Organizations considering VMware alternatives may initially view the task as a hypervisor replacement exercise. Yet virtualization represents only one component of the infrastructure they may need to replace in order to regain infrastructure control.
DevOps Backup must evolve as AI agents turn good employees into unintended bad actors. Learn how HYCU protects DevOps data from AI-driven mistakes.
DCIG has started researching SDS object storage solutions available in the market today. The outcome will be a series of DCIG TOP 5 SDS Object Storage Solution Reports covering the top-ranked solutions. While still early, these six insights stand out among the twenty products researched thus far.
In finalizing DCIG’s TOP 5 research into general-purpose NAS appliances used as backup targets, I made a notable observation. I found few articles that provide guidance on which file protocol that organizations should use for backups. That omission may seem trivial.
However, organizations continually seek ways to accelerate backups and recoveries. Something as simple as choosing NFS over SMB, or vice versa, could potentially improve performance. Since all network attached storage (NAS) appliances positioned as backup targets support both protocols, why not select the better one?
Organizations increasingly evaluate HCI OSes as alternatives to traditional virtualization stacks when modernizing their IT environments. In doing so, they typically evaluate each HCI OS’s hypervisor, storage, networking, management, and licensing features. However, this approach may overlook another consideration: how certain HCI OSes require organizations to purchase and maintain specific server hardware. To avoid this, organizations should evaluate three characteristics that indicate how much hardware flexibility an HCI OS provides.
For decades, organizations measured Enterprise IT by workforce size. More employees typically meant more applications, servers, offices, and data. Employee count became a convenient proxy
Once again, another year has come and gone with 2025 now in the books. That means it is time for DCIG to pause and identify DCIG’s most-read blog entries in 2025. This year I again handled identifying the TOP 5 most read blog entries in 2025 the same way as I did last year. First, I only considered blog entries that covered topics unrelated to the DCIG TOP 5 reports. Next week, I will post a blog entry that highlights the most read blog entries about the DCIG TOP 5 reports published in 2025. Second, I count blog entries down from #5 to the #1 most read blog entry in 2025.
Anyone who attends the annual Super Computing conference knows that “Performance” and “Data Center Cooling” themes predominate. However, “Data Management” and “Data Storage” represent two additional themes that freely comingle alongside SC2024’s other two most prominent themes. These two side themes are personally what attract me to SC2024 as cutting-edge advancements in these areas often surface at this event.
As expected, the SC2024 conference met my expectations for learning about the latest and greatest advancements in these two areas. The three cutting-edge data management and storage advancements that I observed at the SC2024 conference included the following.
Building upon DCIG’s four TOP 5 reports on physcial NAS backup targets, DCIG has initiated research into the growing segment of utilizing software-defined storage as backup targets. DCIG intends to publish one or TOP 5 reports based on this research. It invites all SDS backup target providers to participate.
Anyone who is close to backup recognizes that some types of data deduplicate better than others. However trying to translate that understanding of the environment into meaningful backup policies is almost impossible since it is both complicated and time consuming to successfully implement. Using the new Sepaton VirtuoSO platform, it is able to choose the best form of deduplication for each backup stream on the fly. In this third part of my interview series with Sepaton’s Director of Product Management, Peter Quirk, we discuss how its VirtuoSO platform detects the nature of incoming backup data and then automatically invokes the best deduplication method to deduplicate the data.
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