Backup & Recovery Channel
Blogs
It’s A Solid-State Symposium
April 20, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
Next week I’m off to sunny San Jose for the first Solid State Symposium and Storage Field Day. While Storage Field Day follows the general blogger’s tech-day format, the Solid State Symposium is a public event on Wednesday, when we’ll try to wrangle the future of solid state storage out of the sponsoring vendors and industry luminaries.
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The Promise of LTFS
April 05, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
A bit more than a year ago the folks behind the LTO tape format standards, primarily IBM, with some contributions from HP and Quantum, added the Linear Tape File System to LTO's feature list. While some niche markets, primarily the media and entertainment business, have adopted LTFS, it won't live up to it's promise without support from archiving and eDiscovery vendors.
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Virsto’s Storage Hypervisor Enables Storage to Play Nicely with Server Virtualization
April 05, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by David Hill
On the whole, server virtualization has been a blessing due to physical machine to logical machine consolidation that leads to better system and CPU utilization and attendant improved IT cost economics. But servers are only part of broader interlocked “systems” of hardware components (including networks and storage) and software (including operating systems and applications) that must work in harmony together. And any change in one component (in this case, servers) may cause complications or problems (such as performance and capacity utilization) with another component (in this case, storage). This is yet another instance of the law of unintended consequences. However, Virsto’s chosen role is to repeal that instance of the law through the use of its storage hypervisor.
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Intel/InMage Delivers Business Continuity to the Lilliputian Server World
April 02, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by David Hill
Many IT vendors tend to focus on the mid-market to enterprise market space, yet there is a sizable SMB market where customers actively purchase physical servers on a one-at-a-time basis. This might be called (in fond memory of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) the Lilliputian server market.
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A Rose May Be A Rose But Dedupe Is Not Necessarily Dedupe
March 22, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
Today just about every vendor in the storage market has data deduplication as a feature in one or more of their products. While those of us that work with multiple deduplication products on a regular basis know there are big differences between the various technologies that vendors call data deduplication many users don’t know how to pick the deduplication solution that will best fit their needs.
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Report From The Tape Summit
March 21, 2012 09:24 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
This week I spent two busy days in San Francisco at the second annual Tape Summit. While some may wonder if there’s enough life left in tape to have a summit I know tape has taken a bad rap over the past few years. In this post I’ll reflect on a few key facts that came out at the summit and expose some fallacies about tape. To start Gartner never said “71% of all attempts to restore from tape fail”.
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Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.










