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Data storage infrastructure starts with science-fiction inspiration
This article is part of the Storage issue of March 2017, Vol. 16, No. 1
Fans of classic science-fiction movies might appreciate the feelings that overwhelmed me this past holiday season when I confronted the challenge of building a fairly complex data storage infrastructure from an assortment of undocumented parts. There I was, a veritable Dr. Cal Meacham from the 1955 classic This Island Earth, working to create a storage platform no less complicated than your proverbial "interocitor," but without so much as a "Metalunan" catalog to document the component parts. I wasn't sure whether my creation would be useful for storing data, let alone performing some sort of "electron sorting" or other exotic workload mentioned in the movie. But I attacked the project with zeal, anyway. The backstory My test bench, consisting of a couple of DataCore SANsymphony servers connected in a failover cluster, had grown into a hodgepodge of external storage boxes connected with everything from USB to eSATA and Fibre Channel (FC). Every slot of every installed StarTech.com eSATA board was maxed out, their drives ...
Features in this issue
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The state of flash storage systems
Making flash storage performance even faster has little to do with the media itself and more to do with the storage infrastructure that surrounds it.
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SAN arrays maintain primary data storage dominance, for now
Solid-state flash is the most sought-after technology for primary storage, as storage area networks remain the main focus of increasing capacity for most enterprises.
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Overcome problems with public cloud storage providers
Security and compliance concerns are chief obstacles to public cloud storage adoption, as IT managers are hesitant to have their critical data reside outside the data center.
Columns in this issue
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Classification of data can solve your data storage problems
Having a data classification process in place can make your data smart enough to know what to do with itself, allowing you to attain the holy grail of enterprise data storage.
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Data storage infrastructure starts with science-fiction inspiration
Find out what happens when you take a cue from an old science-fiction movie and build an 'interocitor' that becomes its own storage infrastructure.
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A cure for secondary data storage services blues
Effective user-centric data storage management eases copy data management and object storage uptake while enabling secondary storage services to evolve.