Georgiana Comsa

The record-breaking weather on the East Coast in October left an estimated three million homes and businesses without power. Those businesses had to continue running and access to critical data from databases, mail and file servers and ongoing employee access to their online business files were critical. Due to power outages and hazardous travel conditions, when a lot of people couldn’t get to work, and the IT infrastructure, including primary and secondary data centers, was often down, access to mission-critical data was not an easy task for IT administrators.  Even if there were backup copies of data stored on tapes, external disks or USBs, it could be very difficult to obtain them, and almost impossible to restore the data when the data centers are down. A recent blog post talks about the importance of online data backup and recovery services, such as Zetta, a f... (more)

Construction Company Makes Zetta Data Protect Its Home in the Clouds

Robert Bogucki, IT manager at Skender Construction, researched multiple solutions when he started the disaster recovery project at Skender. Then he found Zetta. Zetta has a much more reasonable cost model with no charge for the ZettaMirror agent software, no matter how many copies are installed. Skender Construction's almost four terabytes of data are now backed up in the cloud with Zetta Data ProtectTM. "Cost was an important factor, and paying $1.40 to $1.60 per gigabyte just didn't make sense after finding Zetta," said Bogucki. He installed the lightweight ZettaMirrorTM agent... (more)

Clustrix Emerges from Stealth with Highy Scalable Database Solution

Clustrix today emerged from stealth mode and announced the Clustrix CLX 4010, a highly scalable database solution that addresses the infrastructure scalability challenges facing Internet companies, enterprises, and cloud service providers. The new appliance brings to database administrators the best of both worlds: the high-performance, high-scalability of NoSQL key value stores and the relational, ACID-compliant and robust functionality of SQL while providing drop-in interoperability with the MySQL protocol. The cost savings of utilizing the Clustrix solution are also significa... (more)

Dispelling the Myth that Flash Is Expensive

Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire, addresses the SSD cost question that seems to be on many users' minds these days, creating confusion and delaying purchase decisions that could actually save money for the respective organizations. In a recent blog post, he states that the myth that flash is expensive is propagated by enterprise storage vendors selling flash modules for $25-$50/GB or more. Today, not everybody can afford that, and some users are currently limiting the use of flash to only the most critical applications in need of the highest-performance storage. Wright... (more)

What to Look for When Selecting a Cloud Storage On-Ramp or Gateway Device

In a recent blog post, Joel Christner, chief scientist at StorSimple, is looking at various factors that customers should be considering in their search for a cloud gateway. When researching their cloud gateway options, Christner advises organizations to consider: Performance - when using cloud storage, you are effectively injecting Internet latency, bandwidth, and packet loss in between your server and its storage.  Gateway devices mitigate this, and an understanding of the architecture - and quantification of the system's performance - will help you understand whether or not ... (more)