Category: Storage

The concept of introducing virtualization into corporate data centers has moved well past the trial phase over the past few years into one of wide acceptance today. The latest virtualization technologies deliver on the promise of increased efficiency, reduced expenses and a smaller overall footprint.

But when it comes to a truly virtualized data center, server virtualization, which enables several applications to run independently on a single physical server, is only half of the solution.

Storage Demands Continue

CIOs today continue to struggle keeping up with the demands for more storage capacity as data continues to grow exponentially. That, in turn, has led them to add storage systems ad-hoc, responding to the needs of a specific deployment, a particular business function, or a geographic area. As such, many organizations have created a complex, inflexible storage infrastructure that has become both difficult and costly to manage.

When it comes to performance, flash-based memory has always been the undisputed king. However, flash memory has also been the leader in another area as well—expense.

Until recently, flash memory has proved to be far too expensive for the typical enterprise to deploy for tier 1 storage. Simply put, the performance offered was not worth the additional cost.

Nevertheless, enterprise needs change, and access speed is becoming more and more critical to many enterprises, especially those looking to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), mine big data and push ahead with private cloud technologies. All of which depend on fast, reliable and affordable storage, which is where tier 1 storage with cache technology normally comes into play. However, cache combined with spinning media is starting to fall short from a performance perspective, yet it seems to be the most economic path to enabling large storage capabilities.

Amazon doesn’t release financial data about its cloud computing operations, but it periodically shares some numbers about the scale of its operations. How fast is Amazon Web Services growing? The number of objects stored on the company’s S3 cloud storage service tripled in the 12-month period between the final quarters of 2010 and 2011. S3 now stores an amazing 762 billion objects, according to AWS cloud evangelist Jeff Barr.

By any measure, that’s extraordinary growth. That total works out to 108 objects for each of the earth’s 7 billion citizens. And how many operations that have been operating as long as S3 have 290 percent annual growth?

If your company’s entire services are built on cloud storage, how do you accommodate growth in your business and the need to move and store massive volumes of data? That was the challenge facing YouSendIt, Inc., a fast-growing company that offers cloud-based services where users can send files, share folders and sign documents. The company recently investigated storage offerings that chose DataDirect Networks (DDN), which has built a niche handling large volumes of data. DataDirect Networks is the world’s largest privately-held data storage infrastructure provider. Its focus is on the requirements of today’s massive unstructured data generators, such as high performance computing; life science research; Web and cloud content; professional media; homeland security; and intelligence communities.

In a long post on the Amazon Web Services blog Wednesday, Amazon launched the AWS Storage Gateway service, a tool for connecting on-premise software appliances with its cloud storage services, making its cloud products more accessible to users currently dealing entirely (or mostly) with on-premise IT. Amazon says the new AWS Storage Gateway service enables data stored in a customer’s data center to be backed up to Amazon’s S3 storage, as EBS snapshots, which can be treated as backups, and restored to the on-premise hardware when necessary. The stored files can also be accessed as Amazon EBS volumes, which means data can be mirrored between on-premise applications and those based on EC2.

It is not surprising that Aaron Levie says CIOs are ready to sign off on big corporate cloud-storage deals. He is, after all, the co-founder and CEO of Box — a company staking its claim as an enterprise-grade cloud-storage service. More surprising is the fact that experts with no dog in this fight agree that even the biggest companies are ready to commit to cloud storage. They are late to the party. Consumers have already embraced the notion of cloud storage — whether it is Dropbox, which claims more than 45 million users; Apple’s iCloud; or a dozen other offerings.

For the past few years, cloud-based storage has oscillated somewhere between a replacement strategy for existing back-up storage solutions (i.e. tape) and a typically inexpensive but complex real-time storage solution for online web properties and enterprises. Much like the first waves of virtualization, many organizations are struggling to figure out where cloud storage fits within their existing IT infrastructure. Unlike basic server virtualization, and possibly more critical however, is the determination of if and when cloud storage is even legal. Cloud storage carries with it an extra layer of complexity: compliance.

Digital storage in remote data centers has been made possible by the confluence of a number of software and infrastructure management technologies.  These technologies  have increased the effectiveness and lowered the overall costs of digital storage in the cloud.  Software technologies that have created the rapid increase in cloud storage and services include virtualization where real physical resources can be subdivided into a much larger number of virtual devices which can be rapidly deployed as needed to support many more clients.  This has resulted in higher utilization of these resources, including digital storage. 

Big Data, housed in new and disruptive technologies, is expected to account for more than 50 percent of the world’s data in the next five years, according to a a new study. While it offers huge and untapped value, the inevitable result is stress and strain on the world’s Interent infrastructure as companies seek to manage this explosion of information. The new study, released jointly by Internet Research Group and Infineta Systems, a provider of WAN optimization systems, examines how big data is affecting enterprise WAN (Wide Area Network) throughout the country. Big Data – which is defined as datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze – is most often found in petabyte to exabyte size, and is unstructured, distributed and in flat schemas.

The subject matter experts at Dell present “The cloud awaits: Storage for the growing virtualized infrastructure.” This technical whitepaper explains the benefits behind the integration of Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI SANs and VMware® vSphere™ virtualization software. Virtualization has been the trend in data center evolution and the benefits are well documented from both a cost and infrastructure perspective. The Cloud is next showing an even greater promise in terms of ROI. In between these data center strategies lies the need for a proven storage solution. The authors passionately advocate and clearly explain how Dell and VMware provide the optimal combination for the data center. This marriage is successful because the collaboration, between the two industry leaders, makes for an effective integration allowing for a less challenging expansion of the virtualized footprint.

The pre-configured 4TB-8TB DX4000 Sentinel can connect to public clouds or provide a local private cloud Digital storage specialist Western Digital announced the release of the WD Sentinel DX4000, a network storage server aimed at small and midsized businesses. The DX4000 includes the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system software and the Intel D525 Dual Core Atom CPU. The DX4000 offers centralised shared storage and automatic server-based backup and restore for up to 25 devices (PC and Mac) in the network, as well as data protection with built-in hardware and software redundancy for all of the connected devices in the network.

ft. data center is now US$ 4.1 million annually. Previously, because the cost of running facilities was buried in budgets, companies didn’t pay attention. Now, with increasingly tight regulation from the EPA, companies are factoring that into the cost of computing.

Virident, the PCIe solid state memory player that competes head to head with Fusion-io, scored $21 million in Series C funding including money from new investors Intel Capital and Cisco Systems, as well as contributions from Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures.

November 1, 2011 -- Cloud storage provider SolidFire announced on Monday that it has raised $25 million in its second funding round, bringing its total funding to $37 million. NEA, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle participated in the funding round.

October 20, 2011 -- IT industry research firm International Data Corporation announced on Thursday it has released a new report that shows that cloud computing will significantly drive new IT spending over the next five years as public cloud service providers and the adopters of private cloud environments invest in the supporting infrastructure.