RSSNews Analysis
Agility, Not Savings, May Be The True Value Of The Cloud
There are ways to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) when moving IT from the data center to the cloud, but experts say the savings to the IT budget is only a fraction of the reason to do so. Analysts and proponents of cloud computing discussed calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) and the ROI of moving to cloud computing at Cloud Connect, a three-day conference this week in Santa Clara, Calif.
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Architectures
SSDs Speed Up Online DBMS Performance
Founded in 1996, IC Source is one of many Internet-based businesses delivering product availability information to electronic components brokers. Daily, more than 3,000 brokers in 40 countries access the company's database in search of needed items. A few years ago, performance problems with the company's storage system arose, a problem that prompted the corporation to become an early user of Solid State Disk (SSD) technology.
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Reviews & Workshops
Fluke Networks' AirCheck WiFi Tester
Enterprise wireless networks are a blessing and a curse for IT administrators. While WiFi offers convenient, secure access to corporate network resources wherever the end-users roam, it also makes use of the unlicensed wireless spectrum. Without restrictions on who can be occupying the airwaves, it can be a challenge to provide a persistent and reliable connection for mobile clients. While many of the technologies within the spectrum, such as Bluetooth, are designed to play nice with your WLAN, devices such as cordless phones or microwave ovens can wreak havoc on the wireless network. Fluke Network hopes the AirCheck WiFi Tester will help administrators find the clearest air for their networks.
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Blogs
Automatic Tiering - It Isn't HSM/ILM 2.0
March 19, 2010 11:41 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
Ever since NetApp's Tom Georgens said "I think the entire concept of tiering is dying" in an analyst call last month, the blogosphere has been all a-twitter about automated storage tiering, I mean George Crump alone got three blog entries out of it. Unfortunately, many of those writing about automated tiering are thinking about storage as strictly unstructured file data, arguing that better file management with an ILM-like solution would be a better idea. In array tiering, is the cost/performance answer for the problems ILM can't solve?
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Source-Side Deduplication
March 18, 2010 11:30 AM
Posted by George Crump
In our next series of entries, we will begin to look at companies that do source-side deduplication. Actually, we already looked at one: Atempo. Source-side dedupe means that the redundant data is eliminated prior to it traveling across the network to the backup server. If you draw this technique up on the whiteboard, it seems like this would be the most logical place to eliminate redundant data, but it is not without its challenges and we will try to address those as we go through them.
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Watch For The Sacred Cows On The Road To Enterprise Mobility
March 18, 2010 9:16 AM
Posted by Michael Brandenburg
Several years ago, while working for a small manufacturer, I was tasked with mobilizing the salesforce. The goal, at least at the time, was pretty lofty: eliminate the need for a laptop for the sales guys. The project started off very well. I was able to get evaluation units of all of the latest devices running the latest operating systems. We put a few devices in the hands of the eventual end-users and gathered a wealth of feedback on what would work best for them out in the field. Synchronized email, contacts and calendars were all checked off the list. Everything was going great, and as we were gearing up to roll out the chosen platform out to the team, a most unfortunate question was asked: "What about our CRM software?"
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Gorillas In The Market
March 17, 2010 4:33 PM
Posted by Tom Trainer
The lush, changing landscape of the Fibre Channel market took another interesting turn today with QLogic's announcement of their addition of the 5800V Series stackable switches to EMC's Select program of product offerings. While some may view this announcement as just another new reseller for the 20 port switch, there are several larger implications here to consider.
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If Disk-Drives Weren't Proprietary, Storage Would Still Be Expensive
March 17, 2010 4:00 PM
Posted by Howard Marks
Every once in a while I'm chagrined when another storage blogger, who should know better, starts complaining about the huge difference between the cost of a 2TB hard drive they buy at Fry's and the cost of a similar amount of storage in an enterprise array. Ladies and gentlemen, while disk drives may account for most of the weight of a disk array, we're past the point where they make up most of the value.
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Migration Migraines
March 16, 2010 3:16 PM
Posted by George Crump
One of the problems with ever-increasing storage volumes is moving that volume of data to a new storage system. When that nice, new storage system is added to a row in your data center, after you turn it on, make sure everything lights up and finish connecting servers that at some point are going to have to migrate data from the old storage platform to the new one. New storage systems bring new technologies like thin provisioning and automated tiering. How do you make sure your migration does not impact those? Migration migraines now not only stem from having to move TBs of information but also from making sure that the migration does not render new storage system capabilities useless and invalidate current data retention policies. There are software and systems that now address these needs while still delivering migration performance.
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Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
Data deduplication is emerging as a critically important new arrow in the storage administrator's quiver to answer hard questions about the increasing problem in storage growth costs.
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists
Optimization is a fantastic way of saving money and creating really happy customers at the same time, but it doesn't work flawlessly for all applications.
WAN Optimization as a Managed Service: It's Not About the Cost
This insight examines how organizations outsourcing their WAN optimization initiatives to a third-party go about achieving their goals for application performance, reducing operational costs, and streamlining enterprise infrastructure.
