Determining the real cost of storage

Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process.

Taneja Group Research: Deduplication and the Innovation Race—It Isn’t Over

I think it is safe to say that data deduplication technology on the backup side has now gone mainstream. At the enterprise level we estimate that almost all companies have installed some form of data deduplication technology, even if the percentage of data under the jurisdiction of dedupe is closer to 40 percent. In other words, each enterprise has dedupe equipment, but not all backup data is yet being deduped. The reasons vary with each enterprise (importance of application, geographic isolation, limited funding, and so on). When one looks under the covers one finds that some of this deduplication is happening at the source but a large majority at a target, and more specifically, a target appliance.

I/O performance in need of a fix

What you’ll learn in this tip: The computer industry has overcome a multitude of technological challenges in the past several years. Networking and memory speeds have increased, processors have gotten faster and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) has allowed for a massive increase in bandwidth. However none of these advances will remain beneficial if I/O performance doesn’t improve. Author Arun Taneja outlines the basics of I/O and explains why critical applications are stalled due to I/O performance issues. There are many supposed keys to this decades old issue—while some turn to Flash, Flash memory or NAND flash memory chips, others look to solid-state and solid-state drive (SSD) controllers.

Cloud storage ahead of the pack for hybrid cloud deployments

The idea of turning over storage systems to the cloud hasn’t caught on with enterprises, but hybrid cloud storage products show how to leverage both in-house and off-site storage

What you should know about local area network disaster recovery

Local area network disaster recovery planning is frequently overlooked, although many IT functions depend on the LAN. Jeff Boles, senior analyst with Taneja Group, recently spoke with SearchDisasterRecovery.com Editor Andrew Burton about how to prepare that unsung hero of networks – your LAN – for disaster recovery, as well as whether virtualization can help streamline the process.

Your new storage vendor might be VMware

VMware’s latest releases suggest it has serious intentions about encroaching on storage vendors’ turf, which might be a wakeup call for the data storage industry.

Five or so years ago I wrote about the impact server virtualization and VMware in particular was going to have on data storage. To me the picture was clear: VMware enabled features that were traditionally considered the purview of storage. It was also blurring the line of demarcation between server and storage, and clearly entering into space that storage vendors had assumed for decades was theirs. Little did I know how true my premonition would prove to be.