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News Analysis
Citrix, Carpathia Launch XenServer Cloud Service
Carpathia Hosting and Citrix Systems have combined resources to offer a XenServer-based set of cloud services, called Carpathia InstantOn. Such services are likely to appeal to heavy users of Citrix XenServer hypervisor or Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, since both use a shared VHD virtual machine file format which would lend itself to export to a XenServer based cloud. InstantOn is one of the first cloud offerings to be based on XenServer.
More News Analysis
- Nasuni Brings Speed To Cloud Storage's Low Costs
- Cachengo Offers Premises/Cloud Backups For SMBs
- Cloud Storage Lags Behind The Hype
- Box.net Builds Content Management For Cloud Storage
More News Analysis in Cloud Storage Channel »
Architectures
Understanding Private Cloud Storage
Mention cloud storage to most IT professionals and they think of Internet services like Amazon S3 and Nirvanix that store your data in their data centers. But a storage cloud doesn't have to be public. A wide range of private cloud storage products have been introduced by vendors, including name-brand companies such as EMC, with its Atmos line, and smaller players like ParaScale and Bycast. Other vendors are slapping the "cloud" label on existing product lines. Given the amorphous definitions surrounding all things cloud, that label may or may not be accurate. What's more important than semantics, however, is finding the right architecture to suit your storage needs.
Reviews & Workshops
Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online
Microsoft's new Office Live online service for small businesses helps Web novices build sites and share data with very little trouble. (Courtesy: Small Business Pipeline)
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Blogs
One Million IOPS: Moving The Data Center Bottleneck
March 9, 2010 10:00 AM
Posted by Frank Berry
The first system administrator to ever upgrade a server undoubtedly experienced a mismatch in performance between the installed server and the new component. Since then, millions of data center managers have experienced first-hand the performance bottleneck constantly moving from one component in their data center to another. Have those years of experience stopped smart people in our industry from challenging whether it makes sense to deploy new generations of faster technology, because the new technology has performance the rest of the system can't use? The answer is no. The latest generation of high-performance converged network adapters is a great case-in-point.
See all blogs by Frank Berry
Is All Storage Hype Bad?
March 4, 2010 11:39 AM
Posted by George Crump
Cloud Storage, Automated Tiering, FCoE and deduplication are the current over-discussed technologies in storage. At some point, a technology gets discussed so much that it becomes over-hyped. The reality is that most of the potential users of any of these technologies are not even close to adopting them. Especially right now, most IT professionals are just trying to keep their heads above water. Is all storage hype bad, though?
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Double-Take Takes Disaster Recovery To The Cloud
February 26, 2010 3:04 PM
Posted by Howard Marks
I've spent a lot of time developing disaster recovery plans for mid-size companies with 200-2000 users and 10-100 servers. These companies don't have the multiple data centers and dark fibre that the big boys use to enable array-to-array replication. They make do with servers at a co-lo site and use host or application replication. Double-Take Cloud has extended host-based replication and application recovery to Amazon's public cloud.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
Cisco Delivers Redundant Arrays Of Independent Datacenters: The New RAID
February 23, 2010 3:00 PM
Posted by Frank Berry
On February 8, Cisco announced the introduction of new products that are part of an industry-wide continuum of cloud infrastructure development. One Cisco product, Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), stands out by dramatically simplifying the deployment of Layer 2 connections between datacenters to form Redundant Arrays of Independent "Datacenters" (RAID).
See all blogs by Frank Berry
Intel And Microsoft Overhaul iSCSI For The Enterprise
February 19, 2010 10:52 AM
Posted by Frank Berry
I recently attended a webcast where Jordan Plawner of Intel and Suzanne Morgan of Microsoft described how the combination of Intel Ethernet Server Adapters, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based servers are integrated to optimize iSCSI performance and scalability. I came away from a follow-up briefing with Jordan and Suzanne impressed with the potential benefits to large data centers, as well as the breadth of integration between Intel and Microsoft products. I was also reminded of the power of the Wintel formula. Intel and Microsoft have essentially overhauled iSCSI for the enterprise.
See all blogs by Frank Berry
NASuni Turns Object Cloud Into Endless NAS
February 19, 2010 9:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
After almost 30 years in the business, needless to say, I have become a bit jaded. Pitch me a left-field idea like holographic storage or even Fibre Channel over Ethernet and it will take more than a good PowerPoint presentation to get me to buy in. So I was surprised at my own reaction when the folks from NASuni explained that their virtual appliance would cache public cloud storage and make it usable as an SMB or ROBO NAS.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
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.
