Access "Ford's storage ledger balances capacity decisions"
This article is part of the Vol. 8 Num. 9 January 2010 issue of How vSphere is easing storage burdens of server virtualization
Data storage shops often struggle with anticipating new capacity requirements and ensuring that business needs can be met. Ford Motor Company took a unique approach to the problem and made capacity planning as simple as balancing your checkbook. By Thomas Woods A funny thing happened to the Ford Motor Company enterprise storage team: Storage Sunday maintenance post-mortem review meetings became boring. The meetings were no longer spiced up with horror stories about outages caused by maintenance action failures. Thanks to the enterprise virtual storage program, many high-risk and high-impact maintenance actions had been mitigated by the ability to transparently, and without server interruption, move critical virtual logical unit numbers (LUNs) from physical storage arrays before scheduled maintenance took place. Aside from the woeful exploits of the Detroit Lions, Sundays would have been perfect. For those attending the weekly enterprise data storage infrastructure capacity forecasting meetings, the stress-reducing benefits of virtual storage were less ... Access >>>
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Everything you need to know about vSphere and data storage
With vSphere, VMware addresses many of the past storage-related shortcomings that created headaches for storage pros.
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Ford's storage ledger balances capacity decisions
Storage shops often struggle with anticipating new capacity requirements and ensuring that business needs can be met. After virtualizing its storage, Ford Motor Co. took a unique approach to allocation issues and made capacity planning as simple as balancing a checkbook.
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Quality Awards IV: HP and IBM unseat NetApp
NetApp, winner of all three previous Quality Awards for midrange NAS systems and one for enterprise NAS products, gets nudged aside as Hewlett-Packard and IBM prevail in our latest survey.
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Everything you need to know about vSphere and data storage
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SAS challenges Fibre Channel drives
In their 3 Gbps incarnation, SAS drives have proved popular in low-end and nearline data storage systems, but at 6 Gbps, SAS-2 poses a serious threat to Fibre Channel interface drives and could change the landscape of high-end storage arrays.
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Remote-office backup not getting much easier
Our monthly survey shows that backing up remote and branch offices is still a tough nut to crack for some companies. But newer tools -- like data dedupe -- are helping to ensure that remote data is protected.
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SAS challenges Fibre Channel drives
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Columns
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Cloud storage: Just another storage tier?
by Terri McClure
Storage vendors have become so enamored of the term "cloud storage" that it's hard to tell what it means anymore. But if you can get past the marketing hype, you'll find cloud storage has been adopted in some sectors as a data archive tier, and has been delivering cost-saving benefits for quite some time.
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Storage should get more interesting in 2010
Despite the buzz about solid state and storage for VMware environments, 2009 wasn't a particularly banner year for standout storage technologies. Here's hoping the real storage innovations will come in 2010.
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Cloud storage: Just another storage tier?
by Terri McClure
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