Drew Robb

So many new solid state drive (SSD) and flash storage products are hitting the market that it can be hard to keep up. This article provides an overview of a few of the recent ones. We feature products and breakthroughs from the likes of Dell EMC, Toshiba, Seagate and Micron Technologies. These products, by and […]

“Legacy” is an interesting word. Aided by Gartner, Microsoft managed to convince the world in the mid-nineties that anything that wasn’t a Windows-based server was old and hence “legacy.” Who have thought just a few years ago that anything not flash would earn the very same moniker? Yet here we are. All-flash arrays and hybrid […]

“Go all-flash, young man,” appears to be the current mantra of the storage industry. Vendor after vendor is urging enterprises to ditch hard disk drives (HDDs) in favor of solid state drives (SSDs). You also hear about flash-first strategies that urge organizations to look at flash storage first, last and always. While this approach makes […]

Flash used to be expensive. Five years ago, my all-flash laptop cost a pretty penny. These days solid state drives (SSD) are regarded as being much more affordable. But just how well is flash doing on the economic side? Jim Handy, general manager of semiconductor and flash storage research firm Objective Analysis, said flash has […]

All-flash storage is clearly on the up-and-up. Gartner analyst Valdis Filks predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of data centers will use only all-flash arrays (AFA) for primary data, up from less than 1 percent in the middle of 2016. Overall, Gartner expects flash to be the dominant form of enterprise storage within a couple […]

It’s inevitable: machine Learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are coming. Most experts believe these technologies will severely disrupt the data storage world. So what should storage managers be doing about it? Here are some of the top tips: 1. Get Strategic Organizations considering an investment in AI or machine learning first need to think strategically […]

Broader adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has some system and storage managers really excited. Machine learning algorithms, for example, can be incorporated into the control layer to enable administrators to diagnose the various causes of traffic congestions far more easily. This allows them to predict potentially vulnerable network sectors. “User requests and […]

Enterprise SSD technology seems to get more complex over time. There are all the types of cells, 3D varieties and a host of form factors. Some may hanker after the good old days when an SSD meant a solid state drive you could use as a direct replacement for a disk drive. But the options […]

While storage marketing and technology labels come and go, software-defined storage (SDS) continues to be used as the preferred term to define a trend towards data storage becoming independent of the underlying hardware. The term itself is somewhat loose but generally encompasses policy-based provisioning and data management in a hardware agnostic fashion. Features such as […]

Who’s who in software-defined storage (SDS)? Pretty much everyone claims to be an expert. Here are some of the more interesting market entries. While some of the established names are included, we tried to broaden the search and also cover some less well-known approaches to SDS. Infinidat InfiniBox Infinidat sees SDS evolving. Companies want to […]

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has really caught on of late. Gartner cites a 77 percent increase in DRaaS-related inquiries over the past year and estimates the DRaaS market will reach $3.4B by 2019. What’s driving this trend? 1. Confidence A survey by DRaaS provider Zetta found that confidence plays a big part in […]

Why should you keep your data stored in-house instead of in the cloud? It’s a heated debate, to be sure. This article showcases the many good reasons to keep your storage in-house. 1. Data Frequency On-premise is ideal when you have to access data frequently and quickly, said Michael King, Senior Director of Marketing Operations, […]