Items Tagged: Google
Cloud-Based Storage and Service Levels
Establishing service level agreements (SLAs) for cloud-based applications is pretty straightforward. But establishing SLAs for cloud-based storage is a different kettle of fish.
- Premiered: 08/15/11
- Author: Taneja Group
Google Opens Data Centers in Asia
Google opened its newest data centers earlier this month in Taiwan and Singapore, setting up the Internet giant to capitalize on one of the Internet's fastest growing regions.
- Premiered: 12/18/13
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Network Computing
Google launches price war in the cloud
The online storage wars got more intense last week when Google Drive slashed prices for people who want to store their videos, photos and documents online. But most experts say even the biggest storage hoarders can find ways to avoid paying for space in the cloud.
Convergence and Hyperconvergence: Assessing the Difference
If you feel you are already being left behind as the era of data center convergence unfolds, fret not—it seems that the convergence we have seen so far is just the opening act. The real action is yet to come in the form of hyperconvergence.
- Premiered: 07/09/14
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: IT Business Edge
Microsoft takes latest shot in cloud price war
The online storage wars just got more intense as Microsoft announced Monday that it’s offering unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers.
- Premiered: 10/27/14
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: MarketWatch
VMware Releases Long-Awaited vSphere 6 Upgrade
It's been three years since VMware has upgraded its flagship hypervisor platform, but the company took the wraps off vSphere 6, which the company said offers at least double the performance over its predecessor vSphere 5.5.
- Premiered: 02/05/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: Redmond Magazine
The hyper-converged infrastructure bandwagon picks up speed
Hyper-converged systems are quickly gaining attention -- and sales -- because they offer many advantages over traditional storage products.
- Premiered: 02/12/15
- Author: Jeff Kato
- Published: Tech Target: Search Virtual Storage
Google tries to melt Amazon Glacier's lead in cold data storage
Google Cloud Storage Nearline takes on Amazon Glacier, promising restore times in seconds rather than the hours it takes for Glacier customers.
- Premiered: 03/13/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: TechTarget: Search Cloud Storage
Unitrends Grows Free's Value with Google Nearline
By integrating Unitrends Free with Google Nearline, Unitrends increases Free’s data protection value even more.
Primary Data primes the pump for data virtualization software
Startup Primary Data prepares GA launch of DataSphere data virtualization software, which is designed to make data available any time on any storage.
- Premiered: 08/27/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: TechTarget: Search Virtual Storage
IBM Back in the Growth Game with Cleversafe Acquisition
On October 5, 2015, IBM announced the acquisition of Cleversafe, a provider of object-based storage software.
- Premiered: 10/06/15
- Author: Arun Taneja
Dell-EMC acquisition leaves questions as Tucci steps away
When the Dell-EMC deal is complete, EMC CEO Joe Tucci will step away after 15 years on the job -- leaving Michael Dell and others to carry on his legacy.
- Premiered: 10/13/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: TechTarget: Search Storage
Oracle Takes Convergence to New Extremes
Regardless of naysayers, convergence is the new rage of this era.
- Premiered: 10/26/15
- Author: Arun Taneja
Hyperscale Cloud Vendors vs. Cloud-Enabled Data Protection Vendors
Cost alone should not be the deciding factor when deciding between a hyperscale cloud vendor or a cloud-enabled data protection provider.
- Premiered: 11/06/15
- Author: Jim Whalen
- Published: Datamation
Startup InterModal Data targets Web-scale storage
Startup InterModal Data introduced its Web-scale storage software that runs on commodity hardware, and is designed to scale to thousands of storage and performance nodes.
- Premiered: 12/08/15
- Author: Taneja Group
- Published: TechTarget: Search Storage
Nutanix Versus VCE: Web-Scale Versus Converged Infrastructure in the Real World
This Field Report was created by Taneja Group for Nutanix in late 2014 with updates in 2015. The Taneja Group analyzed the experiences of seven Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform customers and seven Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Vblock customers. We did not ‘cherry-pick’ customers for dissatisfaction, delight, or specific use case; we were interested in typical customers’ honest reactions.
As we talked in detail to these customers, we kept seeing the same patterns: 1) VCE users were interested in converged systems; and 2) they chose VCE because VCE partners Cisco, EMC, and/or VMware were embedded in their IT relationships and sales. The VCE process had the advantage of vendor familiarity, but it came at a price: high capital expense, infrastructure and management complexity, expensive support contracts, and concerns over the long-term viability of the VCE partnership (see an opinion of the DELL/EMC merger at end of this document). VCE customers typically did not research other options for converged infrastructure prior to deploying the VCE Vblock solution.
In contrast, Nutanix users researched several convergence and hyperconvergence vendors to determine the best possible fit. Nutanix’ advanced web-scale framework gave them simplified architecture and management, reasonable acquisition and operating costs, and considerably faster time to value.
Our conclusion, based on the amount of time and effort spent by the teams responsible for managing converged infrastructure, is that VCE Vblock deployments represent an improvement over traditional architectures, but Nutanix hyperconvergence – especially with its web-scale architecture – is an big improvement over VCE.
This Field Report will compare customer experiences with Nutanix hyperconverged, web-scale infrastructure to VCE Vblock in real-world environments.
Data protection vendors fight for cloud storage title
Though major cloud storage service providers like AWS, Azure and Google lead on price, they may be lacking for data protection services.
- Premiered: 03/07/16
- Author: Jim Whalen
- Published: TechTarget: Search Cloud Storage
Google Drives a Stake Into The Human Heart? - AlphaGo Beats Human Go Champion
Google's AlphaGo program has just whipped a top human Go playing champion (Lee Sedol - a 9 Dan ranked pro and winner of many top titles) four games to one in a million dollar match. You might shrug if you are not familiar with the subtleties of playing Go at a champion level, but believe me that this is a significant milestone in Machine Learning. Software has long proven to be able to master games whose moves can be calculated out to the end game with enough computing power (like checkers and chess), but Go is (as of yet) not fully computable due to its board size (19x19) and seemingly "intuitive" beginning and even mid-game move options.
Cohesity Data Platform: Hyperconverged Secondary Storage
Primary storage is often defined as storage hosting mission-critical applications with tight SLAs, requiring high performance. Secondary storage is where everything else typically ends up and, unfortunately, data stored there tends to accumulate without much oversight. Most of the improvements within the overall storage space, most recently driven by the move to hyperconverged infrastructure, have flowed into primary storage. By shifting the focus from individual hardware components to commoditized, clustered and virtualized storage, hyperconvergence has provided a highly-available virtual platform to run applications on, which has allowed IT to shift their focus from managing individual hardware components and onto running business applications, increasing productivity and reducing costs.
Companies adopting this new class of products certainly enjoyed the benefits, but were still nagged by a set of problems that it didn’t address in a complete fashion. On the secondary storage side of things, they were still left dealing with too many separate use cases with their own point solutions. This led to too many products to manage, too much duplication and too much waste. In truth, many hyperconvergence vendors have done a reasonable job at addressing primary storage use cases, , on their platforms, but there’s still more to be done there and more secondary storage use cases to address.
Now, however, a new category of storage has emerged. Hyperconverged Secondary Storage brings the same sort of distributed, scale-out file system to secondary storage that hyperconvergence brought to primary storage. But, given the disparate use cases that are embedded in secondary storage and the massive amount of data that resides there, it’s an equally big problem to solve and it had to go further than just abstracting and scaling the underlying physical storage devices. True Hyperconverged Secondary Storage also integrates the key secondary storage workflows - Data Protection, DR, Analytics and Test/Dev - as well as providing global deduplication for overall file storage efficiency, file indexing and searching services for more efficient storage management and hooks into the cloud for efficient archiving.
Cohesity has taken this challenge head-on.
Before delving into the Cohesity Data Platform, the subject of this profile and one of the pioneering offerings in this new category, we’ll take a quick look at the state of secondary storage today and note how current products haven’t completely addressed these existing secondary storage problems, creating an opening for new competitors to step in.
Unitrends Really Raises the Bar on free Data Protection
On May 12, 2015, Unitrends released a new free virtual appliance backup product, Unitrends Free. Unitrends Free shares the core software engine of Unitrends flagship product, Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB), but is specifically designed for IT professionals seeking protection for home labs, early-stage virtualization projects and small environments. Unitrends Free is a genuinely usable version of this full product that is simply limited to 1TB of protected capacity. 1TB lets users do more than just test the product: they can use it in production for as long as they want.
The free product boasts functionality that is often unavailable even in full versions of competing products. For example, Free supports both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments as well as multiple VMs and individual item recovery. It allows the user to perform both full and incremental backup and create synthetic fulls in the background. And although recovery verification is considered a high end functionality, this free product has it. And the list goes on.
Taneja Group believes that Unitrends is setting a new standard in a free product, not only in its full functionality but in professional support. These are all novel things in the fast-moving data protection industry, and Unitrends is accelerating the pace of innovation even more. Read on for more details.