In Depth

In Depth

Server hardware

• 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

• CW@50: 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

• CW@50: 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

• CW@50: 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

• CW@50: 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

• How Amsterdam crowdsourced environmental monitoring with the IoT

  Amsterdam launched an IoT project to crowdsource local air quality measurement. While it faced a lot of hurdles in the project, it is implementing it on a wider scale based on the lessons learnt  Continue Reading

• What's causing Poland's datacentre market to flourish?

  The Polish datacentre market, although still in its early phases of development, is worth more than 1bn Polish zloty  Continue Reading

• Cloud, frozen pizza model and the immutable infrastructure

  The architecture pattern for immutable infrastructure is based on the made-to-order pizza model  Continue Reading

• How cloud companies are engaging in price wars

  Cloud prices are coming down, which is great news for organisations taking their first steps into using public cloud services  Continue Reading

• Intel is making waves in the growing microserver market

  Analysts predict the microserver market will account for more than 10% of the server market by 2016. But what progress is x86 heavyweight Intel making in the field  Continue Reading

• The internet of things is coming: Is your datacentre ready?

  Gartner estimates the IoT will see 26 billion units installed by 2020 – channelling huge volumes of data traffic into datacentres  Continue Reading

• Harnessing the power of cloud with VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC)

  Firms planning an SDDC strategy need a tool to manage, automate and orchestrate their IT - such as VMware vCloud Automation Centre  Continue Reading

• Enterprises, scientists and academics turn to public cloud for HPC

  Organisations are starting to use supercomputers on demand via public cloud to access HPC capabilities  Continue Reading

• Micro-datacentre: What IT problems it solves and what workload systems suit it

  A micro-datacentre is a smaller containerised datacentre system designed to solve different problems or to handle different workloads  Continue Reading

• Will silicon photonics replace copper cabling in mainstream datacentres?

  Silicon photonics can increase bandwidth in servers, improve data transfer speeds and reduce complexity. But are datacentres ready for it?  Continue Reading

• CIO Interview: Chris Birch, IT Director, News UK

  Chris Birch, News UK's IT director talks about how the company adopted a cloud-first strategy to support business innovation  Continue Reading

• Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust secures government backing for £6m IT modernisation programme

  CIO interview: Joanna Smith, CIO. Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust  Continue Reading

• Erasure coding vs Raid as a data protection method

  Erasure coding is mooted as a potential successor to Raid and backup software  Continue Reading

• Get datacentre cooling under control

  Reviewing existing datacentre cooling designs and exploring new ones for efficiency may not be as hard as you think. Here's how  Continue Reading

• Flash hits the motherboard with memory channel storage

  Memory channel storage puts flash storage into the DIMM slots on servers, offering unprecedented speed of access to hot data. Who’s making it and what are the pros and cons?  Continue Reading

• Can the mainframe remain relevant in the cloud and mobile era?

  IBM mainframes run more than 1.1m transactions per second, yet the mainframe has remained largely unfashionable. We investigate  Continue Reading

• No more email? Why companies are turning to collaboration technology

  Collaboration technologies are helping companies improve their employees' work-life balance  Continue Reading

• How to navigate the IT supplier jungle

  Being a CIO is interesting and satisfying, but there is a relentless pressure on them to improve  Continue Reading

• How the datacentre market has evolved in 12 months

  The increasing interest in co-location, hosting and cloud has led to murmurings around the death of in-house datacentres  Continue Reading

• Optimising application performance with flash storage

  At a Computer Weekly roundtable, IT leaders heard how Cancer Research UK achieved a 30% improvement in application performance  Continue Reading

• Make a high-performance computing and high-availability datacentre

  High performance computing and high availability systems are no longer limited to engineers and scientists. But is your datacentre ready?  Continue Reading

• How Capgemini keeps its Merlin datacentre green and energy-efficient

  Capgemini's Swindon-based Merlin datacentre is one of the most energy-efficient in the world. But what makes it green?  Continue Reading