July 2008 - Data Protection Options for Virtualizes Servers: Demystifying Virtual Server Data Protection - Server vitalization continues to be a popular industry focus, particularly to address IT data center power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) issues (commonly referred to as green IT computing) along with supporting next generation virtualizes data center environments. There are many challenges and options related to protecting data and applications in a virtual server environment. This in-depth report explains what your organization needs to know as it moves into a virtual realm.

January 2008 - Scalable Storage for Unstructured Data: Enabling Scalable Storage Performance, Availability and Capacity for unstructured data and Web 2.0 applications - The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers (similar to how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) has resulted in desktop and server sprawl) and a resulting urgency to consolidate to maximize resource usage and IT management tasks.

January 2008 - MAID 2.0: Energy Savings without Performance Compromises: Intelligent Power Management (IPM) Energy Savings for Secondary and Near-line Storage - Not all Green Storage is created equal. There are business benefits to aligning the most energy efficient storage to meet different data and application requirements. All storage vendors are claiming some form of green or some power, cooling and floor space savings. This industry trends and perspectives brief looks at a category of storage using intelligent power management (IPM) to support secondary and near-line or off-line data needs, comparing performance with energy savings, to enable you to be the judge of who is the greenest of them all.

December 2007 - Achieving Energy Efficiency using FLASH SSD: Leveraging SSD as part of a tiered storage building block for server and storage consolidation and energy efficiency - Reducing energy consumption is an important topic for many IT data centers. While there is a lot of discussion about reducing energy by doing less, another form of energy efficiency is doing more with less power for green storage. This paper looks at how solid state disk (SSD) and, in particular, FLASH based SSD can be incorporated into an energy-efficiency or green storage strategy as part of a tiered storage architecture to address power and environmental concerns while reducing server and storage I/O performance bottlenecks.

December 2007 - The Many Faces of MAID Storage Technology: How Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) is evolving and being implemented in various storage solutions - This paper looks at MAID technology in general along with some current implementations along with benefits, caveats and what to look for and consider when evaluating MAID enabled technology to support primary, secondary and off-line data storage requirements to address energy efficiency and green storage needs.

October 2007 - Enabling comprehensive data protection for VMware: Issues and solutions for complete data protection and application availability for virtual environments - Server and storage vitalization are complementary technologies that support day-to-day business along with high-availability, business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) needs in a virtual data center environment. This paper looks at the issues and requirements for comprehensive data protection beyond simple server crash consistent restart in a VMware environment and addresses the importance of application-aware enabling data protection technologies.

August 2007 - Analysis of EPA Report to Congress (Law 109-431) (PDF): A StorageIO perspective on the EPA Report to Congress addressing public law 109-431 pertaining to IT datacenter electrical power consumption - On August 1, 2007 the United States environmental protection agency (EPA) responding to public law 109-431 presented a 130 page report (plus 14 pages of executive summary and 67 pages of appendices and other supporting documents) to the U.S. congress addressing IT datacenter electrical energy consumption and associated issue. The EPA conducted a series of webcasts on August 9th 2007 covering the report, its findings, recommendations and plans for moving forward. This is a synopsis of the EPA report to congress with comments by the StorageIO group as to what the EPA report means for green storage.

July 2007 - Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction (PDF): A look at why and how reducing your data footprint provides a positive benefit to your business and application service objectives including address green storage needs - The information necessary to support your business in timely and effective decision making and in maintaining a competitive advantage has an impact on your data footprint. This paper looks at various techniques, and, in particular, how data compaction compression technologies can be applied to various types of data and IT functions to help reduce your data foot print to improve energy consumption and green storage and, enhance existing storage resource utilization while addressing other IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) inefficiencies as well as enhancing overall application service levels.

May 2007 - Business and Application Aware DPM: A look at the landscape of data protection management (DPM and Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) - Data protection management (DPM) provides timely insight and analysis of data protection activities, including cross domain event correlation and analysis for problem resolution and planning purposes to optimize IT resource management. This paper looks at the expanded focus and shifting landscape of DPM and its role in enabling cost effective IT Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) and service enhancement.

September 2006 - Data Protection Management (DPM): A look at the benefits of DPM for timely and effective data protection management - Backup reporting, cross domain event correlation, root cause analysis, modeling, performance and capacity planning, configuration and policy validation, data protection management (DPM), storage management software tools

August 2006 - Data Center I/O Performance Issues and Impacts: A look at I/O performance bottlenecks and their impact on time sensitive applications - Data center and I/O performance bottlenecks, storage and performance management, consolidation, improving time sensitive applications, I/O acceleration vs. bandwidth acceleration, SAN and NAS

September 2008 - Application Transparency and Co-existence with Real-Time Data Compression - Organizations of all size and applications type, including high-performance file serving and databases with changing data, can realize the benefits of a reduced data footprint using real-time compression.

September 2008 - Enabling “Green” and Energy Efficient Storage with Real-time Compression - For environments looking to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental (PCFE) “Green” footprint issues, a data footprint reduction strategy across different applications and data types including on-line and off-line data should be adopted as part of a PCFE strategy.

July 2008 - Real-time Data Compression Integrity and Reliability - This brief looks at how lossless Lempel-Ziv (LZ) type real-time data compression provides data integrity while reducing data footprint for on-line active NAS primary storage. LZ compression is a proven technique for data footprint reduction that scales with stability as more data is ingested without introducing performance bottlenecks during writes (compressing) or reads (un-compress).

July 2008 - Real-Time Data Compression Performance Considerations - This industry trends and perspective solution brief looks at performance considerations and impacts of real-time data compression for active data on-line primary NAS storage as part of a organization wide, application independent data footprint reduction strategy.

July 2008 - Real-time Data Compression for On-line Active Data - For organizations wanting to address power, cooling, footprint and environmental (PCFE) issues, a holistic data footprint reduction strategy should be pursued. A data footprint strategy should include real-time data compression of changing and static on-line data while using de-duplication of recurring backup data and archive for in-active data. This solution brief looks at how and where real-time data compression of active on-line data, including primary NAS and secondary storage, can be used to achieve data footprint reduction benefits across a wide range of applications in organizations of all sizes.

June 2008 - Affordable Business Continuity (ABC): BC Data Storage for Mid-Sized Companies - This solution brief looks at issues with traditionally cost prohibitive and complex BC solutions for mid-sized business along with new easy to acquire, easy to deploy and easy to manage affordable scalable solutions that include networking services, optimization, bandwidth remote site hosting and local storage all in a turnkey package.

April 2008 - Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) - If you have not yet heard of the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology or one of the vendor marketing terms including Data Center Ethernet (DCE), I/O Virtualization (IOV), Converged Network Architecture (CAN) or Data Center Fabrics leveraging a hybrid premium Ethernet with low latency and Quality of Service (QoS), rest assured, you will soon. This StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspective looks at what FCoE is, why it is important to be aware of and where it may fit in your environment in the future.

December 2006 - Decrypting Enterprise Storage Security: A look at enterprise storage system security strategies, options and issues for data at rest and in-flight. - Data security, encryption, key management, security strategy, aligning technology to specific needs and requirements.

December 2006 - Addressing Storage Management Challenges: A look at addressing storage and data management challenges using ultra scalable NAS - Data and storage management challenges, point-in-time (pit) snapshot copy, iSCSI, virtualization, ultra scalable NAS, iSCSI, high performance, clustered storage, replication, thin provisioning, policy based automated data migration.

August 2007 - Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction (MP3) - A brief podcast audio (MP3) look at why and how reducing your data footprint provides a positive benefit to your business and application service objectives. This is a short MP3 or podcast version of the popular white paper report in PDF form pertaining to the Business Benefits of Data Footprint Reduction to improve IT resource usage and help enable a green and virtual IT data center effective and data and storage management.

August 2007 - Scaling Storage with Clustering: Video looks at clustered storage as a technique to scale both I/Os to meet transaction processing and bandwidth along with other cluster storage scaling benefits for both SAN and NAS environments. - View this Video cast to get the answers to the most pressing questions on clustering, including:

• What are the defining characteristics of clustered storage and how does it differ from traditional storage environments?
• Are there particular applications that benefit more from clustered storage?
• Is there a difference between grid computing and clusters?
• And more

December 2006 - Video - (Download may take a few moments) : Remote office branch office (ROBO) data protection - Discussion covering issues and challenges with timely data protection of ROBO and distributed data

November 2006 - Video - (Download may take a few moments) Remote site data protection with replication - Discussion pertaining to issues and challenges with providing timely data protection for remote sites.

October 2006 - Podcast - (Download may take a few moments) Server and storage I/O performance gap: A discussion of issues and challenges with data center and storage consolidation and I/O performance gap challenges - Storage I/O performance bottlenecks and data center challenges, response time, performance, throughput, latency, service level and quality of service.