Will your Backup Plan Answer the Recovery Call?

Software Defined Storage. Is it just another buzzword or can the concept bring meaningful change to the way storage is acquired, implemented and used? As vendors race to jump on the "software defined" bandwagon, Storage Switzerland set out to explain the term, provide users with an understanding of how software defined storage can solve many of their current storage challenges and provide a way to decide which vendors are really delivering a software defined storage future.

Exchange Server backup and disaster recovery presents a unique challenge for IT Managers since Exchange data needs to be recovered quickly and without loss to keep business communication moving. This means frequent backups throughout the day, plus multiple snapshot copies. The problem is that having a mandate for zero data loss and rapid disaster recovery can cause companies to deploy multiple backup products, significantly increasing cost and complexity.

Data centers that use hyperscale architectures face a unique challenge. They have to respond to an ever widening variety of I/O requests from an ever increasing number of users, while at the same time providing a cost competitive service. A solid state only approach addresses the performance problem and significantly reduces operating cost but threatens cost competitiveness.

In this webinar George Crump, Lead Analyst with Storage Switzerland and Esther Spanjer, Director, SSD Technical Marketing at SMART Storage Systems will discuss why hyperscale data center managers should consider an all-flash design and more importantly how they can afford it.

All pre-registrants to the webinar will receive an advanced copy of Storage Switzerland's latest report "High Performance Storage For Hyperscale Data Centers".

One of the core offerings of most Managed Service Providers (MSPs) is providing an online backup offering to their customers. It is one of the first processes that IT is willing to outsource and it is one that can show substantial improvement when monitored and managed full time. Many MSPs have settled into a existing backup offering and new MSPs may opt for the status quo.

In this webinar George Crump, Lead Analyst of Storage Switzerland and Neal Bradbury, VP of Business Development at Intronis, will explain the five weaknesses of MSP Backup Software solutions and then provide guidance on how to fix them. Those weaknesses include lack of:
1. Platform Coverage including online applications and VMware
2. Storage Flexibility both for the customer and the MSP
3. Performance – For Cloud Backup and Recovery, performance matters
4. Protection of the protected data
5. MSP Visibility - MSPs must show value while running their business

During this webinar MSPs will learn more about these problems and get steps on how to fix them.

Server side solid state storage is the storage performance equivalent to a surgical strike. It places storage performance right where the problem is, the server or host having to respond to workload or application demands. Over the last few years PCIe SSD has emerged as the performance solution but the state of server side SSD is changing. Drive form factor SSDs like IBM’s recently announced offering of SMART Storage Systems’ Optimus SSD are out to prove that drive form factor SSDs can provide a superior alternative to PCIe based solutions.

In this webinar Storage Switzerland will explore the state of server side SSD and IBM will detail its SMART Storage Systems’ Optimus SSD announcement.

All pre-registrants will get an advanced copy of Storage Switzerland’s latest report “Buying SSDs: What's More Important $ per GB Stored or $ per TB Written?”

Solid State Storage has established itself as the go-to storage technology for solving the performance issues typically faced by databases, virtualized servers and virtualized desktop environments. As a result the industry has flooded the market with an almost overwhelming number of both all-flash and hybrid flash-based solutions to address that challenge. Most of these solutions are expensive and require that you throw out your current investment and switch to the new technology entirely.

But if you have a budget to adhere to these kinds of ‘forklift’ upgrades aren’t always feasible. The costs to achieve the performance benefits of flash can be a major constraint. In this seminar, led by Storage Switzerland’s Lead Analyst George Crump and Len Rosenthal, SVP of Marketing from Astute Networks, you will learn how to best leverage flash on a budget of less than $50K.

As the SMB data center becomes increasingly virtualized the limitations of legacy backup solutions set in and the IT administrator is left scrambling for a more VM-aware backup solution. What they often find is complicated, expensive solutions that were designed for the enterprise not for the unique requirements of the SMB. The virtualized SMB needs a data protection solution that can leverage the cloud so they can provide the same quality of data protection and uptime as larger enterprises.

In this webinar George Crump, Lead Analyst With Storage Switzerland and Bruce Talley, CEO of NAKIVO will discuss how to leverage the Cloud to solve the SMB virtual backup problem

Join Storage Switzerland's George Crump, Chief Steward and Eric Slack Lead Analyst for an informative and entertaining 45 minute webcast were we predict what will happen in the storage industry in 2013. We will cover:

#1 – Will 2013 Be All Flash and No Drive?

#2 – Will Object Storage be ready for the enterprise?

#3 – Will 2013 be the year we stop doing backups?

#4 – What vendors will get bought and who will be the new market leader?

Three Things You Need To Know About Your Environment Before Buying SSD in 30 Minutes

Solid State Disk (SSD) is quickly become the default choice for environments facing a storage performance problem. But there is a concern that the extra 15X dollar-per-GB investment SSDs require won’t deliver the IOPS per GB promises the SSD vendors are making. There are five things you need to know before purchasing SSD that will help make sure you get the maximum return on your SSD investment.

In this 30-minute webinar Storage Switzerland's Chief Steward, George Crump and SolarWinds' Brian Radovich for an informative discussion that will tell you the three key things you need to know about your environment before investing SSD. This webinar will save you money, time and maximize your investment.

At this fast paced, information filled Webinar you will learn

1. Make sure the application can take advantage of SSD
2. Understand Your Data Profile to Know What Type of SSD you Require (cache, tiering or static placement)
3. Understand Your Workloads to predict peak loads, making sure the right data is on SSD at the right time.

Cloud Backup seems like the perfect match for the data protection needs of small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), government agencies and even large enterprises. As a result there is a wide selection of solutions to choose from. The IT team at these organizations has to be careful not to assume that all cloud backup solutions are created equal.

Attend this informative webinar featuring Storage Switzerland's Lead Analyst, George Crump and Zetta's VP of Products, Chris Schin, to learn the five critical questions to ask when selecting a cloud backup vendor; backup performance, data safety, restoration performance, architecture and price.

The Four Challenges To Backing Up The Virtualized SMB

Virtualization has made its way into the small to medium sized business (SMB). In fact many SMBs have a higher percentage of virtualization than do larger enterprises. But like the larger enterprise they face four challenges when it comes to protecting these environments.

•First, because of their high percentage of virtualization, the shortcomings of legacy data protection applications are harder to overlook.

•Second, the typically thin SMB IT staff needs a product that is easy to learn and operate but also can take care of itself.

•Third, the SMB IT staff can't afford an elaborate disk backup target to deliver disaster recovery capabilities. The SMB virtualized backup product must leverage simple cost effective methods to both curtail on-premise data storage growth and establish an off-site repository.

•Finally the SMB Virtualized Backup solution needs to be within the reach of the typically modest SMB budget.

In this informative seminar Storage Switzerland's Lead Analyst, George Crump and NAKIVO's CEO Bruce Talley will lead an interactive discussion that covers these four data protection challenges facing the virtualized SMB and how to overcome them.

Thursday December 6th at 1PM ET / Noon Central / 10AM PT

Solid State Disk is increasingly the “goto” option for data centers looking to solve the I/O blender that their virtual environments are creating. This is caused when dozens of virtual machines per host are making constant but random data requests from the storage infrastructure. The problem is that while SSD is a I/O problem solver it is also a premium priced solution. In this insightful webinar we will show you four ways that you can reduce your SSD expense while at the same time improving overall performance of those SSDs

Enterprise backup is becoming a fragmented mess. Point backup utilities are appearing everyday with a special focus on environments like VMware or applications like Oracle and Sharepoint. At the same time disk backup appliances are offering features that even bring new power to the inbuilt utilities in these environments and applications. The result is that backup administrators are left managing an increasingly complex data protection process, that is increasingly more expensive and does little to improve data recovery confidence.

To simplify the data protection process, keep costs in check and to improve recovery confidence is going means fixing the four areas where enterprise backup is breaking; Complete Multi-Platform data protection, integration with point utility products, integration with disk backup appliances, sophisticated multi-site / multi-geography management.

It’s time to upgrade one or all of your storage systems, but what should you do? One alternative is to stay with the ‘tried and true’ solution of hard-drive based storage arrays, another is to leverage solid state disk (SSD) somehow in order to meet growing performance challenges. If SSD is for you which implementation style should you choose?

Hybrid Flash Arrays have emerged as a viable strategy to introduce flash technology into the data center and remove performance bottlenecks. They can deliver on the promise of flash technology without incurring the costs sometimes associated with all-flash arrays or the performance disappointment of legacy systems that try to add flash to old, hard-disk array technology.  

Register now for a 45 minute live webcast with Storage Switzerland’s Chief Steward George Crump and GridIron System’s Prasad Pammidimukkala, VP of Product Management and Business Development to learn the four advantages of hybrid flash arrays. This discussion will cover the different flash array implementation options and the pros and cons of each.

From Storage Management To Storage Value

Today, the data center is moving from virtualization to cloud computing, with an eye toward reducing IT complexity and costs while increasing flexibility and business responsiveness. In reality 60-70% of IT budgets are devoted to maintaining existing infrastructures not on creating business value. IT personnel are stretched too thin to truly respond to the needs of the business and spend most of their time just keeping up. This is particularly true when it comes to the storage infrastructure. Countless hours and millions of dollars are spent on the “must-haves” of provisioning, performance tuning, expansion, backup, archival, disaster recovery, as a necessary cost of doing business.

In this webinar, experts from Storage Switzerland, IBM and TwinStrata will share their insight on steps that IT can take to reduce the amount of time spent on the storage must haves so that they can instead focus on initiatives devoted to business value.

In order to continually improve the ROI of virtualization projects, it is critical to increase the percentage of virtualized workloads and increase the density of virtual servers per host. Storage-related issues such as cost, complexity and performance, continue to be the key obstacles to these goals. Join Storage Switzerland’s lead analyst George Crump and Tintri’s lead architect, Ed Lee as they discuss how storage systems need to become VM Aware to address these challenges.

When server virtualization began to move out of the evaluation labs and into production there was a gap in the ability to protect the data that those environments would create. In response several virtualization specific backup applications appeared on the market to fill the gap. These products have advanced from basic data protection to several advanced recovery capabilities The challenge is that they have not fully scaled to meet the demands of the virtual infrastructure. Virtualized Backup needs to address four key challenges so that the enterprise can have confidence to continue their virtual infrastructure rollouts.


#1 – Lack of Protection of Non-Virtualized Servers

#2 – Lack of Application Aware Data Protection

#3 – Lack of Tape Support

#4 – Lack of Enterprise Scale Operations

Disk has never really replaced tape in most data centers, instead tape has continued to be the "Big Backstop" catching all data being thrown at it. Now though thanks to improvement in tape technology, tape libraries are taking a more prominent role in the data center both for backup and archive. In this live webinar learn why tape is regaining its prominence and how you can leverage tape to lower your disk backup costs while improving data protection.

Deduplication, the process of eliminating redundant data segments on a storage system, has become an expected feature in the disk backup market. It seemed logical that deduplication would be applied to throughout the data center. For the most part though deduplication is only consistently available where low latency and massive scale are not required, namely backup and Branch WAN optimization.

Specifically missing in action is primary storage deduplication. Why? Attend this web meeting hosted by Storage Switzerland’s Lead Analyst, George Crump and Jered Floyd, CTO of Permabit Technology. Both storage vendors and IT Managers will get significant value as they eavesdrop in on a conversation between Crump and Floyd in which they discuss the top four reasons that deduplication has not ubiquitously made its way to primary storage:

1) Unintelligent use of RAM and CPU storage for deduplication hash tables
2) Inefficient deduplication hash table size
3) The inefficiency of the hash lookup engine
4) The lack of experience in developing and supporting deduplication technology

After these weaknesses are covered, the webinar will conclude with a series of steps that developers can take to make sure their deduplication engines are up to the primary storage challenge and the questions that IT Managers should ask their prospective vendors to make sure they are getting a well vetted deduplication engine that will stand the test of time.