In addition to advisory along with custom research or consultancy activities, StorageIO periodically publishes industry trends perspectives reports, white papers as well as solution briefs. These free resources are in addition to regular blog postings, twitter tweets, articles, tips, FAQs, videos, pod casts, webinars along with in person speaking and keynote events around the world. Check out books by StorageIO founder Greg Schulz pertaining to IT data center and data infrastructures covering servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, services, cloud, virtualization, data protection and resource management among other related topics here. View press mentions, perspectices, quotes, comments and interviews pertaining to industry news activity at the Server and StorageIO news page.
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August 2009 - (Updated) Data Protection Options for Virtualizes Servers
Demystifying Virtual Server Data Protection (Enhanced version of 2008 white paper)
There is no such thing as a data or data protection recession, however, organizations of all size need to balance the need to support and protect an increasing amount of data in the same or smaller footprint. This has led to a focus around data center optimization and efficiency, including server virtualization.
Server vitalization continues to be a popular industry focus, particularly to address IT data center power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues (commonly referred to as green IT computing) along with supporting next generation virtualizes data center environments. There are many challenges and options related to protecting data and applications in a virtual server environment. This in-depth report explains what your organization needs to know as it moves into a virtual realm.
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March 2009 - Long-Term Data Protection and Retention - Finding The Correct Balance
The Changing and Evolving Role of Magnetic Tape
IT organizations of all sizes contend with a growing data footprint with more data to manage, protect and preserve for longer periods of time. Online primary storage, has focus a on fast low-latency, reliable access to data while near-line secondary storage has a focus on low cost and high capacity. Long term data retention requires a combination of ultra-low cost, good performance during storage and retrieval, and reduced footprint in terms of power, cooling, floor-space and economics (PCFE) - also known as a small green data footprint - for inactive data. This white paper looks at the evolving role of magnetic tape in a tierd data infrastructure.
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January 2009 - The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC)
ISBN-10: 1420086669 and ISBN-13: 978-1420086669
Hardcover • Approximately 376 pages • Over 100 Illustrations, Figures and Tables
“The Green and Virtual Data Center” sets aside the political aspects of what is or is not considered green to examine the opportunities for organizations trying to grow their business while being environmentally friendly in an economically efficient manner. Addressing multiple technology domains and disciplines, this booklooks at design and implementation tradeoffs using various best practices and technologies to sustain application and business growth while maximizing IT resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity along with management software tools.
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October 2008 - Business Benefits of Policy Based Data De-Duplication
Data Footprint Reduction with Quality of Service (QoS) for Data Protection
Organizations of all sizes are faced with the demands of storing more data, including multiple copies of the same or similar data, for longer periods of time. The result is an expanding data footprint that results in increased IT resource management costs to support and sustain given levels of application and information Quality of Service (QoS) delivery.
An approach to providing relief from the pressures, costs and complexities associated with managing data protection for an expanding data footprint including reducing the amount of data transmitted over wide area network (WAN) links is data de-duplication (de-dupe).
Data de-dupe reduces the impact of expanding data footprints by optimizing storage and network bandwidth capacity used to store protected data, enabling improved utilization and more information to be processed in a given time frame.
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July 2008 - Data Protection Options for Virtualizes Servers
Demystifying Virtual Server Data Protection - Best Practices and Tips
Server vitalization continues to be a popular industry focus, particularly to address IT data center power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues (commonly referred to as green IT computing) along with supporting next generation virtualizes data center environments. There are many challenges and options related to protecting data and applications in a virtual server environment. This in-depth report explains what your organization needs to know as it moves into a virtual realm.
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January 2008 - Scalable Storage for Unstructured Data
Clustered and Grid Bulk Storage and File Serving for scaling performance, availability and capacity.
Enabling Scalable Storage Performance, Availability and Capacity for unstructured data and Web 2.0 applications. The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers (similar to how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) has resulted in desktop and server sprawl) and a resulting urgency to consolidate to maximize resource usage and IT management tasks. |
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January 2008 - MAID 2.0: Energy Savings without Performance Compromises
Intelligent Power Management (IPM) Energy Savings for Secondary and Near-line Storage
Not all Green Storage is created equal. There are business benefits to aligning the most energy efficient storage to meet different data and application requirements. All storage vendors are claiming some form of green or some power, cooling and floor space savings. This industry trends and perspectives brief looks at a category of storage using intelligent power management (IPM) to support secondary and near-line or off-line data needs, comparing performance with energy savings, to enable you to be the judge of who is the greenest of them all. |
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December 2007 - Achieving Energy Efficiency using FLASH SSD
Leveraging SSD as part of tiered storage for server and storage consolidation and energy efficiency
Reducing energy consumption is an important topic for many IT data centers. While there is a lot of discussion about reducing energy by doing less, another form of energy efficiency is doing more with less power for green storage. This paper looks at how solid state disk (SSD) and, in particular, FLASH based SSD can be incorporated into an energy-efficiency or green storage strategy as part of a tiered storage architecture to address power and environmental concerns while reducing server and storage I/O performance bottlenecks. |
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December 2007 - The Many Faces of MAID Storage Technology
How Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) is evolving and being implemented in various storage solutions
This paper looks at MAID technology in general along with some current implementations along with benefits, caveats and what to look for and consider when evaluating MAID enabled technology to support primary, secondary and off-line data storage requirements to address energy efficiency and green storage needs.
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October 2007 - Enabling comprehensive data protection for VMware
Issues and solutions for complete data protection and application availability for virtual environments
Server and storage vitalization are complementary technologies that support day-to-day business along with high-availability, business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) needs in a virtual data center environment. This paper looks at the issues and requirements for comprehensive data protection beyond simple server crash consistent restart in a VMware environment and addresses the importance of application-aware enabling data protection technologies. |
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August 2007 - Analysis of EPA Report to Congress (Law 109-431)
StorageIO perspective on the EPA Report to Congress addressing public law 109-431 pertaining to IT datacenter electrical power consumption - On August 1, 2007 the United States environmental protection agency (EPA) responding to public law 109-431 presented a 130 page report (plus 14 pages of executive summary and 67 pages of appendices and other supporting documents) to the U.S. congress addressing IT data center electrical energy consumption and associated issue. The EPA conducted a series of web casts on August 9th 2007 covering the report, its findings, recommendations and plans for moving forward. This is a synopsis of the EPA report to congress with comments by the StorageIO group as to what the EPA report means for green storage. |
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July 2007 - Business Benefits of Data Footprint Impact Reduction
A look at why and how reducing your data footprint provides a positive benefit to your business
The information necessary to support your business in timely and effective decision making and in maintaining a competitive advantage has an impact on your data footprint. This paper looks at various techniques, and, in particular, how data compaction compression technologies can be applied to various types of data and IT functions to help reduce your data foot print to improve energy consumption and green storage and, enhance existing storage resource utilization while addressing other IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) inefficiencies as well as enhancing overall application service levels. |
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May 2007 - Business and Application Aware DPM
A look at data protection management (DPM and Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM)
Data protection management (DPM) provides timely insight and analysis of data protection activities, including cross domain event correlation and analysis for problem resolution and planning purposes to optimize IT resource management. This paper looks at the expanded focus and shifting landscape of DPM and its role in enabling cost effective IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) and service enhancement. |
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September 2006 - Data Protection Management (DPM)
A look at the benefits of DPM for timely and effective data protection management
Backup reporting, cross domain event correlation, root cause analysis, modeling, performance and capacity planning, configuration and policy validation, data protection management (DPM), storage management software tools. |
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August 2006 - Data Center I/O Performance Issues and Impacts
A look at I/O performance bottlenecks and their impact on time sensitive applications
Data center and I/O performance bottlenecks, storage and performance management, consolidation, improving time sensitive applications, I/O acceleration vs. bandwidth acceleration, SAN and NAS. |
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Resilient Storage Networks - Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructure (Elsevier)
ISBN 1-55558-311-3 * Paperback * 443 pages * Approximately 150 Illustrations
Resilient Storage Networks looks at storage and storage networking from a technology, and vendor neutral standpoint including coverage or performance, capacity planning, security, design, topologies and scaling, local and wide area, lifecycle management and data access among other topics. |
Please note that the URLs that are referenced from this page are subject to change without notice. Check out Gregs latest blog postings at www.storageioblog.com and twitter postings at www.twitter.com/storageio.
Contact us via info@storageio.com or 651-275-1563 to arrange a briefing and learn about our services and how StorageIO can be of assistance to your storage and data infrastructure needs. |
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