid cloud object storage products are an emerging category. But what use cases are driving their emergence? And which suppliers lead the way?  Continue Reading

• Hybrid cloud file and object pushes the frontiers of storage

  A single environment across on-premise and cloud environments is possible with a new class of product that builds file systems and object stores with hybrid cloud  Continue Reading

• Storage briefing: The evolution of software-defined storage

  The evolution of software-defined storage, from simple software products to those that offer scale-out, hyper-converged, NVMe, public cloud and container functionality  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Object storage vs block vs file

  We recap the key attributes of file and block storage access and the pros and cons of object storage, a method that offers key benefits but also drawbacks compared with SAN and NAS  Continue Reading

• Hybrid cloud 101: Using the cloud as a storage tier

  We look at what’s possible when it comes to hybrid cloud, what types of data and what hybrid cloud architectures can combine on-premise and cloud storage capacity  Continue Reading

• Software-defined storage: The pros and cons, and what is available

  Software-defined storage is a rapidly rising trend in the datacentre, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of building your own storage, and is it suitable for all organisations?  Continue Reading

• Amazon S3 storage 101: Object storage in the cloud

  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has emerged as a de facto standard for accessing data in the cloud. We run the rule over S3, its key attributes and what you need to know to use it with your applications  Continue Reading

• NAS vs object: Which one for large volumes of unstructured data?

  Both NAS and object storage offer highly scalable file storage for large volumes of unstructured data, but which is right for your environment?  Continue Reading

• Object storage: Cloud vs in-house

  Object storage is a rising star in data storage, especially for cloud and web use. But what are the pros and cons of cloud object storage or building in-house?  Continue Reading

• Flash in NAS file access storage: Does it need it – and, if so, how much?

  While flash is rapidly going mainstream for primary storage with the all-flash datacentre, does NAS file access storage need flash – and, if so, how much?  Continue Reading

• VMware vs OpenStack: How they handle storage

  The opportunities and challenges presented by the two virtualisation environments when it comes to storage, backup and disaster recovery.  Continue Reading

• OpenStack Manila: File access storage for the open source cloud

  OpenStack Manila is the file level access method in development by the open source cloud platform. What is it, how does it work and when will it be ready?  Continue Reading

• Scale-out NAS product survey: The big six

  We survey the big six storage array makers’ scale-out NAS product ranges  Continue Reading

• Big players target object storage at cloud and archive

  All but one of the big six storage vendors have object storage products that target public and private cloud environments and/or archiving use cases  Continue Reading

• Backup vs replication, snapshots, CDP in data protection strategy

  Best practice data protection strategy combines backup with snapshots, CDP and replication for different levels of recovery  Continue Reading

• Object-based storage promises scalability and flexibility for static, unstructured data needs

  Object storage gets rid of traditional file system hierarchies and puts in place a flat access structure that provides a good basis for hugely scalable unstructured data access.  Continue Reading