Storage Trends and Industry Perspectives

The storage industry is undergoing rapid changes – not just in the underlying technology, but also in how storage is provisioned, deployed, managed and consumed. Important new disciplines such as software-defined storage, object storage and big data are giving IT teams new options for architecting solutions to meet the demands of the business.

Hybrid Clouds Are the New IT Ecosystem: Here’s Why Storage Systems Must Adapt

Enterprise storage systems have evolved through four distinct stages. First, there were monolithic storage arrays. These gave way to modular SAN/NAS systems and distributed storage networks. Next, advanced software techniques led to storage virtualization, with storage volumes abstracted from the underlying physical devices. Finally, in the current era, cloud storage services have emerged that combine virtualization with unprecedented economies of scale. Continue Reading

Buckle Up! The Top Storage Technology Trends for 2015

In my 35 years in IT, I have never seen so much simultaneous change in technology. Every part of the IT stack is in transition—end user devices, networks, application design, virtual server software, physical server design, storage systems and even storage media. Some of the trends are well underway and will accelerate in 2015, while others are just starting to emerge. Either way, buckle up! Enterprise IT is in for another wild ride in 2015. Continue Reading

Check Your Mirror: Object Storage May Be Closer than It Appears

Object-based storage is a form of software-defined storage designed for massive scale, infrastructure flexibility, and extreme efficiency. It has recently been popularized by Web-scale pioneers such as Amazon and Google, each of which faced the challenge of creating multi-petabyte content repositories and managing billions of data objects. Continue Reading

Software-Defined Storage Must Address Enterprise Storage Systems and the Cloud

The term software-defined storage (SDS) is often used to describe storage software running on commodity hardware, and the idea of using commodity components to build a low-cost storage pool is certainly appealing. However, this vision isn’t broad enough for a world in which the majority of enterprise application data is stored on traditional external storage systems. According to IDC, more than 20,000 petabytes of new external storage system capacity was purchased in 2013 alone. Continue Reading

Why Storage Is Critical to the Success of Enterprise Desktop Virtualization

As organizations increasingly turn to desktop virtualization to meet growing demands for flexibility and responsiveness, IT decision makers are recognizing that the storage infrastructure they choose can make or break the deployment. Continue Reading