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Taneja Group always seems to be years ahead of other analyst firms when it comes to nailing down trends in the market. We find their advice technically sound and business savvy. Little wonder that IT pays attention when they speak.
Technology
Includes iSCSI, Fibre Channel or FC, InfiniBand or IB, SMI-S, RDMA over IP, FCoE, CEE, SAS, SCSI, NPIV, SSD.
All technologies relating to storage and servers are covered in this section. Taneja Group analysts have deep technology and business backgrounds and several have participated in the development of several of these technologies. We take pride in explaining complex technologies in a simple enough manner for IT, the press community and the industry at large to understand.
Abstract: Taneja Group Multi-Client Study (MCS) on Storage Acceleration and Performance Technologies
Taneja Group’s latest multi-client sponsored research study addresses the young and rapidly evolving market for storage acceleration and performance solutions. This study provides vendor sponsors with key insights into the current uptake and usage of storage acceleration and performance technologies, along with user-perceived value of key features and capabilities. The study findings will help vendors understand how to overcome sales and deployment barriers, improve and sharpen the positioning of their products/solutions, and determine where they should invest going forward, based on the technologies and use cases that will be most important to buyers over the next 2-3 years.
This abstract is free and can be downloaded by clicking the "Available Now" button.
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Kaminario K2: The Truly Enterprise-Ready SSD Storage Array
Just a couple of years ago, as solid-state storage technologies began finding significant mainstream adoption, Taneja Group began closely following a vendor whose architectural roadmap seemed to destine them to be the pre-eminent architectural leader for scale-out, high performance, enterprise-ready, cost-effective solid-state arrays.
That vendor was Kaminario, who first entered the market with a highly resilient, scale-out architecture that promised extreme performance with more linear scalability as well as superior availability / serviceability versus other offerings we then saw on the market.
In the past couple of years, Kaminario has continued advancing their technology in both performance and features, systematically adding the mainstream features that the enterprise demands – and are that are too often missing on high performance storage systems: features like snapshots, utilization reporting, resiliency that tolerates full node failures, and more.
In turn, Kaminario recently drew the attention of Taneja Group Labs. Scale-out and enterprise-class storage management features are not easy to architect (especially not together), and we wanted to know whether Kaminario could deliver enterprise-class wrappings with all of their historic scale-out capabilities.
Extreme Applications in the Enterprise Drive Parallel File System Adoption
With the advent of big data and cloud-scale delivery, companies are racing to deploy cutting-edge services that include “extreme” applications like massive voice and image processing or complex fi-nancial analysis modeling that can push storage systems to their limits. Examples of some high visi-bility and big market impacting solutions include applications based on image pattern recognition at large scale and financial risk management based on decision-making at high speed.
These ground-breaking solutions, made up of very different activities but with similar data storage challenges, create incredible new lines of business representing significant revenue potential. Every day here at Taneja Group we see more and more mainstream enterprises exploring similar “extreme service” opportunities. But when enterprise IT data centers take stock of what it is required to host and deliver these new services, it quickly becomes apparent that traditional clustered and even scale-out file systems - of the kind that most enterprise data centers (or cloud providers) have racks and racks of - simply can’t handle the performance requirements.
There are already great enterprise storage solutions for applications that need either raw throughput, high capacity, parallel access, low latency, or high availability – maybe even for two or three of those at a time. But when an “extreme” application needs all of those requirements at the same time, only supercomputing type storage in the form of parallel file systems provides a functional solution. The problem is that most commercial enterprises simply can’t afford or risk basing a line of business on an expensive research project.
The good news is that some storage vendors have been industrializing former supercomputing storage technologies, hardening massively parallel file systems into commercially viable solutions. This opens the door for revolutionary services creation, enabling mainstream enterprise datacenters to support the exploitation of new extreme applications.
Are You Making Money With Your Object Storage?
Object storage has long been pigeon-holed as a necessary overhead expense for long-term archive storage, a data purgatory one step before tape or deletion. In our experience, we have seen many IT shops view object storage more as something exotic they have to implement to meet government regulations rather than as a competitive strategic asset that can help their businesses make money.
Normally when companies invest in high-end IT assets like enterprise-class storage, they hope to re-coup those investments in big ways like accelerating the performance of market competitive applica-tions or efficiently consolidating data centers. Maybe they are even starting to analyze big data to find better ways to run the business. There are far more opportunities to be sure, but these kinds of “money-making” initiatives have been mainly associated with “file” and “block” types of storage – the primary storage commonly used to power databases, host office productivity applications, and build pools of shared resources for virtualization projects. But that’s about to change. If you’ve intentionally dismissed or just over-looked object storage it is time to take deeper look. Today’s object storage provides brilliant capabilities for enhancing productivity, creating global platforms and developing new revenue streams.
Object storage has been evolving from its historical second tier data dumping ground into a value-building primary storage platform for content and collaboration. And the latest high performance cloud storage solutions could transform the whole nature of enterprise data storage. To really exploit this new generation of object storage, it is important to understand not only what it is and how it has evolved, but to start thinking about how to harness its emerging capabilities in building net new business.
Company Profile: Vembu Technologies
Since its founding in 2004, Vembu Technologies has maintained a two-fold mission: innovate cloud information management for business users and accelerate the growth of the channel partners who serve them.
Vembu StoreGrid is the flagship product that offers simplified, flexible and cost-effective data protection services in the cloud. Its innovative architecture enables integrated backup and recovery across multi-platform OS’s, physical and virtual environments, and multiple applications. Vembu SyncBlaze builds on these capabilities with a cloud file collaboration solution that solves the growing problem of file sharing in a mobile workforce.
Vembu completes its product portfolio with customized editions of StoreGrid and SyncBlaze for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Managed Hosting Providers (MHPs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Value Added Resellers (VARs). These specialized editions enable Vembu partners to offer multi-platform hybrid cloud data protection and content management to their SMB and mid-sized customers. Vembu’s customized support and business management offerings enable these partners to grow their customer base, increase revenues, and speed up go-to-market initiatives.
High-End Storage for Everyone: Exablox OneBlox
Reliable storage is critical to the lifeblood of every data-driven business, and operational storage capabilities like non-disruptive scalability, continuous data protection, capacity optimization, and disaster recovery are not just desired, but required. But enterprise-class storage features have long been out of reach of organizations that don't have enterprise-sized budgets, storage experts and large data centers. Instead, they make do with low-end disk arrays or even just a box of disks patched together with a minimal amount of data protection in the form of manual backups. The problem is that disks fail, organizations change, and data continues to grow – organizations that pile up disks under the desktop are taking big risks for significant business failure while those that pay up for traditional arrays and even cloud storage incur significant cost and management overhead.
Having to step up to deliver these advanced storage requirements challenges growing organizations with big adoption hurdles, not the least of which is both OPEX and CAPEX cost. Far too many organizations struggle along with high-risk storage or feel forced to allocate significant energy, cost, and staff time into acquiring, deploying, and operating high-touch storage arrays with layers of complex add-on software. Even larger enterprises with expert storage gurus and big data centers can feel the weight of managing complex SAN’s for departmental, ROBO, and other practical rubber-meets-road storage scenarios. What’s really needed is a new approach to storage - an affordable, expandable array solution with advanced storage capabilities baked in. Ideally it should be simpler to operate than even setting up a file system on raw drives and it should be available at a justifiable cost for even small data driven businesses.
In this solution brief we are going to look at what SMB and departmental storage buyers should both require and expect from storage solutions to meet their business goals, and how traditional mid-market storage based on old technologies can fall short. We will then introduce Exablox’s new OneBlox storage array to highlight how purposefully designing storage from the ground up can lead to a simple but powerful hardware design and software architecture that features built-in high availability, easy scalability, and great data protection. Along the way we’ll see how two real-world users of OneBlox experience its actual benefits, cost effectiveness and true ease of management in their live customer deployments.