DCIG logo
Request A Briefing
Contact Us

Category: Business Continuity

Did Xiotech Over-Engineer Its Emprise Storage System? Insights from Day 2 at Chicago Storage Decisions

May 15, 2008

I started out the day with an hour-long briefing with Xiotech’s CTO Stephen J Sicola and Storage Architect Peter Selin. Xiotech has been talking up a storm about the ground-shaking importance of its new Intelligent Storage Elements (ISE) ever since Xiotech announced it at Storage Networking World about a month ago. However Xiotech and I have not had a chance to connect for me to take a close look at its architecture so Stephen and Peter spent some time talking me through it.

Read More

Compellent Users Get Virtualization; Day 2 of Compellent’s Annual C-Drive User Conference

May 9, 2008

One thing that struck me was that Compellent users really understand what a game-changing technology that virtualization is. I sat through 2 or 3 presentations during the two days of the conference (May 7 – 8) and also met with a fair number of users (~10) between sessions, over meals and at the evening events and all of them were pretty stoked about the capabilities that virtualization in general and Compellent specifically delivers.

Read More

The End of the Internet Free-For-All? Network Bandwidth Limitations Loom for Businesses

April 16, 2008

Should there be a “Use more, pay more” fee for Internet use? Should the cost of sending a text message to Grandma about junior’s birthday party be the same as the cost of sending the entire video of junior’s birthday party? How much of the Internet is a person or company entitled to? These were some of the questions that CIO magazine’s Gary Beach recently attempted to address in a video commentary, Net Neutrality: Why the Internet Can’t Remain Free, which recently appeared on CIO magazine’s website.

Read More

Compellent’s Data Instant Reply Can Dramatically Improve Application RTOs; How Do You Migrate Data to a Thinly Provisioned Volume?

March 12, 2008

As its name suggests, Compellent’s Storage Center is a compelling product for companies to evaluate but they need to exercise caution in how they implement it and in what circumstances. Compellent’s Data Instant Replay feature should match the snapshot capabilities of other storage systems and exceed many in its recovery capabilities. However Compellent’s use of thin provisioning to provide this feature should give companies pause about what types of application data they should migrate to Storage Center and what other promised benefits of its thin provisioning feature it will not be able to deliver.

Read More

Continuity Software Offers Disaster Recovery Assessments for $15K; No Agents and a 48 Hour Turnaround

March 6, 2008

Someone once said to me that making changes in an enterprise mission-critical production data center storage area network (SAN) is akin to changing the wheels on a 747 as it is taking off. There is no room for error, you better be damn good at what you are doing and you need at least three back out plans in your back pocket should something go wrong. So what does this have to do with Continuity Software’s RecoverGuard? RecoverGuard’s premise is that it monitors the hardware on SANs at the production and disaster recovery sites and gathers information about their configuration. Once gathered, it compares the information and reports on the discrepancies that exist between production and disaster recovery sites.

Read More

LeftHand Networks Announces New Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA); VSA Circumvents VMotion SAN Prerequisite

February 18, 2008

LeftHand Networks’ new focus on SMBs and ROBOs is seen in today’s new product offering – their Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA). It provides for failover between different VMware ESX servers using VMware’s VMotion feature without a requirement for an external iSCSI or FC SAN. LeftHand Networks circumvents this requirement for an external SAN by using its SAN/iQ software to virtualize disk (internal or external) on each VMware server and then creating a cluster of VMs on different VMware physical servers.

Read More

Click Here to Signup for the DCIG Newsletter!

Related Posts
Categories

DCIG Newsletter Signup

Thank you for your interest in DCIG research and analysis.

Please sign up for the free DCIG Newsletter to have new analysis delivered to your inbox each week.