IT professionals often wonder whether the time and expense involved in acquiring a certification is worth it. And if it is, which certification should they pursue? Foote Partners recently released its 2018 IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report, which helps answer those questions. Based on data from 3,188 North American employers, the report found […]
Software-Defined Storage: Getting Started
Although the SDS concept is straightforward, transitioning to the technology can be both complex and challenging. Experts offer advice for successful adoption. Drawn by the combined lures of automation, flexibility, increased storage capacity, and improved staff efficiency, a growing number of enterprises are pondering a switch to software-defined storage (SDS). SDS lets adopters separate storage […]
While no one was looking, California passed its own GDPR
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is widely viewed as a massively expensive and burdensome privacy regulation that can be a major headache and pitfall for American firms doing business in Europe. Many firms, including Facebook, have sought ways around the law to avoid having to deal with the burden of compliance. Well, […]
Data Storage War: Flash Vs. Hard Drives
The struggle for market share between flash-based drives and hard-disk drives is so similar to physical conflict that we can apply the same language. Wars are essentially territorial, with outcomes determined by who owns the battlefield. Logistics chains and technological leadership often determine point battles and having superiority of resources is always a major factor […]
Data Center Tech ‘Graduation’: What IT Pros Have Learned
As schools around the country hold graduation ceremonies, classic songs like Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” will be sung, played, or reminisced about by students everywhere as they reflect on fond memories and lessons learned in school. Graduation is a symbol of transition and change, a milestone that represents growth, progress, and […]
Software-Defined Storage Products: IT Pro Perspective
Users weigh in on pros and cons of Dell EMC ScaleIO, HPE StoreVirtual, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, Red Hat Ceph, and StorPool. Software-defined storage describes storage products in which the storage virtualization separates storage management software from the underlying hardware. In some cases, SDS products may offer storage resource pooling, abstraction, management workflow automation, and artificial-Intelligence […]
How Erasure Coding Is Evolving
Erasure coding, an alternative to RAID, and is changing to address emerging data resiliency challenges. Data resiliency is at a crossroads. Traditional SAN storage solutions than run on Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) are creaking under the strain of new data demands. While striping, mirroring, and parity in RAID implementations provide various degrees of […]
Open Source Storage: 6 Benefits
Storage software creation, delivery, and support are all evolving at a high rate today. We’ve added open source coding, support-services bundling, platform pre-integration, code as a service, microservice architectures, and scalable software-defined storage services to the traditional bundled proprietary code approach. Open source packages in the storage word are now mainstream solutions. The acceptance of […]