Software-defined storage

Late Night Infomercials and the Data Center

August 15, 2017 By mletschin

Today’s storage administrators are looking for the best performance for the lowest cost to satisfy their enterprise data requirements. Performance is often improved by adding more solid state drives, but these come at a cost premium. For enterprises looking to save money and resources while meeting performance requirements- data reduction is a key component in creating the ideal solution.

Options for data reduction are classified into two main categories and each has their own purpose- data deduplication and compression.

Declare Your Independence From Legacy Storage

June 29, 2017 By cnadams7

Independence: [in-di-pen-duh ns], noun

Freedom from the control, influence, support, aid, or the like, of others.

Today’s enterprise IT administrators are looking to declare their independence from the legacy vendors that have dominated the technology landscape for decades. This freedom has manifested in the form of software-defined solutions.

3 Simple Ways To Protect Your Data From Ransomware

June 28, 2017 By mletschin

By: Michael B. Letschin, Field CTO

Ransomware attacks have become one of the biggest threats to enterprise data. WannaCry was released just a few months back, and yesterday, an even more sophisticated attack was launched called Petya.

This new attack locks down a computer’s hard drive and demands payment in Bitcoin to unlock the user’s system. They claim it will send a password after payment, but there is a slim chance that a password that will ever arrive.

The one thing these attacks have in common is they are based on the EternalBlue tool that was leaked from the NSA. The tool specifically attacks vulnerabilities on Windows systems.

So how do you protect your corporate data? There are 3 Simple ways.

How to Get More from All-Flash Using Software Defined Storage

May 15, 2017 By Nexenta

By: George Crump, Storage Swiss

Flash often makes the hardware selection less important, but makes the software selection very important. The right software can not only ensure optimal flash performance, but also extend flash implementation beyond the typical high-transaction database use cases and into modern apps and big data analytics. It is critical though that IT professionals make sure software defined storage solutions (SDS) include core enterprise features that they have come to count on.

Why is Storage Hardware Less Important?

Storage systems used to be full of proprietary hardware so they could extract every last drop of performance from the array. These custom chips were used because CPUs were relatively slow, software was cumbersome to create and maintain, and rotational hard disks were highly latent. Times have changed. CPU processing power is almost too plentiful, software development is much easier to start and continuously maintain, and most importantly, flash media has almost no latency when comparing the alternatives.