Before selecting a SAN product, learn which features seven market-leading storage vendors provide organizations of all sizes and how they distinguish their products
"Choosing a storage area network can be a daunting task when comparing products and trying to understand their differences. IT decision-makers must consider a range of factors, including scalability, performance, availability, management and data protection.
Here, we examine the following storage area network products:..."
Not all workloads require the performance boost that SSDs provide
"Flash technology is nothing new. SSDs have been around long enough now that the industry has seen them graduate from being a high-priced luxury to the standard media used in storage arrays across the spectrum of devices and computing platforms.
Specialized use cases where performance is king, like high-frequency trading, AI/ML, and supercomputing have taken advantage of SSDs for years. Major cloud providers have been consuming massive quantities of flash storage in a technological arms race to provide potential customers with the greatest user experience. Over the last few years, however, all-flash arrays have begun to arrive as an option in mainstream storage price-bands, no longer out of reach to those with limited IT budgets..."
I&O leaders must invest in application-aware infrastructure, embrace infrastructure-led-innovation and modernize storage systems for hybrid cloud services
"Advanced storage technologies and consumption-based IT services provide the agility and flexibility needed to thrive in a digital economy. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders must invest in application-aware infrastructure, embrace infrastructure-led-innovation and modernize storage systems for hybrid cloud services..."
SAN benefits include speed, scalability and fault tolerance, but the technology isn't without its drawbacks. Cost and complexity are big concerns for smaller organizations
"SANs have become increasingly popular over the years, but they aren't necessarily the right choice for every organization. Before deploying one, organizations should carefully consider storage area network advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of a storage area network
- Fast
- Easy to scale
- Fault tolerant
- Better hard disk utilization
One of the biggest advantages of using a storage area network is that SANs generally provide better performance than competing technologies, such as NAS..."
Is it time to consider modernizing your data storage infrastructure?
"If your enterprise is still using a local file storage solution, such as NAS or local file servers, it may be time to consider modernizing your data storage infrastructure to support an increasingly distributed workforce and maximize data security and compliance using edge-to-cloud storage services.
Here are five key signs that you need to start thinking about file storage modernization..."
Data scientists working with large data sets or in high-performance computational environments may find these programming languages essential to extracting data quickly and effortlessly
"Data science is a field focused on extracting knowledge from data. Put into lay terms, obtaining detailed information applying scientific concepts to large sets of data used to inform high-level decision-making. Take the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic for example: Government officials are analyzing data sets retrieved from a variety of sources, like contact tracing, infection, mortality rates, and location-based data to determine which areas are impacted and how to best adjust on-going support models to provide help where it is most needed while trying to curb infection rates..."
Seagate's new HDD allows to store 4320TB per rack
"Seagate on Thursday officially unveiled its Exos X18 hard drives that have been shipping to select customers for a while. The new drives are designed for hyperscalers, datacenters, and enterprise NAS systems that require maximum capacity, reliability, and 24/7 availability.
The Seagate Exos X18 is the company's 5th generation family of helium-filled 3.5-inch hard drives with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. The HDDs can store 16TB or 18TB of data using eight or nine platters. The HDDs rely on conventional magnetic recording to ensure predictable write performance. Being aimed at various customers with different servers, the Exos X18 may use a SATA or SAS interface as well as 512e or 4KN formatting. The SATA version features an average power consumption of 5.3W, whereas the SAS version consumes 5.8W..."
SANs consolidate resources and provide a high-speed network for storage traffic, but that doesn't mean you're off the hook when it comes to performance management
"Storage area networks can deliver the performance required by even the most demanding enterprise workloads. Even so, there are several SAN management best practices that must be followed to achieve the optimal performance.
Infrastructure management
One of the key tasks required for keeping a storage system healthy is to proactively monitor the storage infrastructure. SAN vendors generally provide a management tool that you can use to configure and monitor their products, but third-party management tools are also widely available..."
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