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Data Center
The Questions You Must Ask About Software-based HCI vs. Appliance-based HCI
It’s not on the level of “What’s the meaning of life?”, but there are important questions to ask before you make the move to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. The two types of offerings are software-based and appliance-based. In a software-based HCI environment, you can install… Read More
By ActualTech Media -
Data Center
How MSPs Benefit from Commodity Hardware and Open Source Virtualization
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or hosting provider, you need to keep pace with the big public cloud providers and create customer solutions that provide the same flexibility and potential for scale that the hyperscalers offer. Yes, you can offer customers the peace of mind that comes with hoste… Read More
By ActualTech Media -
Data Center
Key Advantages of Software-Based Hyperconvergence
You have two choices when it comes to moving to hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI: a software-based approach or an appliance-based approach. They both have their positives and negatives, but the average administrator may not realize the long-term benefits of a software-based solution, since appl… Read More
By ActualTech Media -
Data Center
Meeting the Challenges of Managing Microservices-based Applications
It used to be so much easier to do application performance management (APM). Remember? Monolithic, old-school apps didn’t have that many dependencies. Fewer moving parts meant less to monitor. It also meant greater visibility of those parts. Less data collected. Fewer issues (but by no means few)… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Tutorial: Deploying a Cumulus Linux Demo Environment With Vagrant
Thanks to ActualTech Media’s relationship with the Cumulus Networks team, I had the opportunity to attend an onsite bootcamp at Cumulus HQ in Mountain View, Calif., where a Cumulus professional services consultant (David Marshall) trained myself and a few others on the ins and outs of Cumulus Linu… Read More
By James D. Green -
Data Center
How to Take the Pain Out of the Private Cloud Lifecycle
Designing a cloud is, in essence, designing an entire data center. Designing and operating a cloud requires attention to the entire lifecycle of the cloud: since each component can affect adjacent solutions, the impact of every change on the whole must be carefully considered. Layering on some cl… Read More
By ActualTech Media -
Data Center
IT Support May Be the Crucial Cloud Question
Once IT teams are no longer having to hand-hold IT infrastructure every day, they won’t know the intricacies of its operation. This makes the support experience – both the ease of access to support, and the overall quality of the support – absolutely critical. What do other customers of that v… Read More
By ActualTech Media -
Data Center
Apstra to Demonstrate Intent-Based Data Center Network Automation with VMware vSphere Integration at VMworld
We are, of course, meeting with tons of IT companies at VMworld like we always do. One of the meetings I'm excited about this year is with Apstra. It's been about two years since I've had a good hard look at Apstra. They presented at Networking Field Day 13, for which I had a seat at the table. Si… Read More
By James D. Green -
Data Center
How SoftNAS Is Like the U.S. Marines
“Cloud native” is currently a major buzzword in the IT industry. Applications built to be used in the cloud, whether public, private or hybrid, focus on things like microservices and distributed architectures, and they work at any scale. But here’s the thing: not everyone needs to, or is wi… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
What You Need to Know About Value Stream Mapping for the Enterprise
Leading enterprises like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb have demonstrated that the future of business lies in figuring out how to create value faster than competitors. This sounds good on paper, but enterprises can get hit snags when trying to move faster without creating more value in practice. To ad… Read More
By George Lawton -
Data Center
Top 5 Tips for VDI Success
Last week, ActualTech Media hosted the VDI and End-User Computing EcoCast (which you can still watch On Demand here). The purpose of the event was to discuss the latest innovations in End User Computing and hear from some manufacturers of products that can make deploying VDI solutions more straightf… Read More
By James D. Green -
Data Center
NooBaa V2 Addresses Next Generation of Cloud Storage Challenges
There's a lot of buzz these days about supporting cloud migrations and having a multi-cloud strategy. Yet it's an open question if those are valid, current concerns or a matter for some point in the future. After all, migration away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure or to Google C… Read More
By James D. Green -
Data Center
CloudEndure Finds Joint Answers to Issues of Disaster Recovery and Cloud Migration
IT departments usually look at the challenge of setting up disaster recovery in the cloud as discrete from the equally large challenge of migrating workloads from an on-premises environment to the cloud. Yet, those two challenges have a lot in common. One shared characteristic is speed. Whether y… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Pure//Accelerate™ 2018 Conference News
I’m at Pure//Accelerate™ in San Francisco this week, and it’s shaping up to be an exciting event! The show features keynotes by Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo and guest speakers Jez Humble (who you may be familiar with from books such as The DevOps Handbook) and Dr. Kate Darling, leading e… Read More
By James D. Green -
Data Center
Countdown to the GDPR Deadline: Preparing for Compliance
It’s nearly May 25: Do you know where your data is? If you don’t, the consequences could be severe. On that date, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect, a regulation that was designed to protect an individual’s personal data. With the compliance deadline upo… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
Open Source Storage Is Disrupting the Enterprise Market
What do you get when you combine enterprise storage with open source? A zebra. Open Enterprise Storage! At the center of the open enterprise storage movement is iXsystems. iXsystems is the developer of both TrueNAS and FreeNAS. FreeNAS is the adventurous open-source younger sibling. TrueNAS is t… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Executive Briefing: Excelero Provides Performance of Local NVMe Across the Network
There’s no doubt that Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) is the storage of the future. It’s extremely fast and low-latency; a perfect fit for workloads needing the highest level of performance currently available. That amazing performance, though, starts to take a hit as soon as you leave the… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Executive Briefing: E8 Storage Pushes NVMe to the Edge
There is a certain mindset in the industry (often promoted by vendors) that the faster the storage, the better. This is often more hype than reality: it’s quite possible that the best storage method for your cold data is, for example, good ol’ tape. It’s cheap, it’s reliable and it’s time-… Read More
By Keith Ward -
Data Center
Technology Experts Share Their Top Tips and Advice for 'World Backup Day'
Backing up data should be one of the most fundamental of all IT activities. Yet, time and again, companies that should know better fail to properly create, secure and validate their backups. This Saturday, March 31, is World Backup Day, a day created to raise awareness for data backup and protect… Read More
By Scott D. Lowe -
Data Center
Top 10 Things You Need to Know About NVMe Devices
Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) devices are now mainstream. They are no longer considered exotic, and, as such, they have a wide variety of use cases. A year ago, Micron supplied me with a couple of enterprise NVMe devices, and I have been using them in my vSphere servers as cache devices and… Read More
By Tom Fenton -
Data Center
HyperGrid's HyperCloud 5.0 Adds Raft of Updates to Ease Cloud Implementations
Pretty much every IT shop has looked at moving at least some of its operations to the cloud, whether it’s a private, public or hybrid cloud. The benefits in terms of costs, efficiency and reduced dev/test time are well known by this point. One of the major stumbling blocks to making this happen… Read More
By Keith Ward