Worldwide

  • Retailers Take Stock: “Empowerment through Flexibility” Available Today with a Storage Hypervisor

    Wednesday, May 09, 2012

    Retail There are more than a million retail companies in the United States, ranging from mom and pop corner stores to large department store chains and big box stores, not to mention online retailers. At first glance, you’d be hard pressed to point out what virtually all of them have in common besides selling merchandise piecemeal to the general public. That is, until you looked at their bottom line, which is characterized by razor-thin net profit margins, generally around a couple of percent.

    Little wonder that retailers have been among the most aggressive adopters of server virtualization, seeing in it a way to improve their bottom line by reducing IT costs and promoting the agility needed to meet competitive demands. The economic uncertainty of the last few years and its impact on consumer spending has made this technology even more strategic for retailers. But as they expand their virtual server footprint, ...


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  • Can Storage Hypervisors Enable BYOD for Data Storage?

    Tuesday, April 17, 2012

    By George Teixeira, CEO & President DataCore Software

    I’m sure you have seen the wider use of the term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in our industry and while I know it mainly refers to mobile devices, it got me thinking about why this is an inevitable trend – fueled by customers wanting greater buying power and flexibility. Therefore why shouldn’t this same trend impact their storage devices?

    In reality, with storage hypervisors it already has. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software empowers users with hardware interchangeability (another way to say BYOD) and a powerful, enterprise-wide feature set that works with whatever the existing or latest storage devices happen to be. For those skeptics out there, try it out yourself Download a Storage Hypervisor or give it a Test Drive on our hosted virtual environment.

    Why do I say it’s inevitable? Because it has already happened before with server hypervisors and they ...


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  • To Protect and Serve - Storage Hypervisors and the Data Protection Imperative

    Friday, March 09, 2012

    Data Protection ManagementFor most people, the motto “to protect and serve” automatically brings up the image of a police car, but for IT professionals it might just as well be blazoned on the hardware and software of their storage infrastructure. The ever-increasing computer-dependence of business has pushed data protection and business continuity to top of mind in the IT world, and storage is a major player in the quest to preserve the integrity and availability of data assets.


    But it can be a major headache, as well. It’s not that there aren’t good solutions for assuring storage availability, data protection, and data recovery. What’s problematic is assembling them into an affordable, consistent, and maintainable defense in depth to minimize “time to data:” how long it takes after an interruption to recover data, bring applications back up, and reconnect users.

    This is especially difficult given the skyrocketing growth of storage capacity, driven both ...


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  • Big Data Is Almost Here -- Using a Storage Hypervisor as an Agent of Change

    Tuesday, February 21, 2012

    Big DataThere weren’t any telescopes on earth 65 million years ago when the six-mile-wide asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs approached. Even if there had been, there’s not much to be done about a gazillion tons of rock moving faster than a speeding bullet.

    Big Data – ultra large scale data storage and analysis – is the data center equivalent of that big rock, but it’s not arriving without warning and it doesn’t have to be an extinction-level event for IT professionals. To the contrary, it offers a unique opportunity to re-architect your storage management infrastructure in a way that makes it more adaptable in every respect and more easily aligned to business needs.

    As profiled in the New York Times last Sunday, Big Data is transforming business, government, and education. One researcher reported that a study of 179 large companies showed that those adopting the data-driven decision-making that ...


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  • All Virtual is Not Enough; Managing Physical, Virtual, Old and New is Real World

    Friday, February 10, 2012

    We at DataCore think the “all or nothing” proposition offered by vendors that can’t address both the virtual and physical world is a mistake, and an expensive one at that. Virtualization and Cloud computing comes with an assumption that it is better to replace your existing investments in servers and storage and start over to meet the higher demands for performance and availability. DataCore sees this as a major obstacle and has thus designed its storage hypervisor to work across existing storage investments; it improves and supplements them with a powerful feature set. Managing both the physical and virtual and the mix of old and new platforms and device types cannot be ignored.

     

    It is interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped on the pure ‘all virtual’ model and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. They do not deal with ...


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  • Did Virtualization Begat a Monster?

    Tuesday, February 07, 2012

    As with all disruptive technology changes, virtualization brought tremendous productivity and cost savings gains, but its widespread adoption has also created a new challenge: managing what some have called the “Virtual Machine Sprawl Monster.” The ease of provisioning has increased dramatically the number of virtual machines deployed. As a consequence, even greater performance, availability and administrative management is required to support these sprawling virtual environments. These requirements will only grow as systems (both virtual and physical), platforms and applications continue to proliferate, as they most surely will.

    Fundamentally, the main challenge facing IT managers is: “How can I manage and control all this complexity with a tighter budget and fewer skilled resources?” The answer is straight forward: with very smart software, a new mindset focused on architecture versus devices, and the alignment of people and processes to this new reality.

    Is the real bottleneck for an IT manager the time ...


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  • Storage Hypervisors will make storage virtualization and Cloud storage practical.

    Thursday, January 26, 2012

    2012 PredictionsEnterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently authored a Market Report that I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In "The Relevance and Value of a ‘Storage Hypervisor'," it states "...buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It's a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21rst century."

    While enterprises strive to get all they can from their hardware investments in servers, desktops and storage devices, a major problem persists - a data storage bottleneck. Ironically, even as vendors promote and sell software-based, end-to-end virtualization and Cloud solutions, too often the reaction to handling storage is to throw another costly hunk of hardware at the problem in the form ...


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  • "Big Data" will get the Hype, but "Small Data" will continue to be where the action is in 2012.

    Monday, January 23, 2012

    2012 PredictionsYes, Big Data is getting all the attention and yes Big Data needs "Big Storage," so every storage vendor will make it the buzz for 2012. Big Data has many definitions but what is obvious is that the growth rates and the amount of data being stored continue to grow. This Big Data requires better solutions in order for it to be cost-effectively managed. Analyst firm IDC believes the world's information is doubling every two years. By the end of 2011, according to IDC, the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes of data. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times that amount of data, and IT departments will have to manage 75 times the number of "information containers" housing this data. Clearly, the largest companies managing petabytes, exabytes and beyond are the main focus of the talk, but the small and mid-size businesses that deal in terabytes ...


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  • Software will take center stage for storage in 2012 empowering users to a new level of hardware interchangeability and commodity-based "buying power."

    Thursday, January 19, 2012

    2012 Predictions"Throw more hardware at the problem" is still the storage vendor mantra; however, the growth rate and the complexity of managing storage are changing the model. The economics of "more hardware" doesn't work. Virtualization and Clouds are all about software. With the high-growth rates in storage, virtualization and Cloud computing, it is becoming increasingly clear that a hardware-bound scale-up model of storage is impractical. The "hardware mindset" restrains efficiency and productivity, while software that enables hardware interchangeability advances these critical characteristics. The hardware model goes against the IT trends of commoditization, openness and resource pooling, which have driven the IT industry over the last decade. Software is the key to automating and to increasing management productivity, while adding the flexibility and intelligence to harness, pool and leverage the full use of hardware investments.

    As the world moves to Cloud-based, to virtualization-based and to "Big Data" environments, software models that ...


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  • The real world is not 100% virtual. Going virtual is a "hot topic," but the real world requires software that transcends both the virtual and physical worlds.

    Monday, January 16, 2012

    2012 PredictionsEven VMware, the leading virtualization company in the world, as well as the most ardent virtualization supporters in the analyst community, predict that in 2012 over 50% of x86 architecture server workloads will be virtual. Different reports point out that only 25% of small businesses have been virtualized, and others highlight the many challenges of virtualizing mission critical applications, new special purpose devices and legacy systems. The key point is that the world is not 100% virtual and the physical world cannot be ignored.

    I find it interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped squarely on the virtualization trend and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. Most do not, therefore, deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments. Some nouveau virtual vendors ...


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