Three key VDI storage challenges

Virtual desktops offer some attractive benefits, but storage systems that aren’t up to the task can make it hard to realize those benefits.

Not all scale-out NAS systems are created equal

You may already be sold on the concept of scale-out NAS, but scale-out systems vary widely and you’ll have plenty of decisions to make before buying one.

9 Top eDiscovery Trends for 2012

So many people come out with end of the year “Trends” articles that I sometimes skip it. However, there is so much rapid morphing in the eDiscovery industry that if I didn’t share my 2012 trends I’d be a slacker. We can’t have that.

The following 9 points are some of the trends you need to know about the complex field of eDiscovery coming into 2012.

Determining the real cost of storage

Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process.

Taneja Group Research: Deduplication and the Innovation Race—It Isn’t Over

I think it is safe to say that data deduplication technology on the backup side has now gone mainstream. At the enterprise level we estimate that almost all companies have installed some form of data deduplication technology, even if the percentage of data under the jurisdiction of dedupe is closer to 40 percent. In other words, each enterprise has dedupe equipment, but not all backup data is yet being deduped. The reasons vary with each enterprise (importance of application, geographic isolation, limited funding, and so on). When one looks under the covers one finds that some of this deduplication is happening at the source but a large majority at a target, and more specifically, a target appliance.

I/O performance in need of a fix

What you’ll learn in this tip: The computer industry has overcome a multitude of technological challenges in the past several years. Networking and memory speeds have increased, processors have gotten faster and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) has allowed for a massive increase in bandwidth. However none of these advances will remain beneficial if I/O performance doesn’t improve. Author Arun Taneja outlines the basics of I/O and explains why critical applications are stalled due to I/O performance issues. There are many supposed keys to this decades old issue—while some turn to Flash, Flash memory or NAND flash memory chips, others look to solid-state and solid-state drive (SSD) controllers.