Entries categorized under “Tiered Data Systems”

Last month I announced that DCIG is putting together its first annual Midrange Array Buyers Guide. Since then a lot has happened and over the last two weeks responses to the questionnaires that I sent out to over 20 storage providers representing over 100 midrange array models have been pouring in. So while it is still too early to announce any winners and results are still being tabulated, I am prepared to share some preliminary findings in the areas of total storage capacity and cache sizes on midrange arrays. (read more)

The initial hype around solid state drives (SSDs) is starting to settle down. The performance benefits, costs, "gotcha's" and use cases of SSDs are now better documented which is resulting in new implementations of SSDs that emphasize their benefits while mitigating their drawbacks. A prime example of this is today's announcement from 3PAR that adds support for SSDs to its InServ Storage Servers but more importantly provides users with a means to optimally and simply take advantage of them. (read more)

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address. (read more)

Organizations do not like to think about business continuity for some very simple reasons: it's costly, it's complex and it exposes to companies just how vulnerable they really are should a disaster occur. So companies tend to live in denial about implementing a business continuity solution until some triggering event occurs that makes them have to deal with the problem head on. (read more)

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland's most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland's tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection. (read more)

While SaaS (Software as a Service) gets most of the press, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is finding its way into increasing numbers of corporate data centers. Parallel SCSI is a proven and reliable data transfer standard and serves the data center well, but all good things must eventually come to an end. With U320 parallel SCSI being the last stop on the SCSI roadmap, and with the advantages SAS has to offer over parallel SCSI, SAS is almost a certainty for the industry at large and your company specifically. (read more)

It is no secret that Overland Storage (Nasdaq: OVRL) endured a period of declining sales and management shake-ups in 2007 and 2008. A new CEO, VP of worldwide sales and VP of marketing in the past year indicate the company is trying to right itself from a leadership perspective. These changes provide insight as to where Overland Storage intends to go as it starts its makeover. Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy. (read more)

One of the more agonizing choices that some companies face when looking to implement the same deduplication scheme across the enterprise is quantifying which version of deduplication to use: inline or post-processing. From a purist's viewpoint, inline (deduplicating data as it is ingested) is sometimes viewed as the best approach since data is deduplicated immediately as it is ingested. (read more)

Quantum is aiming for the enterprise with its deduplication technology and looks to make a serious run at the enterprise datacenter with its DXi7500. Designed to anchor Quantum's deduplication strategy, companies can use the scalable DXi7500 when it is receiving replicated data from Quantum's DXi3500 or DXi5500 appliances in remote offices; replicating to disaster recovery site(s); or deduplicating terabytes of data during nightly backup jobs in the datacenter. To accomplish this, Quantum designed the DXi7500 to become the focal point for its DXi portfolio. (read more)

One thing that struck me was that Compellent users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 - 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers. (read more)

Bringing backup data from remote and branch offices back to a home office is a particularly thorny problem that enterprises continue to face. Directly sending nightly full, incremental or differential backup jobs over a wide area network (WAN) connection back to the home office can saturate the WAN link and cause backups to exceed backup windows and result in failed backups. However the current procedure of backing up data to disk or tape at the remote site perpetuates the problem of how to most efficiently and securely transmit backup data back to the home office or disaster recovery site. (read more)

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage's Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website. (read more)

It is for these types of reasons that Quantum's field marketing and sales organization has developed what it refers to as its regional solutions specialists or "Tiger" teams to help businesses determine what size DXi deduplicating appliance is the best fit for its customer environments. When dealing with Quantum customers, their mission is to ensure and verify every customer has a positive experience with Quantum's deduplicating appliances. To do this, a core tenant of their responsibilities is doing the front end analysis that includes customer interviews and site surveys. (read more)

A majority of organizations still rely on tape as their primary means of data protection. However, with the increasing popularity of disk-based backup, companies are repurposing tape for their offsite data storage and longer term data retention needs. As they do so, new requirements for tape encryption and encryption key management are emerging. I recently had conversations with two individuals at Quantum Corporation to discuss these trends in data protection and how Quantum is responding to them. (read more)