I was asked to do a disaster recovery review for a small non-profit corporation recently. While larger organizations regularly bring in somebody to review their preparedness for disasters, small businesses rarely bring in an outsider. This company had fewer than...
Read More »There are similarities to the advances in storage systems and the advances we’ve seen in automobiles. When you’ve spent most of your life working on both, the similarities become noticeable. Storage systems today have a focus on improving simplicity. That’s...
Read More »Recent developments point to a change in how we protect the loss of a data element on a failed disk. RAID is the venerable method used to guard against damage from a lost disk, but RAID has limitations – especially...
Read More »I read all the reports on the how the storage industry is doing. These include many segments in storage hardware and software, sometimes going into great detail. These reports often come from data that is self-reported by vendors on how...
Read More »Many new storage technologies show great promise. They have useful capabilities such as transferring data faster, storing information for less cost, migrating data with less disruption and administration, and utilizing storage resources more efficiently. Technologies get evaluated on the value...
Read More »I’ve attended two conferences recently where a speaker talked about storage efficiency and the growing capacity demand problem. The speaker said that a part of the problem is we don’t throw data away. That blunt statement suggests that we should...
Read More »Although IT professionals and vendors often think of storage efficiency in different ways, there are usually two main methods of handling it. One is through efficient storage systems that maximize resources. The other way is through data management that determines...
Read More »When working with storage professionals, I always try to understand where storage fits in their organization’s strategic initiatives. The business environment they work in and how they interact with the business owners of critical applications will explain a great deal...
Read More »Data archiving makes sense when primary storage gets filled up with data that is no longer active. Data growth on primary storage – the highest performing storage with the most frequent data protection policies – results in increasing capital and...
Read More »We hear a lot these days about tiering and caching in storage systems. These are not the same thing. Some systems implement tiering across types of media, while others cache data into a solid-state device as transient storage. Other storage...
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