ActualTech Media's Technical Blog
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Enterprise Storage Guide
Flash Forward: The Future of Memory
What is flash memory, why is it important, why is it so darn expensive, and when can buyers expect some relief? When talking about flash, chances are that one of these questions is relevant to the dis… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Latency: The King of Storage Performance Metrics
Storage vendor 1: “Our array can deliver 1 million IOPS!” Storage vendor 2: “Well, our array can deliver 1 billion IOPS, so take that!” This might be the start of the latest round of stora… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
How Can VVOLS Improve Your Storage Environment?
One of the most anticipated components of the 2015 release of VMware vSphere 6 was the long-awaited Virtual Volumes technology. Virtual Volumes (VVOLS) is not a product that is purchased, but rather a… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Data Awareness Is Increasingly Popular in the Storage Biz
As you scan the emerging storage market, there are some very cool things happening, but one of the features that seems to be increasing in popularity — and needs — revolves around analytics or at… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
So, What is Secondary Storage Cohesity-Style?
Just as you’ve managed to wrap your head around the craziness that is the world of modern storage comes an emerging concept: secondary storage. At first, you may think that the term secondary stor… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Overcoming "New Vendor Risk": Pure Storage’s Techniques
One of the biggest challenges for emerging storage vendors is the phrase “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” You can replace IBM in this phrase with any major tier 1 vendor of your choosing,… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
IT as a Change Agent: It’s Time to Look Inward, Starting with Storage
For decades, IT has been considered a change agent for the organization, but there is a dirty little secret that we in IT aren’t always willing to confess: we are sometimes terrible at taking our ow… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
The New Data Center: Serious Simplicity Masks Crazy Complexity
Times are changing. The days of the backroom engineer sitting alone in a locked room denying knowledge to the rest of the organization are over. Today, CIOs and other business and technology leaders s… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Crowd-sourced Metrics and Automated Support Should Be Key Features In Your Next Storage Array - It’s Good For The Business
Most of today’s enterprise arrays – particularly those that are shipping from relatively young companies such as Nimble Storage and Tegile – have built-in comprehensive phone home capabilities.… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
SuperMicro Teams with Nexenta for Unified Storage Offering
SuperMicro is becoming a standard name in the enterprise data center, despite what many would have anticipated. Much like how Toyota built on a new model of delivery and timed their rise to the fore o… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Technology Vendor Conglomeration Is Giving Way to Silos
Inside the data center, convergence is all the rage, and for many good reasons. In the IT industry, however, convergence – of the business kind – has gone out of style in favor of more targeted… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Gridstore Hyper-V-based Hyperconverged Solution Hits The Market
Hyper-V admins take note: there is a new solution on the market for you! This week, Gridstore announced their Hyper-V-based hyperconverged infrastructure solution. Far from being just a “me too… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
DIMM-Based Storage (Memory Channel Storage) Is A Bright Idea
SSDs are SO yesterday’s technology. At least, that’s what you might think after you take a gander at a newer class of storage that has hit the market in recent months. Pioneered by Diablo Techno… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
VMware Unveils Upcoming VAIO I/O Filters
As many announcements are flying around during VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, storage is getting some serious focus as VMware moves to extend optimization for storage on vSphere using the upcoming VAI… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Mesa: How Google Handles Big Data
As a guitarist, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word Mesa is Mesa Boogie amplifiers. They delivery one of the most bone rattling level of sound and tone of anything in the industry… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Storage 101: Flash Storage Myths and Facts
Yes. It’s true that your shiny new all-flash storage array’s solid state disks will wear out over time. However, unlike the flash storage of yesteryear, this wear process isn’t nearly as ser… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
VSAN and Disconnecting Hosts: Be Careful How You Remove Host Resources!
There are a lot of people testing the waters with VMware VSAN, and one of the challenges with bringing a new technology on board is understanding the management processes to keep it running. Shared-no… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Pure Storage and the Missing Power Button
Over the years we have all had exposure to hardware for storage environments that was explicitly built to handle operational failures from the environment by adding redundancy high availability featur… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Atlantis Updates ILIO for VMware VSAN
Atlantis Computing has launched its next iteration of their ILIO suite for VMware VSAN. This is an interesting product that I have had a chance to discuss with the creators when at Virtualization Fiel… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
Discover The True Meaning Of “Software Defined”
If you’ve not yet heard about the latest trend hitting the IT industry, it’s time to breakout your buzzword BINGO playing board and make some new additions. Today, “software defined” is tren… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Enterprise Storage Guide
How Does Data Deduplication Work?
Even as disk capacities continue to increase, data storage vendors are constantly seeking methods by which their customers can cram ever-expanding mountains of data into storage devices. After all,… Read More
By Keith Ward
