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Taneja Group analysts have loads of experience in both the vendor and end-user IT communities, which gives them a unique view of industry trends, vendors and products. It’s their long-running, hands-on experience that enables them to provide the insightful commentary that journalists need.
Virtualization
Includes virtual infrastructure technologies (server, desktop, I/O), virtual infrastructure management (monitoring, optimization and performance), and virtualized data center operations and strategies (automation and Cloud computing).
Virtualization is arguably the most disruptive technology shift in data center infrastructure and management in the last decade. While its basic principles may not be new, virtualization has never been so widespread, nor has it been applied to as many platforms as it is today. Taneja Group analysts combine expert knowledge of server and storage virtualization with keen insight into their impact on all aspects of IT operations and management to give our clients the research and analysis required to take advantage of this “virtual evolution.” Our virtualization practice covers all virtual infrastructure components: server virtualization/hypervisors, desktop/client virtualization, storage virtualization, and network and I/O virtualization. We also explore application virtualization and delivery strategies. In addition, Taneja is uniquely focused on the end-to-end impact of virtualization on IT management, from the desktop to the Cloud, including: virtual server lifecycle management; virtual infrastructure instrumentation, performance management, and optimization; data protection, backup, and HA/DR for virtual environments; data center and run-book automation; and virtual infrastructure security and compliance management.
Riverbed Extends From Wan Optimization To Global Storage Infrastructure: Enabling Next Generation…
Riverbed and Taneja Group have identified a critical emerging challenge that limits IT performance in highly distributed customer environments: costly, complex, and hardware-heavy branch offices. Riverbed customers report that they are struggling to achieve the same level of consolidation (and cost efficiency) in their branch offices that server and storage virtualization have enabled in their datacenters. So the WAN optimization pioneer has now turned its full attention to overcoming its customers’ top barriers to further branch office consolidation. The result is the new Steelhead EX + Granite, which extends the virtual edge of the data center, combining a true “branch-office box” virtualized hardware platform with a first-of-its-kind block storage technology.
Dell Equallogic FS7500: Unified Storage Simplifies File Sharing And Accelerates Virtualization
With the introduction of the FS7500 NAS appliance for the EqualLogic PS Series, Dell customers now have a unified storage option to further reduce management overhead and improve efficiency. All too often, companies have been forced to deploy different storage platforms for different needs: NAS for file-based applications and user file shares and SAN for block-based applications and high-performance virtualized workloads. The FS7500 changes the game. Your unified storage solution should let you easily scale your file shares to handle today’s tremendous growth in unstructured data. It should also accelerate and simplify your virtualization efforts by giving you the freedom to choose the best storage protocol for each virtual workload based on your unique application requirements, skill sets, and existing storage investments. In this technology brief, we explore how Dell’s customers can benefit from the addition of scale-out NAS to the leading scale-out iSCSI SAN storage family.
Dell Compellent: Fluid Storage for a Virtualized World
The enterprise datacenter was a very different place just a few years ago. Over the last decade, several macro trends have converged: rapid server consolidation enabled by virtualization, dramatic data proliferation and the rise of “big data,” solid-state drive technology advances, and an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. In short, IT continues to consolidate, while business becomes more distributed. This tension drives the search for greater efficiency now at the heart of every IT decision. And no-where is this pressure felt more acutely than in the storage layer. Virtualized and consolidated work-loads create new types of storage I/O contention, which are costly to troubleshoot and repair. Storage costs continue to rise because capacity planning is harder in today’s dynamic business environment. Over time, performance limitations, wasted capacity, and complex operations eat into the bottom line and increase lifetime storage TCO. These realities drive the need for more intelligence in the storage layer. In this technology brief, we explore the ways in which Dell Compellent’s Storage Center is delivering such intelligence today.
The case for Intelligent Storage (Dell)
In the past decade, a volatile business climate and a dynamic technology landscape have combined to raise the pressures on the enterprise datacenter, and especially on the storage infrastructure that underlies it. The need to adapt to such constantly-shifting demands and technology developments has sorely tested the limits of existing networked storage solutions. The virtualization mega-trend has dramatically changed the way information is sized, controlled, and protected. But traditional networked storage solutions are too often rigid, complex, and inefficient. Taneja Group has identified a way forward. We have collected the essential elements of the storage solutions needed for today’s new IT realities under the term “intelligent storage.” In this profile, we define what we mean by storage intelligence, whether that storage is file or block, and whether its architecture is SAN, NAS, or unified. We then examine how Dell is delivering this intelligence with its EqualLogic storage line. Wherever you are in your datacenter evolution, we think it’s time to examine whether your storage has the intelligence to carry you to your end goals.
Symantec ApplicationHA: Intelligent Application Awareness in Virtual Environments
Symantec’s recent product refresh for their ApplicationHA product reinforces their commitment to providing application level awareness and high availability to virtual environments. Symantec ApplicationHA is to virtual environments, what Veritas Cluster Server (part of Storage Foundation HA) was to physical environments – a true multi-platform, multi-application aware clustering and high availability platform. ApplicationHA should open the floodgates for migration of Tier 1 mission critical applications to virtual environments – something that many IT organizations are shy to undertake since the virtual infrastructure lacks application awareness that is available in physical environments because of OS based clustering solutions. ApplicationHA plugs this critical void – it provides a layer of intelligence to the virtual infrastructure so it can take corrective action as needed if the application state changes, thus creating an additional layer of application high availability on top of the existing virtual machine availability.
This Taneja Group Opinion covers Symantec’s Application HA – providing application level awareness and high availability to virtualized infrastructure.
AutoVirt: NAS Management Redefined
Taneja Group Solution Profile covering AutoVirt’s NAS solution. AutoVirt’s out-of-band architecture enables customers to reign in NAS sprawl by creating a unified and global namespace, policy based management and non-disruptive data mobility (and migrations).