Monthly Archives: March 2012

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Opt For The Data Express Lane With A LAN-Free Approach

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Have you ever played the game SimCity?  

Once you get slightly beyond beginner stage and build up a city, the biggest challenge becomes traffic.  

It becomes very frustrating, very quickly with all of these little simulated cars, until you realize the solution.

LAN traffic in your data center can be a real challenge too. But, there is an answer here as well and it can be found in the not readily obvious and not entirely new.

The SimCity car glut is much like the challenges from unbridled virtual machine sprawl and data growth.

You need a solution for getting data around that takes you off the highways and byways and onto the road less traveled.

Continue reading →

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The Sharper Image: Penetrating Views Into Your Storage Environment

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Want a storage management experience not unlike your dream home theater system?

Well, do yourself a favor and check out the new EMC ProSphere release. Much like a good big screen TV, the just announced new ProSphere gives you a big, clear, and precise picture of your data center storage environment.

No longer do you have to contend with what would be analogous to the low pixel count and low scan rate of your cathode tube television or first-generation flat screen.

Move up to the sharper image of this new storage management software release.

The new ProSphere provides deeper dives than the initial release into FAST VP to track, manage, analyze, and predict your storage consumption. Similarly, it reaches further into the server environment to capture information pertaining to usage that might impact your storage needs. Continue reading →

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3 Not Always Obvious Reasons to Replicate

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How is replication relevant in today’s world of virtualization and cloud computing?

Since the dawn of the information age, replication for disaster recovery has been business as usual for the data center.

In more recent times, many business intelligence tools have emerged that also use replication. But, these processes are relegated to the night shift, meaning done outside of the normal business day.

Fast forward to today and this approach doesn’t stand up to the 24×7 mentality of the modern world and the global, virtual data center.

Add to this never-sleep mentality, rapid data growth and new uses for (big) data warehouses and you can see the need for replication technologies that push the boundaries of data recovery and also feed the analytics engines that drive business intelligence decisions.  

Getting there means embracing the not always obvious reasons for replication and retooling and re-organizing to deliver self-service models and to scale.

Key to a successful journey is taking an application and replica management approach to replication. Continue reading →

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Fast Cache and the Power Path

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What’s the connection between server Flash and storage Flash?

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about server Flash here at EMC.

The EMC implementation of PCIe server cache or EMC VFCache makes for a very good application performance story. It augments EMC storage-based Flash (i.e. EMC FAST) for optimal data storage just nicely.

These technologies will most assuredly help you deal with the challenges that come with the significant server virtualization and storage growth projected.

But, focusing on server and storage optimization alone is like reading only the beginning and the end of a good story and missing all the excitement that happens in between. It’s the total package that makes for the most rewarding experience. You need a comprehensive approach to optimizing server, storage—and network.

Fortunately, there is a way to optimize the connections between your servers and storage to get the most out of these new technologies. Continue reading →