Deduplication sounds very nice and many storage marketing enthusiasts believe they cannot live without it. Yes, it shines with three factors: reducing space, saving the upload bandwidth and improving backup and cloning virtual machines performance. So far very good, but is there any risk of using deduplication? From a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication)  about Data Deduplication we can learn a lot about it. Data Deduplication does not guarantee data integrity, so keep that in mind. So [...]

Recently I was reading an old post about the end of the Dual Controller Architecture. http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/data_protection/229209939 Today, almost 4 years later still Dual Controllers is kind of an obvious choice for many IT administrators. The reason for the motivation is due to the guarantee of the dual controller brings to the table: Zero Single Point of Failure (SPOF). Redundant controllers,  redundant power supply, redundant cooling and the RAID makes this possible. The RAID is providing [...]

We have recently updated our website with three new Case Studies where our partners starline, ibc and TEMA present how and with which hardware they used Open-E to install high quality storage environments at customers or in their own company. German Gold Partner starline presents a project from the financial sector, implementing a secure private inhouse cloud with virtualization and SAN powered by Open-E (only available in German language). Read more… Ibc from India show [...]

Last week I was visiting the World Hosting Day Event in Germany as usual and I’ve wanted to provide you all with some highlights. Intel was presenting the innovative Romley Server Platform. No doubt in my mind that this will be a very high performance Storage Server. We are working with Intel and Microtronica engineers on the top 3 typical configurations for the Intel Romley based Storage Servers. LSI and Adaptec were exposing SSD Cache [...]

We can read many articles about the pros and cons of Solid State Drives. We may also hear opinions about them – from supporters and opponents of this technology… and can listen to the informational din. We can also leave the technical issues aside and look at it from the perspective of a market. Let’s just say this article won’t provide any answers – it will only ask new questions. The price and the prestige [...]

Cloud is “hot”, everyone is talking about it, everyone uses it, everyone keeps data in the “Cloud”. However, do we know what it really means? Let’s look at a cloud without a marketing shell – at the myths and facts. Confusion in the Clouds Where does the Cloud begin, and where does it end? You may say: “Yes, I have access to my data from various locations. I can choose the capacity of services. I [...]

It’s quicker, it’s lighter, it does not generate any noise and has a lower work temperature…Furthermore, it doesn’t have any mechanical, moving components so it offers you not only a very short response time but also great resistance to any shocks. So isn’t SSD the answer to all our storage needs that we were waiting for? So why should we even consider using SSD if the advantages over traditional, magnetic hard drives are so obvious? [...]

What to do with old hard disks? What to do if your company is going to upgrade its equipment? How to get rid of any useless hardware? However we approach these problems, everything will always concern one important issue – the protection of confidential data. Data security policy Briefly and generally – data security policy is a set of precise rules and procedures created to organize the resources of a company including the issues of [...]

Here we present two ways of thinking about the issue of boot media in cooperation with Open-E DSS V6. Take a look below – there are following options to consider: The first is to use a Small Boot Volume that resides on the Hardware RAID controller. This is a very reliable and stabile boot media and there is no need to buy an extra boot media. The small 2GB logical volume on the RAID Array [...]

Modern technology – we all know its rules, laws (like Moore’s law), limitations, possibilities and direction of development (well, for the most part). Technology is still evolving… But what if we change the starting point? What if we bet on a revolution, not evolution? What if we stop thinking of computers as silicon-based systems? Let’s discuss the issue of biocomputers and DNA computing. The evolution of a revolution Have you ever heard of artificial DNA? [...]