Information Technology Navigator

Dealing with anything related to Disaster Recovery (DR) carries a certain amount of stress with it, frankly the name says it all. There’s nothing good about a disaster of any kind. The word is reserved for the worst case scenarios and recovery or getting back to normal after a disaster conjures up a feeling of the utmost urgency, maybe even a little panic. After a disaster questions from nearly every corner of the organization start pouring in. “What were we backing up? “What is our recovery point?” “How long until we can get back to operational status?” “Can we prioritize certain applications for recovery?”

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For many virtual desktop users, the most frustrating time of day is the morning. This is when users arrive at work and, en masse, attempt to boot up their virtual desktops. This can trigger a so-called boot storm. During a boot storm, the demand is too high for the network to handle effectively, causing sluggish performance and driving users—who are just trying to start their workdays on the right foot—crazy.

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I chuckled to myself as I drove to work this morning. An ad came on the radio talking in clichés. “Synergy!” “Run it up the flag pole.” “Better safe than sorry.” And that was enough to send me into action and write this blog post.

The clichés and metaphors surrounding the cloud are seemingly endless. You read about “The cloud journey.” “The cloudy IT forecast,” and on and on.  It’s no secret that many organizations are looking for ways to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. Moving to the cloud can reduce capital expenditures, eliminate over provisioning, lighten employee workloads, free IT staff to work on strategic initiatives, and help businesses become more agile.

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Virtualization Changed Everything

While we may all be familiar with virtualization at this point, we are still feeling its significant impact on our data centers. What was once sprawling racks of servers has been consolidated into ever-smaller hardware packages.  With the advent of cloud computing, your hardware footprint could in fact be zero! However, despite the technology making our lives so much easier, it’s important to consider that our responsibility for these workloads remains the same.

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As the cost of solid-state technology decreases and its capacity increases, flash technology has steadily been making inroads into the enterprise storage architecture, to the point where flash has become a standard component of most storage solutions. Just how much flash is necessary, however, is the question confronted by directors of infrastructure who are trying to balance cost with their companies’ needs for high performance.

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IT managers have long envied the power of all-flash storage for accelerating their most demanding workloads. Unfortunately, the much higher cost-per-terabyte for all-flash storage compared to traditional spinning disk storage has—in many cases—kept these ideas in the realm of wishful thinking. A data reduction technique called deduplication, however, is bringing all-flash storage into the realm of economic reality.

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For years, traditional spinning disk technology reigned as the only option for enterprise storage. While the speed and performance of other infrastructure components improved exponentially, hard drive technology has improved only incrementally with performance remaining largely the same since the year 2000 when the first 15K RPM drives were released. Traditional hard drive storage has been, and remains, a common bottleneck, making otherwise powerful IT systems sluggish and inadequate for handling the demands of modern workloads.

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All-flash storage arrays are all the rage among IT teams looking to coax as much performance as possible out of their storage infrastructure. Thanks to the generational maturity of the technology combined with data reduction techniques like inline deduplication and compression, all-flash storage is no longer the economic impossibility it once was.

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Jealous of the pure power of all-flash but concerned about cost? The latest generation of all-flash arrays have a couple of tricks up their sleeve that make the difference in usable capacity and cost between flash and spinning disk much less significant: inline deduplication and compression.

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Meeting with clients, I’m hearing a lot of folks complaining about two common problems: First - Backups are taking far too long to complete.  Second – Recovering a single file is a long, painstaking process.

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