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Solid State Disks (SSDs): Definition and Use Cases

If there’s one technology that has taken the storage world by storm over recent years, it’s flash drives. Solid State Disks (or SSDs) have transformed the storage landscape, offering much higher I/O density (IOPS per TB of storage) than can be achieved with traditional hard drives. HDDs are obviously mechanical media, based on spinning platters, accessed by multiple read/write heads. The physical geometry of these devices means that they are more attuned to sequential than random workloads. It’s easy, for example to write data sequentially onto a disk track as the disk rotates past the head. What’s much harder for HDDs is to manage random I/O profiles that read data from physically disjoint parts of the drive, either on separate tracks or platters. Totally random read requests can slow a hard drive down to 120-200 IOPS, depending on the drive speed.

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4 Problems with Traditional Methods of Data Storage

In an age where confusing and confounding terms like “hyperconvergence”, “hyperscale” and “disaggregation” get tossed around (even though hardly anybody actually understands what these mean), you may start to wonder what was really wrong with traditional storage in the first place. Is software-defined infrastructure, flash storage and cloud really necessary? The answer is a resounding “yes”. While the differences in storage options today and those available five or ten years ago are truly staggering, the improvements are just as significant.  There are many problems with traditional methods of data storage, but let’s look at a few key issues:

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The Advantages of Universal Storage

Traditional storage has ruled the data center for over three decades. This has historically come with large CapEx expenditures, usually meaning you initially purchase more storage than you need so that you aren’t faced with another data center upgrade in a couple of years. But the traditional storage model isn’t working anymore. Like Uber has upended the taxi cab industry; smartphones have stumped the sales of products like alarm clocks and cameras; and music streaming services have revolutionized the music industry — universal storage is turning traditional storage on its head. Here’s why.

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enterprise storage reasonnet

4 Best Practices for Managing Your Hybrid Cloud Environment & On-Premises Solutions

As cloud-based storage, computing, applications, and other products became mainstream, most cloud vendors foresaw a vast migration of enterprise storage and other IT needs moving from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions. This has happened, but not quite the way cloud service providers predicted. Enterprises (and, indeed, businesses of most all sizes) have instead opted for the hybrid cloud — a blend of cloud-based storage and on-premise solutions that allows the business to carefully manage what data stays in house and what gets migrated offsite. Most enterprise “cloud” storage infrastructures are actually hybrid clouds. So, what are the best practices for managing your hybrid cloud environment? We break it down here to assure that your hybrid cloud solution is working optimally for your enterprise.

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cloud storage providers

5 Questions to Ask Your Cloud Storage Provider Today

Whether you’re shopping around for your first cloud storage service or are looking to replace your existing cloud vendor, there are some important questions you need to get answered before making a commitment. Don’t sign on the dotted line until you know the answers to these critical questions. Here are 5 questions to ask your cloud storage provider.

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enterprise storage ortana

4 Challenges CIOs and IT Managers Need to Overcome to Succeed

Today’s CIO and IT manager have more lessons to learn, things to address, and challenges to overcome than any generation prior to now. New technologies burst on the scene in rapid-fire fashion, knocking aside older technologies faster than you can say, ‘but we just bought that’. The datacenter is moving to the cloud, desktops are becoming virtualized, and security problems and solutions are more complex than ever. What are the most significant challenges that you must face and overcome to make it in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive world of IT? Here are 4 challenges CIOs and IT Managers need to overcome to succeed:

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The Why and When of an Industry-Wide Shift to OpEx Everywhere

Significant IT expenditures, such as servers, storage arrays, networking equipment and critical software systems have historically found themselves squarely in the CapEx expenditure pile. Capital expenses take longer to get approval, are generally larger and riskier expenditures, and essentially lock the company into a particular IT infrastructure, at least until the lifecycle of the expense is complete and the investment has delivered its expected ROI. But what if all that changed? What if many (potentially all) of those IT investments could be shifted to the OpEx side of the ledger? That’s precisely what is happening now. Common “as-a-Service” offerings are IT solutions (both hardware and software, and occasionally a nice mixture of the two) are served up as cost-effective, pay-as-you-go alternatives to large, risky IT expenditures. So, why is there this industry-wide shift to OpEx?

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hybrid cloud strategy man in suit

How Hybrid Storage Solves IT Challenges

Social, mobile, analytics, cloud … SMAC has reshaped the IT department more quickly and thoroughly than any other innovation since business computers became mainstream. These innovations, however, bring IT challenges, including finding enough space and the right infrastructure to handle big data and the IoT, compatibility and integration problems trying to add mobile devices to your infrastructure, and the sheer costs associated with taking on all these new projects. As it happens, the cloud is actually an excellent solution for what social, mobile, and analytics bring to the table. Here is how the hybrid storage solves IT challenges today.

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