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Archive of 'Storage Applications'

RAID Stripe width

Friday, September 7th, 2007
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Storage Management, Advisor - Steve Rogers

Does the number of disks in a RAID-5 array affect the performance ?

File Virtualization - more “virtualization hype” or is it real this time?

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

Let’s be honest, the reason File Virtualization is hot is because every compute environment is running into the unavoidable realities of exploding data growth in all directions - spreading like a virus across the network and in the data center.

Bigger, better, faster, more powerful then before!

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe Disher

In the realm of storage appliances (NAS or application specific appliances) the technology evolution usually equates to things like more capacity (bigger drives), faster throughput, more IOPS, better availability, and easier management/provisioning, etc… but is that it?

poor-mans cluster

Monday, December 18th, 2006
Posted in Storage Applications, Advisor - Steve Rogers

can a RAID 1 be setup between the two servers creating a real-time duplicate of the active server on the backup server?

RAID on RAID - plaiding

Monday, December 18th, 2006
Posted in Storage Applications, Advisor - Steve Rogers

Can you use software RAID5 across multiple hardware RAID5 or RAID0 storage systems using iscsi?

Desktop search… do I care?

Monday, November 13th, 2006
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

Let’s face it… finding the “right” data is hard, but there is an answer.

Indexing is the missing link to ILM

Monday, November 13th, 2006
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

If some of the new indexing applications live up to the hype …. ILM may actually have a chance…

is CDP right for the SMBs?

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Steve Rogers

What is your definition of CDP! Pick one that works for your business!

data storage for agriculture?

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Steve Rogers

What data storage solutions are available for agriculture?

Living Loving MAID

Monday, April 3rd, 2006
Posted in Storage Applications, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway

MAID stands for Massive Arrays of Idle Disks. It was first mentioned in the January 2002 whitepaper of the same name, created by Colarelli, Grunwald and Neufeld from the University of Colorado in Boulder…

Crappy CDs Part Deux

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
Posted in Storage Applications, Advisor - Tom Treadway

Question: In the late 90’s there was a firestorm of controversy surrounding the lifespan of CDs (to which Tom recently alluded). Is there a definitive answer? Is it safe to use CD-Rs as a permanent archive?

Managed offsite client backups

Friday, November 4th, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe Disher

These backup services are quite convenient. It does require an Internet connection, which just about everyone has now.

The “R” part of “DR”

Friday, November 4th, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

…in my opinion this is a prime example of people being lazy or stupid!

When is fast, fast enough?

Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Application Environments, Advisor - Joe Disher

The toughest question for any storage administrator to answer is, “What kind of performance do you NEED?”

C’est la vie, tape?

Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Tom Treadway

For a long time now I’ve been a proponent of replacing tape drives with hard drives. But there have always been technical hurdles to overcome…

Data Protection in the Distributed Enterprise

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe Disher

There are a number of ways that IT Pros deal with remote site data protection – some are good and some are not so good…

SATA and RAID 6 – the perfect match!

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Application Environments, Advisor - Joe Disher

Finally these “third class citizens” (SATA drives) can get a little respect with a little help from RAID 6.

Is PCI RAID clustering finally dead?

Monday, October 24th, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway

… Microsoft has been putting out feelers to customers and vendors over the last several months regarding dropping support in the Vista timeframe for PCI RAID clustering. …

Different VTL Options

Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

In an effort to insight a riot with one of my fellow Storage Advisors I want to talk about “Virtual” Tape Library (VTL) options.

What’s up with WAFS?

Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Posted in General, Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe Disher

One of the things I really like about WAFS is that it compliments existing storage infrastructures.

Replication of data from/to remote sites

Sunday, October 16th, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Advisor - Steve Rogers

Considering using Replication to move or backup data from remote locations? - some practical advice for sizing the task

Snapshots – more than just a picture of your data

Friday, October 14th, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Advisor - Joe Disher

First, it’s probably worth a quick definition of what snapshots are for those that thought I was talking about some tawdry pictures.

A definition offered by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association http://www.snia.org/) says,”A fully usable copy of a defined collection of data that contains an image of the data as it appeared at the point in time at which the copy was initiated. A snapshot may be either a duplicate or a replicate of the data it represents.” In practical terms snapshots are a point-in-time copy of a dataset. In some cases it may be a read only copy and in others it may be completely writable. Generally, it is a way to have a local backup copy of data that doesn’t take up double the amount of space. More on how snapshots work and their inherent benefits another time though…

SMB’s – Big Storage Needs, Small Budgets

Friday, October 14th, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Joe Disher

So much of what the storage industry focuses on is around the high dollar, high end, and high touch enterprises. While certainly the most sophisticated in their infrastructures they are also the most “beefed up” with expertise and staff to handle these very complex environments.

Now what about the rest of the world? What about the small doctors offices, law offices, graphics design companies, consultancy firms, retail stores and everything else in between? There is lots of data being generated and the need for a reliable storage infrastructure is just as important to the small business owner as it is for the largest of enterprises. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s all relative. Generally, storage and the protection of the data on it is very important…

Is Tape Backup dead?

Friday, October 14th, 2005
Posted in Storage Applications, Storage Management, Advisor - Joe Disher

I remember when all you had to do was choose which tape drive or library you were going to use to backup your data. Media capacity and speed had to be considered – and, of course your budget. Now with all the options for disk-based backup; snapshots, replication and mirroring techniques, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), and the latest three letter acronym in storage (CDP – Continuous Data Protection), does that old archaic tape technology still have a place? I think so… doesn’t it?

Let’s dig a little deeper. With disk-based backup techniques you can replicate data asynchronously on a scheduled basis; you can mirror data real-time; you can migrate older data to lower cost storage based on policies; or you can simply make the disk look just like a tape. There are even some products out there that let you remove disk drives after backup just like tape media for offsite storage…