Opinion

Opinion

Storage management and strategy

• Storage: How ‘tail latency’ impacts customer-facing applications

  Henry He of Virtual Instruments looks at tail latency, the small percentage of storage I/O that could be causing big and costly problems for business applications  Continue Reading

• As data volumes grow, backup needs analytics, says StorageCraft CEO

  Backup appliance maker’s CEO says backup needs analytics so customers can prioritise restore of critical data in a world where volumes increase by 50% a year  Continue Reading

• HPE's Simplivity purchase keeps hyper-convergence in the spotlight

  Hyper-converged infrastructure is well and truly mainstream. 451 Research finds hyper-converged all set to become the number one platform for core datacentre workloads  Continue Reading

• IT transformation brings storage transformation

  IT departments’ moves away from specialised skills to generalist skillsets are fuelling the rise of easy-to-use hyper-converged infrastructure and all-flash storage systems  Continue Reading

• Enterprise NAS performance challenges and how to resolve them

  NAS storage can be used for mission critical workloads but NFS-based storage comes with performance challenges. Jim Bahn of Virtual Instruments outlines the main ones  Continue Reading

• Solid state storage in the datacentre: More than a flash in the pan

  As IT organisations transform their datacentres to meet the efficiency and agility demands of the digital enterprise, flash storage is increasingly viewed as a key element  Continue Reading

• Is your storage ready for the future?

  Research study looks at the challenge of building a storage infrastructure to meet the rapidly changing needs of business  Continue Reading

• Software-defined storage: a proxy for storage transformation

  Software-defined storage reflects important trends that affect storage, such as increasing separation between hardware and software  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage: A threat to entry-level/mid-range storage arrays?

  There are some big obstacles to cloud storage adoption at the moment, but these are likely to diminish over time. Will that spell the end for low- and mid-range array suppliers?  Continue Reading

• Scale-out set to eclipse scale-up for enterprise storage

  Analysing the advantages of scale-out storage and why loosely-coupled grids will make scale-up storage architecture a thing of the past  Continue Reading

• Cloud storage needs an audit process to stay compliant

  If you use a cloud service, where does your data reside, and do you know if you’re fully compliant with laws and regulations? A cloud compliance audit is what’s required  Continue Reading

• IT may not have to worry about mobile device backup

  Analyst Charles Brett offers some advice for IT departments on backing up data from mobile devices, tablets and smartphones,  Continue Reading

• Nirvanix failure – a blow to the cloud storage model?

  Cloud storage firm Nirvanix has given customers a deadline to retrieve their data. Are the reasons for its failure specific to Nirvanix or a real blow to cloud storage overall?  Continue Reading

• Four key questions in disaster recovery planning

  The answers to four key questions will tell you if your organisation’s disaster recovery planning is up to the job  Continue Reading

• The data fragmentation challenge

  Few organisations have policies to guide where data should and should not be stored. The result: data fragmentation  Continue Reading

• Is it time for object storage to shine?

  Object storage is a great fit for very large, unstructured datasets, and with big data and cloud use cases. So, what is holding up adoption of this promising technology?  Continue Reading

• The I/O blender means enterprise flash is here to stay

  451 Group analyst Simon Robinson explains why enterprise flash is worthy of its hype and will consign HDDs to the background  Continue Reading

• Software-defined storage: The reality beneath the hype

  The rise of storage software and APIs on commodity hardware means there is something in the idea of software-defined storage.  Continue Reading

• 2013: a year of software-defined storage, convergence and cloud

  Simon Robinson of 451 Research says storage optimisation is the watchword of 2013, with software-defined storage, convergence and cloud also key trends  Continue Reading

• The storage startups’ war of the flea against big vendors

  Storage startups constantly wage war against the big storage vendors, which face attacks on many different fronts. But it’s all in the game and keeps the storage world turning.  Continue Reading

• Vendor consolidation, with help from cloud, shapes the storage market

  Vendor consolidation is shaping the storage industry, with large storage vendors dominating. Find out how cloud technology is likely to speed this concentration.  Continue Reading

• Shared storage model faces challenges from virtual servers

  Virtual servers are exerting pressure to change on the storage ecosystem, challenging even the fundamental model of shared storage.  Continue Reading