In Depth

In Depth

Server hardware

• Finland moves to industrialise quantum computing

  For the Finnish government, now is the time to start preparing for the day when quantum computers will have practical value  Continue Reading

• New supercomputer opens doors for researchers in Sweden

  More than twice as powerful as its predecessor, a new supercomputer ushers in new opportunities for researchers who rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• HDD support and Zoned Namespaces: Key takeaways about NVMe 2.0

  We look at new capabilities in the most recent iteration of the NVMe flash storage standard  Continue Reading

• Disaster recovery for SMEs: Five key areas to consider

  We look at key disaster recovery considerations for SMEs, including why backup is not enough, how to create a disaster recovery plan, best-practice DR testing and DR as a service  Continue Reading

• Five things you need to know about NVMe over Fabrics

  We look at NVMe-oF, which extends fast flash across the network – what it is, how it works, use cases, benefits and limitations, and the suppliers of NVMe-oF products  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Ecolabels and data sanitisation key to recycling and reusing IT assets

  Ecolabels on hardware and data sanitisation of devices are key to recycling and reusing old IT equipment respectively, helping enterprises avoid unnecessary asset destruction and contributing to increasingly high levels of electronic waste globally  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

• QLC flash storage: What it costs and its best use cases

  QLC flash brings high capacities at costs coming down close to spinning disk. So what are the use cases for QLC solid state, which make best use of its relatively low endurance  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

• Ski firm dumps ‘motley’ storage for DataCore software-defined

  Eurogroup cuts power usage by 70% and rackspace from 84U to 7U as it consolidates multiple physical servers and storage protocols onto SANsymphony software-defined storage  Continue Reading

• Five hyper-converged infrastructure use cases to watch

  We look at workloads ripe for hyper-converged infrastructure deployment. These include virtual servers and desktops, SMEs/remote offices, Kubernetes, and analytics and machine learning  Continue Reading

• Paris post-product studio uses Atempo Miria for live restores

  France-based À La Plage Studio decided on tape as a medium to store its visual production work, with Atempo ADA/Miria as a means to access and restore data to work on  Continue Reading

• RAID, flash and erasure coding: What works best with solid state?

  We look at RAID and flash to highlight key choices when it comes to drive data protection. What RAID levels work best with solid state and when is erasure coding a good choice?  Continue Reading

• Intel Optane Persistent Memory aims to fill the gap DRAM can’t

  We look at Optane and its PMem product that Intel believes will fill a big gap between memory and storage that DRAM technology just cannot deal with  Continue Reading

• Spinning disk hard drives: Good value for many use cases

  When it comes to storage media, all talk is of flash, but there are plenty of use cases where – far less costly – spinning disk can do a perfectly adequate job in the enterprise  Continue Reading

• NVMe-over Fabrics: How NVMe-oF revolutionises shared storage

  NVMe brought super-fast flash storage to the datacentre, but it needs NVMe-oF to allow it to bring the benefits of rapid access and low latency to SAN and NAS shared storage  Continue Reading

• Backup audit: What is a backup audit and why do we need them?

  Backup and recovery are vital components to protect against data loss, whether technical or causes such as ransomware. So how can a backup audit help protect our key assets?  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

• Storage 101: Replication vs backup, and synchronous vs asynchronous

  Storage 101: Can replication replace backup? What are the pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous backup? What’s the best way to mix backup and replication?  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Crash-consistent vs application-consistent snapshots

  We look at crash-consistent and application-consistent snapshots and backup, how they are defined, the pros and cons of each and the benefits and limits of Windows VSS  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

• 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

• How Oxeva delivered budget analytics with Pure Storage flash NAS

  Web hosting provider Oxeva thought the consultants were mistaken and that what suited the web giants for analytics/big data wasn’t necessarily what was needed for enterprise customers  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

• Upcoming conflict minerals regulation does not cover major technology companies

  A forthcoming regulation designed to stem the flow of conflict minerals is unlikely to change the behaviour of technology companies because loopholes in the new rules mean they are not covered  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

• Flash storage tiers: Performance, cost and use cases

  We look at performance, cost and potential use cases for the key flash storage types available, such as Nand flash, 3D Xpoint and Intel Optane, plus SAS, SATA and NVMe connectivity  Continue Reading

• Rook 101: Building software-defined containerised storage in Kubernetes

  Rook – think castles, not birds – uses the principles of containerisation and the methods used in Kubernetes to build storage that’s abstracted from the hardware it lives on  Continue Reading

• From Pixar to GovTech: The inside story of Singapore’s AI whizz

  After nearly a decade at Pixar, GovTech’s Chong Jiayi is leading a team of experts to solve hard problems in robotics and artificial intelligence  Continue Reading

• Caribbean island hospital rebuilds after hurricane with DataCore

  Hurricane Irma tore the roof off a server room and flooded IT hardware, but that was an opportunity to rebuild redundant IT using DataCore’s SANsymphony software-defined storage  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

• Five ways that backup has changed since the days of tape

  Back in the day, all this was tape, but times have changed, with cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud storage, virtual and physical backup appliances and myriad endpoint hardware  Continue Reading

• Processors re-imagined: Will cloud and AI lead mean all change in the datacentre?

  We look at the changes cloud-native platforms and artificial intelligence could bring about in the datacentre.  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

• How to buy hyper-converged infrastructure

  Simplicity, high availability, scalability and reduced cost are among the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure. We survey the benefits, pitfalls and the key suppliers  Continue Reading

• Figeac Aero manages growth with DataCore software-defined storage

  Global roll-out sees DataCore software-defined storage deployed on Huawei hardware to HQ and 14 worldwide sites as aero parts maker copes with acquisition and expansion  Continue Reading

• NVMe-over-TCP brings super-fast flash over standard IP networks

  TCP is the latest transport protocol that can be used to connect NVMe flash storage. We explain how NVMe-over-TCP works and the key advantages for datacentre customers  Continue Reading

• What is QLC flash and what workloads it is good for?

  QLC flash offers low per-gigabyte costs and lots of capacity, but can be limited by endurance and I/O performance. It can be a good disk replacement for several workloads, however  Continue Reading

• Is NVMe flash the right choice for you?

  NVMe flash storage boosts performance for I/O-hungry operations, but how does it work, where can organisations best deploy it, and what are the key uses cases where it can make a difference?  Continue Reading

• How to deploy NVMe flash storage for artificial intelligence

  We run the rule over NVMe flash as a storage choice for AI applications and the key decision points in form factor and hardware specification  Continue Reading

• The pitfalls of hyper-converged infrastructure and how to avoid them

  Hyper-converged infrastructure can be an easy win when it comes to datacentre infrastructure upgrades, but there are pitfalls. We discuss how best you can sidestep them  Continue Reading

• French baby store modernises backup as Veeam handles 150TB a night

  France-based maternity, baby and children’s store Orchestra needed to share IT resources between 700 points of sale across multiple time zones, and backup for 100 applications  Continue Reading

• Enterprise HPC: Why HPE is buying Cray

  HPE’s decision to acquire supercomputing pioneer Cray for $1.3bn serves to highlight the growing importance of high-performance computing (HPC) deployments in the enterprise market  Continue Reading

• SAN vs NAS vs hyper-converged for virtual machine storage

  The pros and cons of file and block access storage arrays vs the new breed of all-in-one server/storage architecture for storage of virtual machine systems and data  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure vs NAS and SAN shared storage

  Can compute, storage and networks in one box be a better option than shared storage? And which organisations can most benefit from it, and for what scale of deployment?  Continue Reading

• NVMe startups’ different routes to flash performance gains

  NVMe offers huge flash performance benefits, but no one is quite sure how to overcome the challenges that brings and startups are trying several different approaches  Continue Reading

• Cloud the rising star of storage: Eight years of text analysis

  Tracking word frequency in nearly a decade’s worth of storage content shows how cloud has come of age, flash has gone mainstream and how we don’t talk about virtualisation any more  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

• NVMe is fast flash storage, but big five suppliers take it slowly

  NVMe flash offers blistering performance gains but so far the big five storage array makers have tended to opt for gradual implementations rather than radical new architectures  Continue Reading

• What is storage-class memory and what is it used for?

  HPE has announced the availability of storage-class memory in its products and other array makers are expect to follow. So what does SCM do for analytics-centred workloads?  Continue Reading

• NVMe over Fabrics brings benefits of NVMe to shared storage

  NVMe over Fabrics – with NVMe carried over Fibre Channel, Ethernet, Infiniband and other protocols – could revolutionise shared storage. We look at how the market is shaping up  Continue Reading

• Intel Optane DIMM aims at persistent storage on the motherboard

  Intel to make 3D Xpoint flash available to applications in a tier below RAM and above storage, with in-memory databases, analytics and high performance computing set to benefit  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: The final flash generation? QLC vs MLC, TLC, SLC

  QLC flash products have arrived in the market, but with a limited performance profile, has NAND flash come up against the realities of the physics that make it possible?  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

• Storage class memory set to upset hardware architectures

  Storage class memory and persistent memory products are set to add a layer of superfast storage media between bulk drives and memory, pushing performance to five million IOPS  Continue Reading

• DR 101: The disaster recovery plan and disaster recovery strategy

  We walk through the key steps and essential building blocks required to develop a disaster recovery strategy and how to write a disaster recovery plan  Continue Reading

• Disaggregated systems try to unlock the NVMe conundrum

  NVMe can unlock the true potential of flash, but storage controllers put a bottleneck back in the I/O path. We look at how suppliers are trying to solve the problem  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure 2018 technology and market survey

  We look at the latest in hyper-converged infrastructure – server and storage hardware nodes that can be built into scale-out clusters – and the players in the market  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

• The death of the mainframe is greatly exaggerated, says CA

  With mainframe software tools forming a key part of its overall growth strategy, CA Technologies remains proud of its mainframe heritage  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure and disaster recovery

  Hyper-converged infrastructure products merge server, storage and hypervisor in scale-out nodes, so how can functionality in HCI products help deliver disaster recovery?  Continue Reading

• OpenStack vs hyper-converged: Open-source cloud in the datacentre

  We look at how to deploy OpenStack on hyper-converged infrastructure and how HCI suppliers’ products can support deployment of the open-source cloud in the datacentre  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged choices: DIY HCI software deployments

  What are the advantages of do-it-yourself hyper-converged infrastructure deployment and who are the key suppliers of HCI software? We run the rule over the DIY hyper-converged market  Continue Reading

• Datacentre decisions: Converged vs hyper-converged infrastructure

  Converged and hyper-converged infrastructure are ready-tested ways to put compute and storage into the datacentre. But which should you choose for your deployment?  Continue Reading

• NVMe flash storage: What are the deployment options?

  NVMe offers to unleash performance potential of flash storage that is held back by spinning disk-era SAS and SATA protocols. We run through the key NVMe deployment options  Continue Reading

• Backup testing: What to test, when to test, how often to test

  We run the rule over what’s involved in backup testing in virtual and physical server environments, how often you should test and the key pitfalls to avoid  Continue Reading

• Time to restore from backup: Do you know where your data is?

  Making a backup is only the start of the process. You must be sure you can restore, that backups contain what you need, and that they will work with the applications that need them  Continue Reading

• Storage performance 101: Server, array and fabric/network basics

  We look at the key performance attributes of storage media in use today, and the choices and basic tuning steps you can take to get the most from your storage  Continue Reading

• Storage 101: Queue depth, NVMe and the array controller

  We look at queue depth and fan-out and fan-in ratios. With NVMe they could become a thing of the past, but for now there’s still a bottleneck at the storage array controller  Continue Reading

• Storage briefing: NVMe vs SATA and SAS

  NVMe brings blistering performance gains over existing HDD-era disk protocols, and is a straight swap-in for PCIe server-side flash with array and hyper-converged products on the way  Continue Reading

• Using cross-industry collaboration on open standards to address big data in the datacentre

  Efforts are under away across the industry to create open standards to ensure datacentre hardware is equipped to cope with the amounts of information datacentres are required to process in real time  Continue Reading

• On-premise IT still the only way to run certain tasks

  How to augment a public cloud strategy with on-premise IT by running workloads in a private cloud and bursting to the public cloud  Continue Reading

• Hyper-converged infrastructure product survey: The big names

  In the concluding part of a two-part survey, Computer Weekly looks at the offerings of the big players – Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HPE, VMware – in the hyper-converged infrastructure market  Continue Reading

• It makes sense to go hyperscale/hyper-converged

  Hyperscale computing and storage are the norm for web giants. Hyper-converged scenarios make it possible for small and medium-sized enterprises to gain the advantages of combined server/storage nodes  Continue Reading

• PCIe SSD: Cache vs storage tier

  Adding PCIe flash is a popular way of speeding up application response times, with more rapid I/O guaranteed, but should PCIe SSD be added as cache or as a tier of storage?  Continue Reading

• [email protected]: How UK home brew gave computing to the masses

  From batch processing to the graphical user interface, from desktop PCs to smartphones, from luggables to wearables, computing has come a long way since Computer Weekly was first published in 1966. We look at some of the personal computers that ...  Continue Reading

• [email protected]: Storage – From punched cards to flash and the cloud

  Since the launch of Computer Weekly in 1966, we have moved from a world of punched cards and paper tape to one where flash and the cloud have revolutionised data storage  Continue Reading

• [email protected]: From ICL to ITIL

  Standardisation helps industries to grow. Here in the UK, a number of highly influential standards emerged that have become building blocks for the modern computer industry  Continue Reading

• [email protected]: The heyday of British computing - how the Brits ruled IT

  We examine how the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s became an age of great innovation for the British computer industry  Continue Reading

• How Verne Global tackled the Icelandic datacentre connectivity gap

  The wide availability of renewable energy has made Iceland an attractive location for datacentre operators, increasing demand for global network connections to the country  Continue Reading

• Welsh Water billing replacement programme offers customers new tariffs

  Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) scooped a Computer Weekly award for a billing replacement programme for which it was its own systems integrator  Continue Reading

• Case study: Open University uses Microsoft Azure to create course content clearance hub

  The Open University recently scooped the award for Best Cloud Project at the CW European User Awards, and here's why  Continue Reading

• UK datacentre growth trends: Why are users shunning inner-city facilities?

  Research suggests inner cities are falling out of favour with datacentre developers, with cost-sensitive users willing to look further afield for co-location services  Continue Reading

• ARM wrestles its way into the datacentre with the help of 64-bit chips

  Intel x86 technology has traditionally ruled the datacentre roost, but could the power consumption benefits of ARM 64-bit systems change all that?  Continue Reading

• The reinvention of Dell: What it must do next to succeed

  Two years after going private, Dell still has some work to do to educate the enterprise about what it has to offer  Continue Reading

• Build in resilience to simplify workloads with hybrid cloud

  Hybrid cloud offers benefits of hosted applications and offloading manual tasks but beware latency and outages in mission-critical functions  Continue Reading

• Why 2015 won't be the year of software-defined everything

  With the technical and market parameters of SDE still taking shape, CIOs are in no rush to adopt, despite the hype going into overdrive  Continue Reading

• Software defined everything: Throwing more software into the mix

  In theory, the move to software-defined everything makes sense. What are the practicalities of the "SD" approach?  Continue Reading

• Time is running out for Windows Server 2003 migration

  Support for Windows Server 2003 will end next year, but careful planning can ease operating system migration  Continue Reading

• Managing risk after support for Windows Server 2003 ends

  With Microsoft due to end support for Windows Server 2003 in July 2015, we look at best practice for migration  Continue Reading