Information Technology Navigator

In March of 2023, Pure Storage announced an exciting addition to their product fleet with the FlashBlade//E, their newest all-flash unified file and object platform with revolutionary density and TCO.

FlashBlade Background and Evolution

For the uninitiated, Pure’s FlashBlade platform, first released in 2016, was built on a custom blade architecture to address file and object storage requirements of the most demanding modern applications and unstructured data workloads in the world. Things like AI and machine learning, log analytics, genomics and imaging, even extraordinarily fast restore and ransomware recovery for backup applications.

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The CDC recently requested all businesses to dust off their pandemic preparedness plans amid the spread of the Coronavirus also known as (COVID-19). The global threat has already had a major economic impact in a very short time, as is evidenced in the recent stock market plunges, worldwide flight cancellations and travel bans, and the clothing manufacturing sector to name a few.

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When virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) first hit the market, the appeal of application control and security benefits were compelling, but early adopters found the stress on the backend infrastructure frequently caused performance issues and ultimately complaints from end users. Today, however, we’ve found that VDI can finally live up to its promises! We recently installed VMware View at a research lab in a major university. In this blog, Michael Chen, Daymark’s Senior Hybrid Datacenter Consultant, provides candid answers on The Lab’s deployment of VMware View.

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In last week’s blog "Is this (Finally) the Year of VDI?" I talked about how VDI has struggled to live up to its many promises and explained how security benefits and performance boosts from HyperConvergence are making VDI an attractive option to secure and support end users. Is wide scale adoption about to happen? Is 2017 finally the year of VDI? Read on to find out!

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It’s become an industry joke that every year is the “Year of VDI.” While promising to be the be-all and end-all solution to everyone’s IT woes, it’s never really lived up to the hype. Sometimes the issue is cost; other times it’s concerns about performance. And there’s also the problem of familiarity -- why break away from something you’re already comfortable with? Not to mention that supporting a VDI environment falls in that weird gray area between infrastructure and end user support. Nobody that has worked on VMware environments for the last 10 years is particularly interested in troubleshooting Microsoft Office issues again. But there is a convergence of improved technologies and market forces creating a perfect storm as to why you should begin seriously considering implementing VDI in your environment, if you haven’t done so already.

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I’ve come across many Enterprise Vault installations in the past 12 months that were suffering from degraded performance. The cause? Fragmentation of the SQL databases. Intuitively, we know that it is essential to perform regular database maintenance to preserve performance and protect data integrity while preventing data loss, but it doesn’t always get done. Without maintenance, stale SQL statistics and fragmentation within the indexes slow down deletion of completed threads which need to be returned to working memory.

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It’s no secret that technology is moving fast – really fast! And its impact on how business is conducted cannot be overstated. To better reflect how we’re helping our clients navigate all the changes in IT, we’ve given our website, www.daymarksi.com, a makeover.

It includes a clean new design, easier menu navigation, faster load times and some really beautiful images in keeping with Daymark’s nautical theme. There’s a lot of great info on: 

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To date, we’ve looked at making a compelling financial case for an investment in software and making the business case for a new disk array. In this last blog, I’ll talk about making an increasingly frequent IT decision, seeking the expertise of an IT Managed Service Provider.

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In my last post, "Making the Business Case for a New Disk Array," I talked about using TCO and ROI to make a decision on whether to replace or upgrade an aging disk array. Now, we’ll look at how to cost justify a new software investment.

Example:

• The Situation: A business is contemplating investing in a software management tool which will allow them to have a better understanding of their application workloads, infrastructure utilization and know where and when bottlenecks exist within the infrastructure.

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Now that we’ve talked about how how to make IT Investments for the future and how TCO and ROI differ, let’s look at a few examples and see where TCO and ROI analysis might come into play for a business.

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