As we see more companies begin Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, we spend more time explaining storage issues related both to server virtualization and VDI. VDI deployments depend heavily on the intelligent usage of storage and on high-capability storage systems....
Read More »Storage tiering, where data is automatically placed and migrated between different storage media, improves the performance of a system by exploiting the access characteristics of data. However, the net effect of tiering sometimes gets overlooked in discussions about maximizing storage...
Read More »All new storage technology doesn’t come from startups, although you might get that impression by reading about industry acquisitions. The reasons most often listed for acquisition of a start-up company are: • Technical infusion (technology acquisition) • Expansion into a...
Read More »When talking to CIOs, IT directors and managers, I’m sometimes surprised by what they know – and don’t know – about industry developments. During an education session I held recently, the IT people told me they had not heard of...
Read More »Last year, Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. At the time there was much speculation regarding the future of Sun's server and storage hardware business and I heard a number of well thought out opinions. But two seemed to...
Read More »Scale-out NAS is becoming popular, with most major vendors offering these types of products. As a reminder, scale-out NAS systems will increase performance and capacity at the same time – although you don’t have to scale the systems in the...
Read More »During many of my discussions with IT managers and directors who would be classified in the mid-tier enterprise space (over 1,000 employees), it has become clear that few have deployed storage systems using solid state drives (SSD) with internal tiering....
Read More »In the high performance computing (HPC) world, Lustre serves as a clustered file system meeting needs for extremely large numbers of files and extremely large file sizes. The problem is, Lustre has been used primarily for “build your own” storage...
Read More »Understanding storage technology can be difficult enough without vendors adding to the problem with odd product positioning. Yet vendors often make things worse when talking to customers or prospective customers. I recently had conversations with two IT professionals that brought...
Read More »I was recently teaching a class on storage technology and systems to a group of IT professionals. I’m always interested in finding out what they know about storage products and what they hear about the market. I discussed with the...
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